Alie Ward (host)

So perhaps Harry Harrison was a Nabokov fan or just really liked fictitious French perfumes.

Oh, that's brilliant.

How did your advisors and how did the committee react to that?

I picture those kind of folios in magazines where you can fold back the little flap and then scratch and sniff, you know?

I think they took them out of a lot of magazines, which I'm bummed about.

I used to rub them on my wrists and neck and be like, free perfume, I'll take it.

Okay, I looked into this, and for decades, it's been known that those really delicious perfume samples in magazines have been an issue for folks with asthma and allergies.

There was a 1995 study titled Inhalation Challenge Effects of Perfume Scent Strips in Patients with Asthma, and it confirmed that chest tightness and wheezing occurred in nearly 21% of asthmatic patients after perfume challenges.

But with the decline in sales for print publishing and more people just taking fashion inspo from whatever isn't being shamed as millennial on TikTok, magazine sales and thus ad sales have fallen.

And so that's really been the driving factor of why we can't sniff Vogue as much.

Although those in the perfume industry do give the heads up that in April and May before Mother's Day and in December before the gift-giving frenzy of the holidays, you might be able to smell more magazines.

There might be some more perfume ad revivals in them if you miss them.

And what about some other smells in novels and in poetry, the way that people are portrayed?

Do you find that that goes through their bodily smells or their food smells or their perfumes?

Like what types of notes?

What do those notes draw on a lot?

Did you have to talk to any olfactologists about the olfactory bulb and its role in memory and the hippocampus?

Like,

I understand that we can't really identify smells unless we have something in our memory to compare them to or kind of a simile.

How are smells processed in the brain?