A love letter to smell

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All In The Mind 32 min 1 speaker 8 chapters transcribed 3 days ago

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What is the purpose of this episode’s “love letter” to our sense of smell?

Lynn Malcolm 0:02

This is an ABC podcast. Hi, Lynn Malcolm here. And just before we get into this week's show, I wanted to let you know about a program that might open up a few new doorways in your mind. It's from RN and it's called Soul Search. It's a weekly look at spirituality and religion, and it's packed with ideas that will interest, surprise and enlighten you. Whether you're a believer or not, you can find Soul Search wherever you normally get your podcasts. The smell of newly cut grass, the waft of freshly ground coffee, or the scent of a loved one's perfume. What memories or emotions do they evoke for you? Just how powerful is your sense of smell? Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynn Malcolm and today with a kind of love letter to our sense of smell.

Lynn Malcolm 1:02

Dawn Goldworm designs signature scents as branding for companies like the Global Fashion House Valentino.

Dawn Goldworm 1:11

Because Valentino is a brand that is based on The really the history of Rome, in their words, they would say it's it's sacred, it's biblical, it's traditional. But it's filled with Emotion and beauty and love and texture. Valentino's the color of blood. And it's based on these generations of Italian and Roman food and religion and architecture and poetry. And it's all inside of the brand of Valentino. And so the scent is built this way.

How does Dawn Goldworm design a signature scent for a luxury brand like Valentino?

Dawn Goldworm 1:46

Um, it's built like a couture gown. And so it seems when you smell it's very effortless and very graceful. But if you smell into the structure of the perfume, it is very solid. And so the top of it it has all of this kind of naive rose absolute and these bright citrus notes and kind of flirtatious, herbaceous green notes. And then the heart of the Valentino scent, just like the heart of Rome, is more traditional. It's this waxy, heavier rose absolute that's a little bit spicy and and much more textural green. And then the base of the perfume, because you have to remember that this is not just for women, it's also for men within all of these boutiques and shows, is black leather, which is what Valentino uses mostly in their accessories.

Dawn Goldworm 2:35

And this balsamic vanillic piece that kind of wraps around the whole scent and gives us this very sensual, soft Almost addictive comfort.

Lynn Malcolm 2:47

Dawn Goldworm, founder of the old faction branding company 1229. And more about her finely tuned sense of smell later.

Anne Sophie Barwich 2:56

My name is N Surfie Barwich and I'm an assistant professor of cognitive science and history and philosophy of science at Indiana University. And I'm interested in the sense of smell to research how the brain works. And how the mind actually. investigates the world, how it interacts with the world and what smell can tell us precisely about that interaction.

Lynn Malcolm 3:18

Doctor Anne Sophie Barwich, author of Smilosophy. She suggests that our sense of smell has been vastly underappreciated and underutilised.

Anne Sophie Barwich 3:30

Well, we often hear people say, Well, I'm not very good at smelling, I'm not very good at detecting odors, I don't smell very well. And that's actually not true. We're incredibly sensitive to to odors. In fact, the human nose is one of the most accurate biosensors on the face of the earth, so to speak. And my favorite example is T C A, which a is a compound that is responsible for that corked wine smell in in in wine. And Just to give you in comparison of how sensitive our nose is, uh, we can detect particles. In a mixture of trillions. So if you had a teaspoon of TCA and you would basically put it into All the wine production of Australia, the red wine production of Australia produced in a year, it would smell of corked wine.

Anne Sophie Barwich 4:17

That's how powerful our nose is. But there's of course more than that. So one thing is we often hear we're not good at smelling. No, that's not true. The other thing is people often say, Yeah, but we're not very good at describing smells. We don't have a language for smells and we don't have a vocabulary. Again, not true if you think about it, a lot of the food smells. We're having lots of descriptors for them. You're very good if you've got a nice dish to say, oh yeah, I can smell the meat with the rosemary, etc.