Art by Zach Christy.
This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther.
The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting smells.
Throughout history, humans have gone to great lengths to indulge their sense of smell. We explore the contemporary scent industry to see how modern creatives are utilizing works of olfactory art everywhere from Disney World to high-end museums. Featuring Disney Imagineer Gary Powell and former New York Times scent critic Chandler Burr.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Sanguine by Dexter Britain
Date Prep by Kerry Muzzey
Kaleidoscope by Lights and Motion
Dizzy (Instrumental) by Fuzzy Halo
Breathe by Chad Lawson
Divisions by Max LL
In Circles by Max LL
Breather by Breakmaster Cylinder
Old Technology Has My Heart by Breakmaster Cylinder
Birds Dress Me In The Morning (No Breakbeat version) by Breakmaster Cylinder
(Dorian) And The Moustache Was His Name by Breakmaster Cylinder
Fabulous Flying Merkins by Breakmaster Cylinder
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.
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View Transcript ▶︎
You’re listening to Twenty Parts Per Thousand, the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting smells.
[SFX: Big sniff]
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Here at Twenty Per K, we are obsessed with everything olfactory. As longtime listeners of this smell-cast are aware, scent is powerful. It can trigger deep nostalgia and emotion. The ancient Greeks and Romans really knew the power of scent, they burned pepper, cinnamon, and cloves on holy altars. Their most sacred places were filled with sweet smells drifting up to the heavens [SFX].
Back then, it took a legendary amount of work to burn fragrances in the direction of Zeus and his buddies. Many of these spices grew on the other side of the world and it could take months to bring them home. All of that, so they could light something on fire because it smelled good.
Just as our ancestors defined their places of worship by burning spices, we use perfumes, scented candles, and other aromas in our homes or businesses to build atmosphere. And here in America, I’d argue that there’s no place more revered and more indulgent for your senses, than Disney World.
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From the moment you arrive at the Magic Kingdom, [SFX: Theme Park Ambience] you’re hit with the sweet smells of desserts on main street, and every attraction you explore has something to smell. The Haunted Mansion has a rich old wood smell and Splash Mountain smells like a jungle after a rainstorm. Even the on-site Disney resorts each have their own distinct smell.
And they’re all created by Disney Imagineers, like Gary Powell.
Gary: We try to emerge the guests in using all of the senses, and have them just totally emerged into the experience. We want them to be able to forget about everything that may be going on in the world, and just really enjoy themselves and their family time, make memories that'll last forever.
Gary: Smell in my opinion, is a memory enhancer. And it really brings back places, happy moments. It's very important and very instrumental to the storytelling.
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When Gary and his team work on an attraction, they have to coordinate between many creative aspects. The goal is to stimulate all of our human senses to create an unforgettable experience.
Gary: My role is a special effects designer. So we will sit there and go through the story concepts with the creative teams, and try to come up with different ideas, whether they be fire effects, projected effects, fiber optics. There's numerous types of special effects that we work on. So we will go through the storyboarding process with the creative teams and try to say, "What if?" What if is something that is used quite a bit over at the Walt Disney Imagineering. What if we did this?
Incorporating smell into an experience is a holistic experience. They’re not just spraying some perfume in the air, they’re making everything work together to tell a story.
Gary: Well, we'll sit there and once again go back to the storyboards, and say, you know "What will really enhance the guest experience?"
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Gary: So what if you smelled the oranges as you are gliding [SFX] through in the Soaring Over California attraction? What if you could smell the ocean [SFX] as you're going through that experience? These are all different things that we talk about in the storyboarding process. And then we go through a process of developing those smells.
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When Gary and his team are ready, they’ll reach out to a perfumer to create the scent that they’re thinking of.
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Gary: Working with a perfumer, you go through a very lengthy explaining verbally, or the best way that you can communicate a scent to a perfumer. They will take that information, and they will go back and do their work, and then send us samples back out.
Every scent for a client like Disney starts with a “brief.” Chandler Burr knows this all too well, he’s the former Perfume Critic for the New York Times, and has documented the process of creating high-end perfumes in his book called The Perfect Scent.
Chandler: The brief is, in a sense, the screenplay, or the blueprint in the case of architecture. It is the concept that is going to be turned into the art.
Olfactory artists or perfumers are the people that come up with the formulas to make a smell. The perfumers at these companies create a first round of scents based on the brief, and then bring these initial ideas to the clients to smell.
Chandler: The perfume houses will come back and they'll say, "These are our first sketches of the brief or the concept that you want." Then the brand is going to say,"You know what? We like this one."
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When you think of a perfumer you might assume that they’re wandering an evergreen forest smelling wet moss [SFX: Forest, sniffing footsteps] or drifting through gardens sniffing flowers [SFX] all day. I mean they might do that on their off time but modern perfumers create scents in high tech purpose built laboratories.
[SFX: Lab ambience (AC, computer hum), SFX of perfumer working: typing, stirring, writing]
Chandler: People have this idea that perfumers are sitting there pouring Rose absolute into Jasmine, at their desk, like some magician, or something, and it's not that at all. Today it is highly, highly scientifically done. The perfumers actually sit at their desks, and have bottles, and bottles of mods.
Mods are short for modifications or a new iteration of a scent that a perfumer is working on. Each time a perfumer tweaks their formula and wants to smell their new scent they create a mod to take a whiff.
Chandler: There are programs, computer programs, that are made to keep track of formuli, and raw materials, at extremely precise portions. They do it in parts per thousand, for some reason, which is sort of interesting, they don't do it in percent.
Getting to a finished smell takes tons of revisions. It can take rounds and rounds of modifications and reviews to hit a smell just right. For Gary and his team at Disney, they’re trying to find something that helps complete their story, but also appeals to the wide audience of visitors at the park.
Gary: Scents are very particular to different people. Some people really enjoy different types of scents, where others may not like it as much.
Gary: So we get a large group of employees [SFX: Crowd ambience - people chattering, sniffing] to come over and start sampling the scent, and try to get a reaction from them to see if they do enjoy it, or they don't. So it's not where we would sit there and say, "Okay. Here. This is the perfect scent. This person likes it." There's quite a few tests that we go through over at Walt Disney Imagineering with different people sampling it to get their opinions.
Gary: So it could take a month. It could take six months or even longer to get through that process. I have gone through as many as 30, 40 different types of samples before we finally got to one that was fairly close to what the creative team was looking for.
Accommodating these changes pose a constant challenge for perfumers, who construct, and reconstruct their formulas over and over.
[SFX: Scientific lab ambience (soft machines whirring, class clinking, liquids being stirred, typing on keyboard) - ideally a repeating sequence, stopping and starting a few times over and over ]
Chandler: With perfume you're constantly evolving the work, the formula. You're adding materials, you're subtracting materials, you are trying different angles and aspects and directions.
Chandler: And in the end, you wind up with a formula that when you compound it, when you put it together, you wind up with the work that is your vision.
While Chandler didn’t collaborate with perfumers who worked on Disney attractions, the perfumers for the Soarin Over California attraction struggled to nail down one very specific scent.
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[SFX: Ocean or beachy]
Gary: The creative team wanted to have an ocean smell. So with this ocean smell, we had gotten in touch with some perfumers, and had them give us different samples. When we brought them over to the creative team and had them sampling these, we found out that none of them really worked from a creative perspective. So we were scratching our heads, saying, "What are we going to do in order to get something that creative likes and creative will buy into?"
Gary: In this case, we went out and bought some new cotton socks. [SFX: Ocean] Went over to the Pacific Ocean, and we dropped the sock into the ocean [SFX] and just saturated it there for a little bit.
Gary: We then took that, put it into a plastic bag [SFX], and we sent it to the perfumer that we were using, and had that perfumer sit there and recreate that scent [Pouring and mixing SFX]. Well, when they sent us back the samples the first reaction from creative was they loved it. It was great. It was exactly what they were looking for. Until that experience, I'd never realized that the different ocean waters had a different smell, depending upon where you were.
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When perfumers find the right mix of ingredients to create that perfect smell, the craft and care of the teams behind Disney’s Parks are able to create something magical.
[SFX: Theme Park Ambience]
Gary: One of the exciting parts of my job is after we finish an attraction, and you have the guests going through experiencing it for the first time, is standing right outside listening to their reactions, seeing their reactions on the hard work that you had done over the past couple of years.
Gary: Soarin’ Over California, the people that were leaving the attraction would make comments on the different scents that they smelled while they were experiencing the ride. And the majority of them were running back over, getting in line to experience the attraction again.
Gary: So when I go into the Disney theme parks, and I hear the guests' reactions to the experience of a new attraction that we have opened, I look at it and say, "Okay. All of this was worth it. Everything that we went through prior was worth it." I mean, to get that smile on the guest's face, it's just amazing. I mean, it's one of my most enjoyable parts of the job that I have.
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For Gary’s team of Imagineers, smell is part of the larger Disney sensory experience, but for perfumers, creating a scent is an artform unto itself. The multi-billion dollar perfume industry is a hidden world of artistic geniuses, cutting edge science, and high-stakes gambles. We’ll explore secrets behind the scents after the break.
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MIDROLL
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If you’ve ever been to Disney World, whether you know it or not, you’ve been affected by smell. From the aromas of regional cuisines in Epcot, to the smoky musk of cannonfire [SFX] on Pirates of the Carribean, smell transports you into these fictional worlds.
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But as the perfume critic for the New York Times, Chandler Burr found that master perfumers create scents that are their own art form.
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Chandler: Scent as an art medium can convey, I think it's very, very clear, can convey things in ways that other mediums can't. I think that scent is certainly one of the weaker mediums in conveying intellectual information and abstract concepts. It doesn't do that well. It is extraordinarily powerful, and I think more than other mediums, in conveying raw emotion and in rendering the person experiencing the work of art, helpless in the face of its power as a medium.
Chandler: It's an extraordinary medium for that reason.
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Just as you can appreciate the sculpture with your eyes, or a work of music with your ears, a work of perfume brings together a collection of elements to create art for your nose.
Chandler: Composers are going to use an accord, they're going to put notes together, form a chord [SFX]. And you're constantly mixing these materials to get the full work of music. It's exactly the same in perfume.
Chandler: There are some perfumes in the market that have 11 or 12 scent materials [SFX: keyboard notes counting up], and there are some perfumes in the market that have 20, 30, 40, 50 [SFX: keyboard notes counting up].
Chandler: The number of raw materials has tended to fall, and one of the reasons is that synthetics gives you a control over the medium.
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Here’s the thing, when you hear the word “synthetic” people start to get a little nervous. Which makes sense! It sounds like you’re spraying toxic chemicals all over yourself so you can smell like a pretty flower. But the truth is that there’s way more nuance to the idea of synthetic versus natural and its way more about marketing than safety.
Chandler: First of all, there is no natural material in perfume. Okay, let's get that straight right out of the gate. I mean, this is dumb. You know, people say, "Oh, that has rose absolute and jasmine and vetiver and that's all it has. And it's all natural." Um... You know what? All of these materials have been treated with chemicals.
Chandler: It's ridiculous. There have never been natural materials. You don't take something from some mint leaf and then put it in a bottle.
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Getting any scent from a raw material takes a good deal of chemistry. Even the most simple elements require some amount of processing.
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Chandler: Now, in rose, if you extract a rose and get an essence and if you extract it with the oldest technology that we use, which is just steam, okay? You've got about a thousand molecules. Of those thousand molecules, only about 30 actually smell. None of the others smell. So take those 30. Well, actually, if you take the 30, only about 15 of them really smell of rose. And so now you're down to 15, and from 15, you really can go down to 10, 8, 7.
By extracting the scent of a rose from thousands of molecules to just around a dozen means there’s fewer ingredients that can cause allergic reactions, and there’s fewer elements to test. So if something does cause a problem it’s way easier to figure out the cause. Rather than following an industrial process to extract these molecules from natural roses, scent companies can simply create these exact same chemical compounds synthetically in a safer and more environmentally conscious way.
Chandler: You can construct a beautiful rose out of four or five materials, but you don't actually have to destroy all these rose bushes and use all this fertilizer and all these chemicals. And it really is a more efficient, lower carbon way of creating these scent materials.
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Thanks to synthetic ingredients, perfumers have a constantly expanding collection of tools to make their art. That creative freedom empowers scent artists to explore lots of inspirations and styles through their work. After all, modern perfume isn’t all about smelling like flowers. There might not be anyone better at explaining all that nuance and craft than Chandler. He can take a single scent and give it the same amount of background and analysis as a painting in the Louvre.
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Chandler: There is a work by two extraordinary olfactory artists named Christine Nagel and Francis Kurkdjian and it is Narciso Rodriguez for Her Eau de Parfum is the name of it. It is a work of neo-romanticism that is absolutely extraordinary. It takes the romanticism of the 1800s and transports it to the 21st century.
Chandler: When you experience it it transports you, it is almost like being caught in a tide or a wind. It is deep, it is dark. It makes you feel emotion. I think it's absolutely wonderful.
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Great perfumers are great artists and they make art that is consumed by millions of people around the globe. There are giant advertisements for perfumes in international airports and small town drug stores, but there’s a reason that most of us have never heard the name of the geniuses that create these works.
Chandler: Scent in most cases is made in the same way. You have these huge brands, L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, and then the names of the brands themselves, Tom Ford, Le Labo, Jo Malone, Yves Saint Lauren and so on. So those are the ones that hire the perfumers.
Chandler: And they didn't want the artists to be recognized because they felt that it detracted. I think that acknowledging the artist, only elevates what is a product.
Chandler: Acknowledging the artist only helps us understand these works and their value and their beauty and their importance more.
To help raise the profile of scent artists, Chandler worked with the Museum of Arts and Design in New York to create a brand new kind of museum exhibit. He created an experience that focused entirely on perfumes, and treated their creators with the same reverence as famous painters or sculptors.
Chandler: The Art Of Scent, which is the first scent art exhibition that I did, we started with a work of art that was created in 1889.
The exhibit takes people through over a century of scent art. Unlike walking through a department store, where staff are spraying you with various perfume samples, Chandler’s exhibitions use techniques specifically designed for appreciating olfactory art.
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[SFX: Museum ambiance]
Chandler: In The Art Of Scent, we actually have two sections for experiencing it. One we call The Gallery, is a very formal space, that's where I have my wall labels on each work.
In the Gallery, Chandler used specially designed, scented beads infused with the perfume
Chandler: You lean toward it and you trip an infrared wire and then the scent comes out [SFX: Perfume spray, sniff sniff]. So it's a very, very efficient and it's a wonderfully fun way, frankly, a sort of high tech way to experience the scent. The second section of the Art of Scent exhibit was the salon, a social space for people to try and discuss different scents.
[SFX: more personal crowd than museum, sniffing, bottles clinking]
Chandler: We actually have the perfume there in glasses and we provide a ton of blotters and you dip them and people talk about them and they hold them and then they shove them in other people's faces. They say, "Smell that, I love that. I think it's amazing." Or, "Smell that, that's insane. I don't understand this." And it really gets sort of experienced by communication
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Chandler’s exhibits appear in museums around the world, and he continues to advocate for widespread appreciation of olfactory art.
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While modern society may not go to the same great lengths as the ancient Greeks or Romans to cater to our sense of smell, Chandler has found that the right scent is as profound as it always has been.
Chandler: It's a wonderful mission, if you will, to make people understand these works of scent convey these same things, are drenched in subjectivity, actively seek to change the way you perceive reality, are in fact major works of art in the mainstream of art history.
Chandler: I remember one time I was giving a curator tour, and I went through and there was this guy who ... just sort of nice guy. And he was clearly a tourist in New York, he was there with his family, and he went through and he's not the kind of guy who you think was going to respond to things and he was transfixed and he stood there. After we finished, he stood there after the last work of art just smelling it and smelling it and he turned to me and he said, "What's amazing about this is not just the works of art, is that I never would have imagined that this thing could have this kind of impact on me the way a movie, or a book, or a painting could," and he said that's why it blows me away.
Chandler: I love that.
Twenty Parts Per Thousand is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of Defacto Smells. A scent design team that makes commercials, documentaries, and trailers smell incredible.
Okay so, by now, surely you know something’s up with this episode. And you may be listening to this episode like three years in the future. so I’ll just say it, this is an April Fools episode.
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Don’t worry, Twenty Thousand Hertz will be back to exploring the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds next time.
This episode was written and produced by Mike Baireuther. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound desgined and mixed by Soren Begin and Jai Berger.
Thanks to our guest Gary Powell for joining us and to Disney for helping out with this episode. And also thanks to Chandler Burr. You can find out more about Chandler’s exhibits at ChandlerBurr.com. The music in this episode is from The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Music Bed. You can find every track name, artist, for every episode we’ve ever done on our website, 20k dot org. Thanks for smelling.
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