Of Space, Time, and Scent

The experience of smell in the Digital Age

Pre-digital: a still from David Lynch’s TV ad for Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, c. 1990

The only surprise in this quote from The Hollywood Reporter is that it was spoken aloud by one of the world’s best-known movie stars:

Matt Damon Says Netflix Wants Plots Reiterated “Three or Four Times in the Dialogue” for Phone-Distracted Viewers

“It’s going to really start to infringe on how we’re telling these stories,” ‘The Rip’ star recently told Joe Rogan.

The “second screen” phenomenon isn’t new—it’s at least a decade old—but it is ubiquitous. According to one estimate, a majority of viewers in the USA, UK, Australia, and India are looking at their mobile devices while “watching” streaming movies.

(Meanwhile, streaming has helped drain the life out of Hollywood as described in this substack post by George MF Washington in “Seen The Lights Go Out On Sunset”.)

The degradation and (literal) shrinking of filmed entertainment is just the most visible effect of the Digital Age. Wider and more insidious effects are taking place throughout everyday life. Dating, dining, shopping, driving, healthcare, and banking have all been transformed. Is it crazy to think the change also extends to how we perceive the world through smell?

The sense of smell takes time. It doesn’t work at the speed of light or the speed of sound. Odor molecules spread by diffusion, a slow random process complicated by air currents and ambient temperature. The different molecules in an odor source each diffuse at their own rate. As a concentration gradient envelops us, our response can change from puzzlement, to pleasant surprise, to annoyance. Lingering odors color ones that come later.

Do we have still have time for smell?

Consider scented candles. You have to physically light one, and then it takes minutes (multiple IG reels) to fill the room. The digital alternative: use a phone app to remotely program a plugin device so that your living room is fully scented when you arrive home. No fuss, no muss, but also no involvement: no flickering flame, no slow build, no blowing it out.

As for timing, maybe we’ve been doing scented entertainment all wrong. From AromaRama to Digiscents, the goal has been to synchronize odor delivery to specific on-screen actions. This is difficult to achieve given the physics of odor dispersion (above). It also fails to exploit the power of scent to set an emotional tone across an entire scene, much like a musical score.

Shortened attention spans and fragrance imagery are at odds with one another. In her post on “David Lynch’s Sublime and Surreal Perfume Commercials,” Quinn MacRorie includes video of his work. Have a look at one or two of these 30 second ads and ask yourself: Can a Digital Age compulsive sit through even one of them without scrolling? (If that DAC is you, drop the phone, grab a flacon, and give yourself a spritz.)

Smells evolve over time. This is a fundamental truth of odor perception. Enthusiasts can parse a perfume’s lifespan into top, heart and base notes, but this is just a specialized instance of being able to track changes over time. We have this ability because our nose and brain actively tune out background smells so we are ready to detect the next novel signal.

The absence of evolution is boredom: French women once accepted the fact that a perfume moved from top note to base note over a matter of hours. They would restart the experience by applying it several times a day. American women were less forgiving. When they bought Eau de Whatever they wanted it to smell like EdW from start to finish. And they wanted it to last on their skin. Thus was born the linear perfume—specifically formulated to evolve as little as possible. Value was maximized and experience was degraded.

Most importantly, smells have meaning. In daily life they signal impending change—time to take the bread out of the oven, time to head inside for dinner, time to shower, time to change the baby’s diaper. When dinner is DoorDash and dating is Tinder, the olfactory realm shrinks. Our ability to read scent signals may decline along with it.

Susanna Carmelina at Dissipate describes perfumes in sketches that read like tone poems. She extrapolates meaning and emotion from what she smells, and creates a story to draw the reader into the experience. Only then does she provide a rundown of specific notes. In her own unique way, she is fighting back against the reduced olfactory attention span.

In a three-part series on her Raeta substack, Alia Malley explores time, scent, and meaning. (Her Tarkovsky post helped inspire this one.) Malley is a Gen-Xer who grew up before cell phones, and her work as a scent artist reflects the headlong, exhilarating, confusing, rewarding, humiliating aspects of coming of age irl in the 1990s.

These elements are missing for today’s young adults who are both connected and kept at a distance by their apps. They fail to engage in person. Physical intimacy is devalued. When Malley and I exchanged comments on a Note, I asked her “Does screen-addicted GenZ buy gourmand fragrances because it’s safer to smell like dessert than like an actual sexy human? What happens to an industry based on allure, seduction, & mystery when sex is all screens and eyeballs?”

There is a lot riding on the second question. Will it be innocuous food groups ftw, or will human nature prevail in all its primitive glory?