Under Your Nose (The Pleasures and Politics of Smell)

Social media’s “smell queen” reveals the secrets of our most overlooked sense.

Roses. Rotten eggs. Perfume. Sweat. Smells transport, attract, and seduce us, but they also disgust, unsettle, even anger us. Why do some smells comfort us while others repel us? And what does that reveal about who we are?

We tend to think of smell as our least important sense and pay little attention to it, yet smell warns us of danger, lets us enjoy our food, and binds us to our memories and identities. In Under Your Nose, Dr. Ally Louks draws on science, literature, history, and pop culture to uncover the hidden influence of smell in our lives. For example:

• With around four hundred smell receptors that can process up to a trillion different smells, humans have a sense of smell that can rival even dogs’ in some cases.

• Since we stop noticing scents to which we’re accustomed, people can learn about our lifestyles and habits from the way we smell, while we remain unaware.

• Virginia Woolf thought fellow modernist writer Katherine Mansfield smelled bad because she wore perfume, while Mansfield thought Woolf smelled bad because she didn’t—an illustration of how scent figures into our biases around categories such as class and gender.

At once entertaining and revelatory, Under Your Nose invites us to become more aware of the invisible forces shaping our perceptions, our relationships, and ourselves.