July 29, 2010 • 21 mins
Designed entirely to cater to the sense of smell, perfume occupies a unique position in fashion and society. But when we catch the whiff of a passing perfume enthusiast, what are we really smelling? Tune in and learn more about the science behind perfume.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. So, Robert, yeah, what is an astronomical unit.
I don't know what astronomical unit. It's one hell of
(00:22):
a big apartment. Oh, welcome to the podcast guys. This
is Alice and the science editor at how storks dot com.
And this is Robert Lamb, of science writer at how
stuff works dot com. And that comes to you from
Bruno in Switzerland. We've been putting the call out for
jokes lately on faceboo. Nice cheesy science related jokes. There's
(00:42):
no reason that scientists can't be humorous, and there's no
reason that scientists can't smell fabulous, right, right, right, So
today we're talking about the science of perfume, and I
wanted to talk a little bit about the worst smell
that you like, you know, sort of the smell you're
not supposed to like, but you do. Um. For me,
it's it's kind of weird cont that, but go on, well,
you know, you know it smells bad for you're not
(01:02):
supposed to be sniffing it. You know, I'm not talking
about you know, sniffing something to get you know, an effect,
but just you kind of like the smell of it,
like gasoline is mine. Okay, It's like I'm not talking
about huffing, but gasoline smells fabulous. But I do like
it also on that vein rubber cement. Okay, okay, but
that's perfect sense. Wait what's yours? Um Well, I mean
(01:27):
I'm one of these people I tend not to think
of like smells. I like is being like horrible. Um well,
like one example, okay, during fruit kind of gets a
bad rap for being a dozen indeed, have you ever
eaten one? But yeah, that's the thing. It's like I
finally got to try it when my wife and I
went to Thailand and and Grant, we were outdoors in
a we're well ventilated area and okay, everybody's just like
(01:48):
our daurian fruit. The smells horrible, blah blah blah. I
mean not the people have sold it to us, obviously,
but but you know, you hear that especially here in
the States, and um and I really wanted to try
it and give it a fair shape because I'm kind
of thinking like this kind of like Western you know, chauvitism.
It's like, you know, saying I don't want this fruit.
You're an equal opportunity for you. So I gave it
a shot and it was it was really good. I mean,
it's I think the thing with the Durian fruit is
(02:09):
that you kind of have to go into it expecting
more of a cheese like it's some sort of a
cheese fruit kind of a thing. But really, yeah, but
in terms of things that, like, I guess I do
have to admit that I now remember that like sometimes
like when I'm painting, like painting, like house painting and
stuff like, there is something kind of nice about that smell,
(02:30):
like it almost kind of smells chocolate somehow to me,
like I should eat it. Yeah. Well, I think it
also has to do with a texture of the paint
a little bit. You know, it has that like thickness
when it's going on. And and I guess we do
tend to paint like the painting jobs I've been on,
it tends to be kind of like a brownish or
a tannish you know, or like even like a white
chocolate kind of color. Stuff. Okay, Well, technically that could
(02:50):
be a perfume, because perfume is a pretty I mean,
you can define pretty much anything as a perfume. It's
a pretty loose definition. It's basically something that you wear
and something that smells. I mean, I'm sure the professional
perfumers out there I have a more rigorous definition. But
for our purposes, like you don't count like Irish spring
is a perfume, but it doesn't necessarily have to smell
(03:11):
good or good to everyone. Right, Definitely baste on some
of the perfumes I've smelt on public transportation, Yeah, no doubt.
So for our purposes, let's talk about liquid perfume. You know,
the stuff you're gonna find in a bottle um, you know,
a sprayer spitzer um, and that's just going to be
a combo of alcohol, water and whatever key ingredients that
(03:32):
evaporated room temperature that you you know, want to throw
in to make your signature fragrance. And when you're smelling perfume,
you're really just sniffering a bunch of evaporating molecules. Right.
Your nose detects perfume and it sends a message. Shear
brain creating this perception good, bad, and different, whatever it
may be. And you know that's what's going on in
the elevator. Have you ever had this experience, I know
all of you listeners. Definitely. Have you walk into the elevator,
(03:54):
you know, somebody gets on at the next floor. They
walk in in with them trills this just ragrant cloud
of cologne or perfume. And I won't say it's women
or ladies or men, because you know, I think both
definitely do this. Like there was this one dude that
I used to work with him in a before it
came to hou stuff works, and it's like I remember
the day he came in to apply for his job.
(04:16):
It was like, you know that comes in through the door.
It's just this stream of just just really strong like
cologne was just hanging off of him. And then he
left and like the cologne stayed. I think that's when
he gave him the job. It's like it's gonna smell impression.
Yeah he did that man made an impression. Yeah. When
I was in college, is reminded me a lot of
Thursday nights. To me, you'd be going out and you
(04:37):
get in a you get an elevator with a with
a boy and he would just you know, the whole
elevator would smell like dre card noir. Do you remember
that cologne? I think I remember. I think maybe my
dad had an old bottle of it, and I like
found it somewhere and it's like dark looking, right, it's
like dark manly looking cologne, I think. So, like, the
more it looks like whiskey, the more it's okay for
guys to wear it. Yeah, if I sniffed it now
(04:58):
would totally take me back. So what's going on with
the individual ingredients in those perfumes, like what's making the
car or linger so long? Well, my understanding is that
the alcohol works to spread out the different smells, right,
allowing you to to to pick up the different hints
and the complexities of the perfume. Otherwise you'd be small
on them all at once, right, right. So, writer Susan Nasa,
(05:19):
who wrote the article on our site about how how
perfume works, was talking about in the in the case
of a perfume oil, Um, if you were just to
smell that perfume oil, which is a really concentrated essence
of the smell, it would kind of be like hearing
all the members of an orchestra all play at the
same time. Yeah, you're not going to hear the you know,
(05:39):
the tuba kind of rumbling. Um. So that that's that's
a perfemale. But the alcohol, right, it allows you to
hear or smell, as the case maybe with perfume, all
these notes um not at once. It spreads them out
like you said, Okay, It's kind of like if you
go to Tapas restaurant and like they bring out you know,
topless restaurant where it and it's, uh, you don't want
(06:01):
all the top as at once in gobl them down
in or you want to be there for like a
lengthy period of time getting the one by one definitely, definitely.
So in that same vein, it makes sense that a
lot of perfumes and when we're talking about perfumes again,
perfume does not applied to women or men. It's just
it's like we said, a smell um so they have
a three part smell and each smell is called a
(06:23):
note in the perfume industry, and that's what they like
to come. But it's just jargon, and I was not
familiar with this at all before we research this. It's
pretty cool, and the smells have different rates of evaporation,
so on the top you're gonna have your top note, right,
and uh, you're gonna smell these within fifteen minutes of apply.
This is where you're gonna find kind of the racy, unpleasant, spicy,
weird smell, you know, something that the designer threw into
(06:45):
just kind of you know, be crazy. This is the
don't apply your perfume on on the train smell, right
when the person next you decides to put it on
and you're like cheese and that that's this. This is
the top These are the top notes in action, right yeah. Yeah,
And and and these are the ones, luckily, that evaporate first.
So take us to the take us through the heart notes.
(07:06):
All right, Well, this apparently starts showing up after three
to four hours after you've gotten off the train, ideally
hanging out at work, and these evaporate more slowly from
the skin. The phase of the perfume's life tends to
be what this is the This is the phase that
makes the most impact. This is what you remember. This
is the prime perfume life stage, right, Robert, if you
(07:27):
were wearing a floral perfume, do you wear a floral perfume? Okay,
So this is where you find your floral notes, okay, okay,
and then you get your base notes, right, and so
these form obviously the foundation of the perfume, the base
of the perfume, and they linger the longest after you
douse yourself in the morning, the five to eight hours
long in a fact. And it's not just the chemistry
(07:47):
of the perfume and you know the rate of the
molecules evaporating, it's you're a factor to right, So the
top notes of the perfume are going to disappear faster
if your skin is nice and dry and warm, um,
rather than if you're kind of cool and oily. So
you're gonna so when you go shopping for a perfume,
you need to sort of carry some of the information
with you, like, no, am, I you know, but how
(08:10):
my skin is going to behave with it? Sure? I mean,
I guess I wouldn't hurt to keep that in mind.
And then how you store the perfume is going to
affect the chemistry as well. If you store it in
bright light, that can impact the bonds and the freegrance
molecules and break them um, and then you're you can
have bright sun that canna damaged perfume within a week's time.
And that was according to a Luca Turan Antonia Sanchez,
(08:31):
authors of the two thousand and eight book Perfume A Guide. Uh,
that's the one for the dude Kills All the Ladies, right, No,
that's fiction by Patrick Suskin. Yeah. Yeah, the protagonist of that.
What is he he's trying to he's trying to. I've
seen the movie, I've not read the book. Read Okay,
well we complete each other and that then like, um,
(08:53):
he I remember correctly, he wants to, like he like
falls for these different ladies and like he finds them
into a into perfume. Right, he wants to According to Amazon,
I believe captured the scent of a beautiful young version.
That's it. That's what he's trying to do. And by
version I meant virgin. Yeah. Um, but if it's sort
of like Silence of the Lambs but with perfume, what
(09:15):
do you think about that? Yeah? Pretty pretty good. The
movie was pretty fabulous, pretty really Yeah, it had Dustin
Hoffman and it's a perfumest in it. But but back
to the storage. Think, what's weird to me about the
whole visible light breaking it down? It's like most perfumes
come in like a little glass vials, right, I mean
it's true, it's just begging to be broken down by
the sun, and they're begging to be displayed, right, I
(09:35):
mean because packaging, of course is such a big part
of perfume as well. Well, that goes into another podcast
that we did on the Smell and Science. Yeah, we've
been on a smelly bender this week. Well, there's a
whole deal about how, like how you know, the information
from our other senses also affect how we perceive a smell.
If you tell me that a cheese is cheese, then
(09:56):
I'm gonna respond better than if you tell me a
cheese is body odor and and likewise in general, that's it.
That's a good assumption. Yeah, But the thing is, it's
like they say that it also ends up applying to
like the shape of our perfume container or the like
the different the name or you know what are all
these different factors that they're using to sell it to you.
It's like that you shape it like an apple, even
if it doesn't quite smell like an apple. It's like
(10:16):
you're gonna be more inclined to think apple when you
when you sniff it. Right, So smell being much more
than just the physical act of sniffing. Yeah, So before
we move on. I just wanted to touch on. There's
one other process that can can harm your perfume, and
you guys know this is oxidation. So this is what's
going to turn your uncorked wine into vinegar. And it
can do a number on your bottle of Chanel number
five as well. Okay, So don't keep your perfume out
(10:39):
in a like trough on your on your desk. Yeah,
and storing your perfume at room temperature in the dark
and in a spray bottle preserves it well, maybe a
shelf life of two years, which is interesting because I
think I tend to keep my sons much longer than
two years. To self, Okay, I gotta go home and
clear out the perfumes pomode on the sink. No, I
(11:00):
will not do that. So why do we wear perfume?
I found this pretty interesting? Um So, the writer Susan
Nasser interviewed this psychologist, Rachel Hurts Uh and she's a
she's a Brown University and she's researched smell pretty extensively.
It Hurts had a couple of ideas about why people
wear these scents. You want to take the men ones? Yeah,
(11:21):
and this this makes a you know a lot of sense,
like young men wear fragrance to attract women or four men. Um,
you know what a preference and uh, of course that
makes perfect sense. And that's like the stereotype too. You know.
It's like guys putting on some sort of funky scent
generally and on oftentimes maybe not generally, but often not
knowing quite what they're doing when when they're picking one out. Um.
(11:44):
So that's the young guys and then the older men.
According uh, according to Nasser, older men wear it as
a nod to the person who gave them the perfume.
In other words, I'm wearing this perfume because i got
it as a gift and I've got to use the
whole bottle where I'm never going to hear the end
of it. And I think you and I think you
think it smells nice. So yeah, so I guess as
well as nice, I'll wear it. If she likes it, well,
(12:04):
we're going out to dinner, might as well. That was
myself a little bit. Yeah, generally I don't receive perfumes
except from um. Bonnie's grandmother gave me perfume one year. Yeah,
I think we quietly destroyed it. I hope she's not listening.
Um So, young women may wear it because of friends,
(12:25):
uh and and media influence. This one actually rang true
for me. I remember at a certain point in my
life in middle school, I think I did start to
wear fragrance. And it wasn't because I you know, wait,
you probably were, didn't you like wear it earlier? Like
you went and like trying on all your mom's perfume
at once? Yeah, that's probably true. I probably did. But
you know, I actually bought a bottle from my local
(12:45):
drug store or something like baby Softer, I don't even know,
some terrible perfume. Not that it's terrible, but I just
probably wouldn't buy it now. But it was very much
something that all my friends were doing, so it was
more like in you know, a reflection of growing up
or something to that effect. Um So, her is the
psychologists that that a writer interviewed says that women in
(13:08):
thirties do it just because you know, they want to. Uh,
once you get into your forties, they're wearing it because
they like it. This sounds random to me, though, I mean,
you don't like it before and then well, I mean
maybe it's kind of like with you know, some people
steal with like say beer, you kind of like, you
drink beer tastes horrible at first, and then supposedly if
(13:28):
you drink enough of it, you start to love it
and then you like it takes a while to like
build up in appreciation for it. So maybe it's like
you spend your thirties, you know, using these perfumes, but
you don't really necessarily like it, but you know, after
a while, then you develop this real appreciation for it
and then you're, you know, totally into it. That being
the case. By sixty again, the women are just wearing
it to please others. Well maybe they're just they're just
(13:51):
nice old ladies and they're like, I'm just gonna gonna
wear this because my son credit for me and they'll
make them happy. Kind of a deal, you know, right,
righties are just nice, That's what saying. So sense can
affect our moods and our behavior, right, we know this.
I mean, it can pull up some sort of treasured
memory and it can influence our actions. And there have
been a couple of interesting studies in this vein um.
I think that you guys have probably heard of the
(14:12):
one about the cinnabon. Have you heard about that. We
were talking about this a little bit before the podcast. Yeah,
what was to do with this again? It's just the
scent of cinamon, right, So put the put the scent
of cinnabon in the air, do it, you know, in
a mall. Okay, And what you're gonna want to do
is you're gonna get some people involved. You're gonna get
your participants, and you get one person to drop something
(14:35):
and then, um, see if a stranger picks up that pencil,
say that you dropped. Well, it turns out if you
have the smell of cinnamon in the air, um, people
are more likely to pick up that pencil. The stranger
is more likely to pick up that pencil. Good smells
as a correlation with you know, good behavior. You know
you're going to pick up a pencil, maybe you'll give directions,
maybe you're just going to be an all around nice
(14:55):
person as long as you're within cinnabons. Wow, it's kind
of interesting, it can. It makes me think of like
a futuristic society, you know, where everybody is like a
perfect citizen and they're doing it because they're just constantly
pumping out the odor of cinnamon. You know what this
really made me wonder, and I didn't have time enough
to get into it before the podcast, was what do
casinos smell like? I'm not a hardcore gambler, but I
had to wonder how this sadness, stale cigarettes, sadness and
(15:19):
cinnabone old ladies playing the slats. I don't know, that's
really I'm gonna I'm very curious. Now. So there's a
study in France that followed a sort of similar cinnamon protocol,
only they check to see whether a woman who was
wearing perfume would um influenced this sort of similar behavior
and strangers so um, you know, she would drop something
(15:40):
from her person, she would. They would see if strangers
would help her pick up the object, and in fact
they did. You know, the woman wearing the perfume brought
out that behavior again she's smelt like cinnamon. No, she
smelt like a different perfume. No they did not. Well,
see they should combine these two studies, right, maybe they
have them. It has the best I act if it's
(16:00):
a cinnamon for fume. And then there's just one final
study that I'll get you here. There's a study published
in the Journal of Psychological Science, and that found that
a citrus scented cleanser was associated with people behaving more
fairly when they played a game, a classic trust game.
According to this article on the Boston Globe, like apples
(16:20):
to app sir, what I don't know, I don't know
what the game was. Yeah, so fair behavior, people picking
up pencils for you. I mean, it does seem like
scent can influence action. And and that's just you know,
a smattering of studies that have been done there. There
are many more to explore. But let's let's take a
break from that and look at the genetic side. So
each of us has a genetically determined number of odor
(16:43):
receptors or cells in our nose that grab fragrant molecules
out of the air around us. So, with more receptors
for a classic compounds like say lily smells, you're gonna
smell lily at a lower concentration, but at normal amounts
the smell could be intense and overwhelming. Alright, But too
few receptors can be a problem. Why is that? Well,
for example, cilantros fragrance consists of many odors. If your
(17:06):
genetic code spells out of variation that reduces your number
of receptors for an odor. You may miss one of
Cilantro's many odors and it may smell soapy to you.
We've got touched on this before, Yeah, we did on
the genetic stuff. They're talking about it tasting soapy and
of course sent and taste or blood brothers. Indeed, So
let's get to the evolution side. And one question that
people have thrown out a lot are you know, are
(17:28):
our old factory likes and dislikes programmed? And there's pretty
healthy argument on this area. So on the pro side,
some people are going to argue that the answer as
to whether we like certain smells isn't really genes but history, right, um,
and you know, way way way back history like Grays,
like just foraging for food kind of things like like
I smell fruit, I eat fruit, fruits great. I wish
(17:51):
everything smells like fruit. Is the center bund thing again?
Yeah totally um, yeah, right, so that kind of harkens
back to our foraging days are hunting and gathering days.
And then you know, on the other hand, we're not
gonna like the smell of you know, urine feces or
you know, maybe rotten or fishy smells, because like urine
could like it could be telling me that somebody else's territory, um,
(18:11):
you know, fecal all that's gonna potentially parasites and pathogens
two sees infectious agents, right, So there could there be
an evolutionary mechanism at work there. That's that's one thought
school of thought on this. I'm I'm game to believe that.
What about the other side of the argument, Well, yeah,
there's the other side of the argument says it smells
are an evolutionary programmed and this is this is kind
(18:34):
of like the sort of short, short and dirty version
of this is like people can get used to anything, right,
Your culture preference, your personal experience can override any smell.
I mean, if you grow up with the latter and smell,
maybe it's not going to bother you. Yeah, you grow up,
you know, gutting fish, then the fish smell is not
going to bother you. Back before the days of refrigeration,
um now, Sir writes in her article, the smell of
(18:56):
rotten meat was tolerated and even liked in Europe. Huh yeah,
I guess I just don't really have a perception of
rotten hamburger meat per se, just because the refrigerator does
play such an important role. Well, one example that comes
to mind, it's like I don't know if you know here,
go to like like sort of foreign or not even foreign,
but just kind of like I guess, like sort of
Asian like kind of like fish markets and stuff, or
(19:16):
I guess just any fish market. It's like, I'm not
around them, so when I go to them, it's it's
a bit overpowering. But I'm thinking, like people a people
were around it a lot are going to be more
less inclined to think it's stinky. And also if it's
like more like a cultural thing, you're going to tolerate
it more. Yeah, or maybe even you know, say you're
a smoker, right, you know how smokers can smell themselves,
but if you walk into an elevator with a smoker,
(19:38):
you can instantly smell it. Or if you're riding the
train with somebody who you know, hit happy hour, maybe
they can't smell the alcohol on them, but I mean
it just waffs over to you on a giant cloud
of dirty martini. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, So so that's
really the other side of the argument is that, Yeah,
like you were saying, we can override any of these preferences,
and evolution really doesn't have a whole lot to do
(20:00):
with smell. So I think we gave you guys a
lot of odor for thought. Yeah, I mean, I'm I
think it's. Yeah, next time you're throwing a little perfume,
you might think about it a little differently you and
also like maybe even like go ahead and mark down
on your schedule, like which phase of the perfume is
gonna is gonna line up with what part of your day.
It's like, oh, crap, I got a three o'clock um,
you know, interview, and that's after phase two ends. What
(20:23):
am I gonna do about my floral notes being gone? Yeah?
So we love to hear from you guys, smelly thoughts
or otherwise. So send us an email at science Stuff
at how stuff woraks dot com, or connect with us
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Science Lab. Also find us on Twitter as lab stuff
and y hey, and shoot us some jokes, you know,
(20:44):
give us some sort of nice cheesy science joke, include
your you know your name and where you're from, and
we will try and throw it up there at the
start of the podcast. It's good, all right, that's all
we got. Thanks for listening to guys. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
(21:06):
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. So, Robert, yeah, what is an astronomical unit.
I don't know what astronomical unit. It's one hell of
(00:22):
a big apartment. Oh, welcome to the podcast guys. This
is Alice and the science editor at how storks dot com.
And this is Robert Lamb, of science writer at how
stuff works dot com. And that comes to you from
Bruno in Switzerland. We've been putting the call out for
jokes lately on faceboo. Nice cheesy science related jokes. There's
(00:42):
no reason that scientists can't be humorous, and there's no
reason that scientists can't smell fabulous, right, right, right, So
today we're talking about the science of perfume, and I
wanted to talk a little bit about the worst smell
that you like, you know, sort of the smell you're
not supposed to like, but you do. Um. For me,
it's it's kind of weird cont that, but go on, well,
you know, you know it smells bad for you're not
(01:02):
supposed to be sniffing it. You know, I'm not talking
about you know, sniffing something to get you know, an effect,
but just you kind of like the smell of it,
like gasoline is mine. Okay, It's like I'm not talking
about huffing, but gasoline smells fabulous. But I do like
it also on that vein rubber cement. Okay, okay, but
that's perfect sense. Wait what's yours? Um Well, I mean
(01:27):
I'm one of these people I tend not to think
of like smells. I like is being like horrible. Um well,
like one example, okay, during fruit kind of gets a
bad rap for being a dozen indeed, have you ever
eaten one? But yeah, that's the thing. It's like I
finally got to try it when my wife and I
went to Thailand and and Grant, we were outdoors in
a we're well ventilated area and okay, everybody's just like
(01:48):
our daurian fruit. The smells horrible, blah blah blah. I
mean not the people have sold it to us, obviously,
but but you know, you hear that especially here in
the States, and um and I really wanted to try
it and give it a fair shape because I'm kind
of thinking like this kind of like Western you know, chauvitism.
It's like, you know, saying I don't want this fruit.
You're an equal opportunity for you. So I gave it
a shot and it was it was really good. I mean,
it's I think the thing with the Durian fruit is
(02:09):
that you kind of have to go into it expecting
more of a cheese like it's some sort of a
cheese fruit kind of a thing. But really, yeah, but
in terms of things that, like, I guess I do
have to admit that I now remember that like sometimes
like when I'm painting, like painting, like house painting and
stuff like, there is something kind of nice about that smell,
(02:30):
like it almost kind of smells chocolate somehow to me,
like I should eat it. Yeah. Well, I think it
also has to do with a texture of the paint
a little bit. You know, it has that like thickness
when it's going on. And and I guess we do
tend to paint like the painting jobs I've been on,
it tends to be kind of like a brownish or
a tannish you know, or like even like a white
chocolate kind of color. Stuff. Okay, Well, technically that could
(02:50):
be a perfume, because perfume is a pretty I mean,
you can define pretty much anything as a perfume. It's
a pretty loose definition. It's basically something that you wear
and something that smells. I mean, I'm sure the professional
perfumers out there I have a more rigorous definition. But
for our purposes, like you don't count like Irish spring
is a perfume, but it doesn't necessarily have to smell
(03:11):
good or good to everyone. Right, Definitely baste on some
of the perfumes I've smelt on public transportation, Yeah, no doubt.
So for our purposes, let's talk about liquid perfume. You know,
the stuff you're gonna find in a bottle um, you know,
a sprayer spitzer um, and that's just going to be
a combo of alcohol, water and whatever key ingredients that
(03:32):
evaporated room temperature that you you know, want to throw
in to make your signature fragrance. And when you're smelling perfume,
you're really just sniffering a bunch of evaporating molecules. Right.
Your nose detects perfume and it sends a message. Shear
brain creating this perception good, bad, and different, whatever it
may be. And you know that's what's going on in
the elevator. Have you ever had this experience, I know
all of you listeners. Definitely. Have you walk into the elevator,
(03:54):
you know, somebody gets on at the next floor. They
walk in in with them trills this just ragrant cloud
of cologne or perfume. And I won't say it's women
or ladies or men, because you know, I think both
definitely do this. Like there was this one dude that
I used to work with him in a before it
came to hou stuff works, and it's like I remember
the day he came in to apply for his job.
(04:16):
It was like, you know that comes in through the door.
It's just this stream of just just really strong like
cologne was just hanging off of him. And then he
left and like the cologne stayed. I think that's when
he gave him the job. It's like it's gonna smell impression.
Yeah he did that man made an impression. Yeah. When
I was in college, is reminded me a lot of
Thursday nights. To me, you'd be going out and you
(04:37):
get in a you get an elevator with a with
a boy and he would just you know, the whole
elevator would smell like dre card noir. Do you remember
that cologne? I think I remember. I think maybe my
dad had an old bottle of it, and I like
found it somewhere and it's like dark looking, right, it's
like dark manly looking cologne, I think. So, like, the
more it looks like whiskey, the more it's okay for
guys to wear it. Yeah, if I sniffed it now
(04:58):
would totally take me back. So what's going on with
the individual ingredients in those perfumes, like what's making the
car or linger so long? Well, my understanding is that
the alcohol works to spread out the different smells, right,
allowing you to to to pick up the different hints
and the complexities of the perfume. Otherwise you'd be small
on them all at once, right, right. So, writer Susan Nasa,
(05:19):
who wrote the article on our site about how how
perfume works, was talking about in the in the case
of a perfume oil, Um, if you were just to
smell that perfume oil, which is a really concentrated essence
of the smell, it would kind of be like hearing
all the members of an orchestra all play at the
same time. Yeah, you're not going to hear the you know,
(05:39):
the tuba kind of rumbling. Um. So that that's that's
a perfemale. But the alcohol, right, it allows you to
hear or smell, as the case maybe with perfume, all
these notes um not at once. It spreads them out
like you said, Okay, It's kind of like if you
go to Tapas restaurant and like they bring out you know,
topless restaurant where it and it's, uh, you don't want
(06:01):
all the top as at once in gobl them down
in or you want to be there for like a
lengthy period of time getting the one by one definitely, definitely.
So in that same vein, it makes sense that a
lot of perfumes and when we're talking about perfumes again,
perfume does not applied to women or men. It's just
it's like we said, a smell um so they have
a three part smell and each smell is called a
(06:23):
note in the perfume industry, and that's what they like
to come. But it's just jargon, and I was not
familiar with this at all before we research this. It's
pretty cool, and the smells have different rates of evaporation,
so on the top you're gonna have your top note, right,
and uh, you're gonna smell these within fifteen minutes of apply.
This is where you're gonna find kind of the racy, unpleasant, spicy,
weird smell, you know, something that the designer threw into
(06:45):
just kind of you know, be crazy. This is the
don't apply your perfume on on the train smell, right
when the person next you decides to put it on
and you're like cheese and that that's this. This is
the top These are the top notes in action, right yeah. Yeah,
And and and these are the ones, luckily, that evaporate first.
So take us to the take us through the heart notes.
(07:06):
All right, Well, this apparently starts showing up after three
to four hours after you've gotten off the train, ideally
hanging out at work, and these evaporate more slowly from
the skin. The phase of the perfume's life tends to
be what this is the This is the phase that
makes the most impact. This is what you remember. This
is the prime perfume life stage, right, Robert, if you
(07:27):
were wearing a floral perfume, do you wear a floral perfume? Okay,
So this is where you find your floral notes, okay, okay,
and then you get your base notes, right, and so
these form obviously the foundation of the perfume, the base
of the perfume, and they linger the longest after you
douse yourself in the morning, the five to eight hours
long in a fact. And it's not just the chemistry
(07:47):
of the perfume and you know the rate of the
molecules evaporating, it's you're a factor to right, So the
top notes of the perfume are going to disappear faster
if your skin is nice and dry and warm, um,
rather than if you're kind of cool and oily. So
you're gonna so when you go shopping for a perfume,
you need to sort of carry some of the information
with you, like, no, am, I you know, but how
(08:10):
my skin is going to behave with it? Sure? I mean,
I guess I wouldn't hurt to keep that in mind.
And then how you store the perfume is going to
affect the chemistry as well. If you store it in
bright light, that can impact the bonds and the freegrance
molecules and break them um, and then you're you can
have bright sun that canna damaged perfume within a week's time.
And that was according to a Luca Turan Antonia Sanchez,
(08:31):
authors of the two thousand and eight book Perfume A Guide. Uh,
that's the one for the dude Kills All the Ladies, right, No,
that's fiction by Patrick Suskin. Yeah. Yeah, the protagonist of that.
What is he he's trying to he's trying to. I've
seen the movie, I've not read the book. Read Okay,
well we complete each other and that then like, um,
(08:53):
he I remember correctly, he wants to, like he like
falls for these different ladies and like he finds them
into a into perfume. Right, he wants to According to Amazon,
I believe captured the scent of a beautiful young version.
That's it. That's what he's trying to do. And by
version I meant virgin. Yeah. Um, but if it's sort
of like Silence of the Lambs but with perfume, what
(09:15):
do you think about that? Yeah? Pretty pretty good. The
movie was pretty fabulous, pretty really Yeah, it had Dustin
Hoffman and it's a perfumest in it. But but back
to the storage. Think, what's weird to me about the
whole visible light breaking it down? It's like most perfumes
come in like a little glass vials, right, I mean
it's true, it's just begging to be broken down by
the sun, and they're begging to be displayed, right, I
(09:35):
mean because packaging, of course is such a big part
of perfume as well. Well, that goes into another podcast
that we did on the Smell and Science. Yeah, we've
been on a smelly bender this week. Well, there's a
whole deal about how, like how you know, the information
from our other senses also affect how we perceive a smell.
If you tell me that a cheese is cheese, then
(09:56):
I'm gonna respond better than if you tell me a
cheese is body odor and and likewise in general, that's it.
That's a good assumption. Yeah, But the thing is, it's
like they say that it also ends up applying to
like the shape of our perfume container or the like
the different the name or you know what are all
these different factors that they're using to sell it to you.
It's like that you shape it like an apple, even
if it doesn't quite smell like an apple. It's like
(10:16):
you're gonna be more inclined to think apple when you
when you sniff it. Right, So smell being much more
than just the physical act of sniffing. Yeah, So before
we move on. I just wanted to touch on. There's
one other process that can can harm your perfume, and
you guys know this is oxidation. So this is what's
going to turn your uncorked wine into vinegar. And it
can do a number on your bottle of Chanel number
five as well. Okay, So don't keep your perfume out
(10:39):
in a like trough on your on your desk. Yeah,
and storing your perfume at room temperature in the dark
and in a spray bottle preserves it well, maybe a
shelf life of two years, which is interesting because I
think I tend to keep my sons much longer than
two years. To self, Okay, I gotta go home and
clear out the perfumes pomode on the sink. No, I
(11:00):
will not do that. So why do we wear perfume?
I found this pretty interesting? Um So, the writer Susan
Nasser interviewed this psychologist, Rachel Hurts Uh and she's a
she's a Brown University and she's researched smell pretty extensively.
It Hurts had a couple of ideas about why people
wear these scents. You want to take the men ones? Yeah,
(11:21):
and this this makes a you know a lot of sense,
like young men wear fragrance to attract women or four men. Um,
you know what a preference and uh, of course that
makes perfect sense. And that's like the stereotype too. You know.
It's like guys putting on some sort of funky scent
generally and on oftentimes maybe not generally, but often not
knowing quite what they're doing when when they're picking one out. Um.
(11:44):
So that's the young guys and then the older men.
According uh, according to Nasser, older men wear it as
a nod to the person who gave them the perfume.
In other words, I'm wearing this perfume because i got
it as a gift and I've got to use the
whole bottle where I'm never going to hear the end
of it. And I think you and I think you
think it smells nice. So yeah, so I guess as
well as nice, I'll wear it. If she likes it, well,
(12:04):
we're going out to dinner, might as well. That was
myself a little bit. Yeah, generally I don't receive perfumes
except from um. Bonnie's grandmother gave me perfume one year. Yeah,
I think we quietly destroyed it. I hope she's not listening.
Um So, young women may wear it because of friends,
(12:25):
uh and and media influence. This one actually rang true
for me. I remember at a certain point in my
life in middle school, I think I did start to
wear fragrance. And it wasn't because I you know, wait,
you probably were, didn't you like wear it earlier? Like
you went and like trying on all your mom's perfume
at once? Yeah, that's probably true. I probably did. But
you know, I actually bought a bottle from my local
(12:45):
drug store or something like baby Softer, I don't even know,
some terrible perfume. Not that it's terrible, but I just
probably wouldn't buy it now. But it was very much
something that all my friends were doing, so it was
more like in you know, a reflection of growing up
or something to that effect. Um So, her is the
psychologists that that a writer interviewed says that women in
(13:08):
thirties do it just because you know, they want to. Uh,
once you get into your forties, they're wearing it because
they like it. This sounds random to me, though, I mean,
you don't like it before and then well, I mean
maybe it's kind of like with you know, some people
steal with like say beer, you kind of like, you
drink beer tastes horrible at first, and then supposedly if
(13:28):
you drink enough of it, you start to love it
and then you like it takes a while to like
build up in appreciation for it. So maybe it's like
you spend your thirties, you know, using these perfumes, but
you don't really necessarily like it, but you know, after
a while, then you develop this real appreciation for it
and then you're, you know, totally into it. That being
the case. By sixty again, the women are just wearing
it to please others. Well maybe they're just they're just
(13:51):
nice old ladies and they're like, I'm just gonna gonna
wear this because my son credit for me and they'll
make them happy. Kind of a deal, you know, right,
righties are just nice, That's what saying. So sense can
affect our moods and our behavior, right, we know this.
I mean, it can pull up some sort of treasured
memory and it can influence our actions. And there have
been a couple of interesting studies in this vein um.
I think that you guys have probably heard of the
(14:12):
one about the cinnabon. Have you heard about that. We
were talking about this a little bit before the podcast. Yeah,
what was to do with this again? It's just the
scent of cinamon, right, So put the put the scent
of cinnabon in the air, do it, you know, in
a mall. Okay, And what you're gonna want to do
is you're gonna get some people involved. You're gonna get
your participants, and you get one person to drop something
(14:35):
and then, um, see if a stranger picks up that pencil,
say that you dropped. Well, it turns out if you
have the smell of cinnamon in the air, um, people
are more likely to pick up that pencil. The stranger
is more likely to pick up that pencil. Good smells
as a correlation with you know, good behavior. You know
you're going to pick up a pencil, maybe you'll give directions,
maybe you're just going to be an all around nice
(14:55):
person as long as you're within cinnabons. Wow, it's kind
of interesting, it can. It makes me think of like
a futuristic society, you know, where everybody is like a
perfect citizen and they're doing it because they're just constantly
pumping out the odor of cinnamon. You know what this
really made me wonder, and I didn't have time enough
to get into it before the podcast, was what do
casinos smell like? I'm not a hardcore gambler, but I
had to wonder how this sadness, stale cigarettes, sadness and
(15:19):
cinnabone old ladies playing the slats. I don't know, that's
really I'm gonna I'm very curious. Now. So there's a
study in France that followed a sort of similar cinnamon protocol,
only they check to see whether a woman who was
wearing perfume would um influenced this sort of similar behavior
and strangers so um, you know, she would drop something
(15:40):
from her person, she would. They would see if strangers
would help her pick up the object, and in fact
they did. You know, the woman wearing the perfume brought
out that behavior again she's smelt like cinnamon. No, she
smelt like a different perfume. No they did not. Well,
see they should combine these two studies, right, maybe they
have them. It has the best I act if it's
(16:00):
a cinnamon for fume. And then there's just one final
study that I'll get you here. There's a study published
in the Journal of Psychological Science, and that found that
a citrus scented cleanser was associated with people behaving more
fairly when they played a game, a classic trust game.
According to this article on the Boston Globe, like apples
(16:20):
to app sir, what I don't know, I don't know
what the game was. Yeah, so fair behavior, people picking
up pencils for you. I mean, it does seem like
scent can influence action. And and that's just you know,
a smattering of studies that have been done there. There
are many more to explore. But let's let's take a
break from that and look at the genetic side. So
each of us has a genetically determined number of odor
(16:43):
receptors or cells in our nose that grab fragrant molecules
out of the air around us. So, with more receptors
for a classic compounds like say lily smells, you're gonna
smell lily at a lower concentration, but at normal amounts
the smell could be intense and overwhelming. Alright, But too
few receptors can be a problem. Why is that? Well,
for example, cilantros fragrance consists of many odors. If your
(17:06):
genetic code spells out of variation that reduces your number
of receptors for an odor. You may miss one of
Cilantro's many odors and it may smell soapy to you.
We've got touched on this before, Yeah, we did on
the genetic stuff. They're talking about it tasting soapy and
of course sent and taste or blood brothers. Indeed, So
let's get to the evolution side. And one question that
people have thrown out a lot are you know, are
(17:28):
our old factory likes and dislikes programmed? And there's pretty
healthy argument on this area. So on the pro side,
some people are going to argue that the answer as
to whether we like certain smells isn't really genes but history, right, um,
and you know, way way way back history like Grays,
like just foraging for food kind of things like like
I smell fruit, I eat fruit, fruits great. I wish
(17:51):
everything smells like fruit. Is the center bund thing again?
Yeah totally um, yeah, right, so that kind of harkens
back to our foraging days are hunting and gathering days.
And then you know, on the other hand, we're not
gonna like the smell of you know, urine feces or
you know, maybe rotten or fishy smells, because like urine
could like it could be telling me that somebody else's territory, um,
(18:11):
you know, fecal all that's gonna potentially parasites and pathogens
two sees infectious agents, right, So there could there be
an evolutionary mechanism at work there. That's that's one thought
school of thought on this. I'm I'm game to believe that.
What about the other side of the argument, Well, yeah,
there's the other side of the argument says it smells
are an evolutionary programmed and this is this is kind
(18:34):
of like the sort of short, short and dirty version
of this is like people can get used to anything, right,
Your culture preference, your personal experience can override any smell.
I mean, if you grow up with the latter and smell,
maybe it's not going to bother you. Yeah, you grow up,
you know, gutting fish, then the fish smell is not
going to bother you. Back before the days of refrigeration,
um now, Sir writes in her article, the smell of
(18:56):
rotten meat was tolerated and even liked in Europe. Huh yeah,
I guess I just don't really have a perception of
rotten hamburger meat per se, just because the refrigerator does
play such an important role. Well, one example that comes
to mind, it's like I don't know if you know here,
go to like like sort of foreign or not even foreign,
but just kind of like I guess, like sort of
Asian like kind of like fish markets and stuff, or
(19:16):
I guess just any fish market. It's like, I'm not
around them, so when I go to them, it's it's
a bit overpowering. But I'm thinking, like people a people
were around it a lot are going to be more
less inclined to think it's stinky. And also if it's
like more like a cultural thing, you're going to tolerate
it more. Yeah, or maybe even you know, say you're
a smoker, right, you know how smokers can smell themselves,
but if you walk into an elevator with a smoker,
(19:38):
you can instantly smell it. Or if you're riding the
train with somebody who you know, hit happy hour, maybe
they can't smell the alcohol on them, but I mean
it just waffs over to you on a giant cloud
of dirty martini. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, So so that's
really the other side of the argument is that, Yeah,
like you were saying, we can override any of these preferences,
and evolution really doesn't have a whole lot to do
(20:00):
with smell. So I think we gave you guys a
lot of odor for thought. Yeah, I mean, I'm I
think it's. Yeah, next time you're throwing a little perfume,
you might think about it a little differently you and
also like maybe even like go ahead and mark down
on your schedule, like which phase of the perfume is
gonna is gonna line up with what part of your day.
It's like, oh, crap, I got a three o'clock um,
you know, interview, and that's after phase two ends. What
(20:23):
am I gonna do about my floral notes being gone? Yeah?
So we love to hear from you guys, smelly thoughts
or otherwise. So send us an email at science Stuff
at how stuff woraks dot com, or connect with us
on Facebook. Yeah, we're on there as stuff in the
Science Lab. Also find us on Twitter as lab stuff
and y hey, and shoot us some jokes, you know,
(20:44):
give us some sort of nice cheesy science joke, include
your you know your name and where you're from, and
we will try and throw it up there at the
start of the podcast. It's good, all right, that's all
we got. Thanks for listening to guys. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
(21:06):
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.
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