THE NOSE KNOWS: HISTORIC SCENTS AS INTANGIBLE HERITAGE

 Heritage Moments | Madison Carmichael 

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There are certain smells that stick with you. The chemical tang of chlorine transports me to a childhood of community centre swimming pools. One particular kind of tea takes me back to the early mornings of my undergrad, where I bought that very specific tea from student-run coffee shops for a neat $1.80 entirely too often. Smells remind you of people, places, and things, or perhaps an entire experience. As I’ve hinted, they can be intensely nostalgic. It is that very effect of odours – be it physical, psychological, or emotional – that inspires Cecilia Bembibre, a researcher at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, to argue that odour influences the way that we engage with history and that, as a result, experiencing the smells of the past can enrich our understanding of it and allow us to engage with our history in a more emotional way. 

I stumbled onto her research project eons ago – i.e., back in January – in an article written for the BBC by Miguel Trancozo Trevino. The title snatched my attention from the start: “The people trying to save scents from extinction.” How dramatic, I thought, how exciting. But what was more exciting was the recognition of smell as a form of intangible heritage and its attendant question: if smells could be cultural heritage, how might we identify, protect, and conserve them?

Bembibre's research focuses on the preservation of smells. (Source)

There are certain scents that threaten to disappear from common, olfactory parlance. The smell of old books, for example, is paradoxically threatened by their own decay and efforts to preserve them; as they disappear into temperature-controlled vaults, accessed by only a select few, public access and experience of that scent wanes. 

But this is not a matter solely confined to old books. Similar concerns are raised over any number of historic ephemera. Bembibre’s research works to develop techniques to recover “extinct” scents from the past and to preserve those around today for the future. Like a great deal of intangible heritage, scent is often overlooked. Indeed, scent as a form of intangible heritage only really entered the international heritage scene in 2018, when the perfume-making region of Grasse in France applied to UNESCO for the recognition of their olfactory traditions as intangible heritage. As such, the cultural significance of scents is often tied to place, as the smells and sounds associated with a site can be included as part of the site’s aesthetic value, therefore marking those scents and sounds as an intangible property of that tangible heritage. But much in the way of Grasse, the cultural significance of scent can also be tied to aspects of cultural heritage like tradition and language.

The Pays de Grasse is well-known for its perfume since the 18th-century. (Source) 

Bembibre’s work to preserve scent is a marriage of chemistry and interpretation. One method includes exposing a polymer fibre to the odour, allowing for the smell-causing chemical to stick to it. From there, that sample can be analyzed in a lab. Another separates and identifies the compound from the gas sample. And a third uses the nose itself, consulting with panels to describe the scents or with expert “noses” – often perfumers or scent designers. Bembibre states that the human element is critical; if these scents are to be preserved for the future, then our experience of them is just as important as their chemical composition. 

With these methods, she has extracted the smells of old leather gloves, ancient books, and mould. She’s also worked to reinterpret the scent of potpourri from 1750 and the old books housed in St. Paul’s cathedral.

A peek into their process. (Source)

In her paper on this subject, the smell of historic paper was used as a case study. The smell of historic paper, or old books, is ubiquitous; second-hand bookstores, or else the very unvisited stacks of a university library, are rife with such a smell – which Bembibre identifies as “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” Through two different routes, she sought to recreate that very smell. Using the methods listed above, she produced a literal chemical recreation of the scent. The other was “an intuitive interpretation” by perfumer Sarah McCartney. 

Bembibre then asked panels to identify which smell resembled an old library best. She was surprised by their response, because it was nearly split. In Trevino’s article for the BBC, she added that if anything, more people chose the interpreted scent rather than the extracted one. 

And so comes a question of authenticity that has no easy answers. If an artist’s reproduction can evoke an olfactory experience to the same degree as a chemical mimic, is it then necessary to duplicate a scent at its chemical level? Conversely, if the smell is not the precise chemical makeup of the original scent, is it truly authentic?

The astonishing amount of candles that mimic the smell of old books and libraries speaks to their cultural significance. (Source)

Putting that aside, here’s another difficult question: which smells should be preserved? It’s a question as political and pressing as any that currently concerns any GLAM institution’s collecting policy. 

There’s a feeling that the significance of scent ought to be concerned with how they are associated with people and their values, or how they are associated with collective memory. These values and memories are many and multifaceted – historic, aesthetic, cultural, scientific, communal, emotional – and determining their importance would necessitate consultation with both experts and communities. The eventual creation of any archive of smells would need to be incredibly mindful of power and privilege, and how that factors into what is preserved and what is not. 

Our knowledge of the past is odourless, according to Bembibre. But on her website, she also poses the question: what smell would you take into the future? What smell would you like to see preserved? Give it a think, and think too on how such considerations may transform the landscape of cultural heritage as we move into that future.