We Weren’t Designed to Appreciate Good Perfume - Issue 38: Noise
▻http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/we-werent-designed-to-appreciate-good-perfume
Every day, we inhabit a vast and complex brew of odors. Take a walk in New York City, and you’ll pass through aromas of car exhaust, garbage, coffee, baking pizza, flowers, damp soil, cleaning fluid, and urine—all in the space of a few blocks. At worst, the city reeks. At best, all of the scents blend together into something barely noticeable, with the occasional whiff of something delicious. We each live in a world of scents that go unnoticed in the backgrounds of our lives; they hum at the edges of our ability to perceive them. It can be a “big blur,” says Christophe Laudamiel, a French master perfumer who is based in New York and Berlin. It doesn’t have to be. “If you are trained, if you are an expert, you can discern things in the noise that you don’t discern if you haven’t practiced (...)