Pardon Me, Do You Have Any Mouse Poupon?

Here’s a tasty new offering from researchers at the Centre des Sciences du Goût et de L’Alimentation in Dijon, France: “Male mice and cows perceive human emotional chemosignals: a preliminary study.”

How do you know if a mouse is perceiving chemosignals of human fear? It poops out more fecal pellets.

How do you know if a cow prefers chemosignals from nonstressed humans? It spends more time smelling the bucket that contains them.

How do you obtain these wondrous human chemosignals? The old cotton pads in the underarms gambit. You get some engineering students to abstain from stinky food and perfume for a few days (major sacrifice—this is France, after all) and wear the pads during a regular class (non-stress) and during an exam (stress).

What can I say? I admire the weirdness of the experimental design. I wonder if members of the ethics panel of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research managed to keep a straight face during the review meeting.

Sidebar: The title of the paper mentions “male mice” and “cows,” when in fact the animals used were male mice and nulliparous female bovines. Shit-kicking American readers would expect “male mice and heifers,” but evidently the heifer vs cow distinction isn’t recognized in the editorial offices of Animal Cognition.

And finally, with apologies to the man from Nantucket:

There once was a heifer from Dijon,
Whose nostrils scientists seized on,
She found it a balm,
When the students smelled calm,
And the researchers gained a citation.

The study discussed here is “Male mice and cows perceive human emotional chemosignals: a preliminary study,” by Alexandra Destrez, Morgane Costes‑Thiré, Anne‑Sophie Viart, Floriane Prost, Bruno Patris and Benoist Schaal, published online in Animal Cognition, April 11, 2021.

Turgenev: The Scent Trails in “Smoke”

Turgenev, by Ilya Repin (1874)

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev did not make much use of olfactory imagery in his novels, at least judging by Fathers and Sons (1862) and Smoke (1867). For the most part, he set his scenes with spare yet effective visual references.

Yet there are a couple of notable exceptions in Smoke, which is the story of a man torn between his feelings for two very different women. One of them occurs when the protagonist Litvinov comes across a picnic party of young Russian officers and their ladies.

All these warriors were immaculately groomed, shaved and perfumed all over with a scent redolent of the nobility and the Guards, a mixture of the finest tobacco smoke and the most amazing patchouli.

There’s a rather hyper-particular smellscape from mid-nineteenth century Russia! And this one is even more so:

Irina [a femme fatale] was sitting on the sofa between Prince Koko and Madame Kh., once a famed beauty and pan-Russian bluestocking, who had long since mutated into a rotting toadstool, smelling of Lenten oil and stale poison.

In those days, the Eastern Orthodox Church proscribed olive oil during Lenten fasts; oil from other sources was allowed. The image of “stale poison”, on the other hand, is a product of Turgenev’s inventive genius.

There are a couple of other olfactory vignettes involving the intoxicating scent of a woman’s hair and neck. They serve their purpose well, but are less unique. A final instance involves an anonymously delivered bouquet of flowers, which figures later in the story.

A strong scent, very pleasant and familiar, caught his attention. He looked round and saw a large bouquet of fresh heliotropes in a glass of water on the window sill. In some surprise he bent down to the flowers, touched, them, sniffed them . . . It seems that something came back to him, something very distant, but what it was exactly he could not think.

Sacrebleu! Yet another example of “Proustian smell memory” that predates Proust by more than half a century. (In this case, it is Proustian in the actual sense of Marcel, namely an odor summoning up a vague, ungraspable feeling where an actual memory ought to be).

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
Smoke (1867)

The Upside of BO

Top five things I miss about Laura. [ . . . ]

Three: I miss her smell, and the way she tastes. It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

Rob (John Cusak) in High Fidelity

Moral Anosmia: San Francisco Edition

Recent notable incidents include a man urinating on books and another breaking a computer with a hammer.

And where might these incidents have occurred?

(A) In a state mental hospital? No—those no longer exist in our more enlightened society.

(B) In a piece of NEA-funded performance art? No—but an excellent guess.

(C) In the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library? Why, yes!

That the SF Library has become a place where people bathe in the restroom sinks, deal drugs and commit indecent exposure is not remarkable; what is remarkable is that Mayor Ed Lee has prodded the Library Commission to take action against such unpleasant and uncivil behavior. Action, that is, beyond mere verbal warning.

Among the behaviors already prohibited are bringing shopping carts into the library, sleeping on the furniture, and giving off a “strong, pervasive odor.” That last item has drawn fire from one Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

“You’d have to ask the library how that would work,” she said. “Is there a senior sniffer, a supervisory sniffer, and are they the ultimate judge of what is a bad body odor? I know what I smell like when I don’t put deodorant on, and it’s not pretty.”

Ms. Friedenbach’s response is revealing on several levels. There is brazen denial; the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, smell-no-evil attitude toward BO powerful enough to clear a reading room. There is the false equivalency—the idea that a week’s worth of non-bathing and unlaundered clothes is the same thing as forgetting to put on some deodorant in the rush to get to work. There is rejection of authority: who are you to judge me or anyone else? There is the roadblock masquerading as concern for due process: she jests about supervisory sniffers, but the inevitable lawsuit against the city on behalf of the homeless will no doubt include a demand for formal appeal from unfavorable BO judgments.

In San Francisco, people can detect in their organic yogurt the residue of an altered gene in corn fed to the cow. They can get a headache from a perfumed lady in the concert hall. But somehow they cannot detect body odor strong enough to be a public nuisance. This seems to be willful blindness in the service of ideology. Perhaps we should call it moral anosmia.

Sympathy for the Smelly

When you get a noseful of B.O. from the taxi driver, what do you feel: pity or disgust? Your answer will probably determine how you react to a new study by Jeroen Camps and colleagues at the University of Leuven in Belgium.

Camps, et al. looked at body odor as a means by which we evaluate other people and decide how to behave towards them. Their basic experimental procedure involved T-shirts: clean, neutral-smelling ones and ones made smelly by soaking them in “a solution of human sweat, beer, hydrogen sulfide, and fart spray.” (Scrummy!)

In an initial experiment, people sniffed a clean or stinky shirt and rated their perception of its owner (specifically, they were to imagine it belonging to someone with whom they had to work). The stinky shirts produced significantly higher agreement to two statements: “I feel sorry for the other person” and “I find the other pathetic.”

Relying on various results from social psychology, Camps, et al. reasoned that B.O.-evoked feelings of pity are likely to increase helping behavior and cooperation. To test this in a second experiment, they used the “ultimatum game,” one of those contrived situations social psychologists employ to measure helping behavior under laboratory conditions. In this game, the test subject is paired up with another student who, in reality, is a confederate of the researchers. The stooge wears either a clean or a stinky T-shirt. As predicted, people paired with a stinky stooge were more helpful (i.e., offered him more imaginary “credits”) than were people paired with a neutral-smelling confederate. The difference was statistically significant but rather small: it amounted to about an extra half a credit out of a possible eleven.

Having demonstrated that B.O.-evoked pity increases charity toward the stinky, Camps, et al. examined whether the effect depends on perceptions of personal responsibility. In other words, does it make a difference whether the malodor is or is not the stinky person’s fault?

In a third experiment, the stinky T-shirts were soaked in beer and booze. The cover story was that the confederate has been invited to a reception where alcohol was served (the “not my fault” condition), or that he had decided to go to a bar (the “my bad” condition). [My terms, not those of Camps, et al.] After some business with maze-tasks, the test subjects ended up playing the “ultimatum game” as in the previous experiment. The results: people donated more credits to the stooge in the stinky shirt; and overall they also donated less to stooges who had been “invited to a reception.”

But the most interesting result was the significant interaction effect. When dealing with a stooge in the “reception” condition, people were more generous to a smelly stooge than to a neutrally scented one. The reverse was true in the “bar” condition—people gave less to the smelly stooge and more to the neutral one. In other words, when the stinkiness was not seen as the person’s own fault, it evoked more pity and therefore more charity; when the stinkiness was self-inflicted there was less pity and less charity.

Camps, et al. believe their results are surprising: “our findings revealed that people with bad body odors are not always treated in an unfavorable way.” Fair enough. But let’s return to the original question: if you imagine your stinky taxi driver is doing his best hygiene-wise—working three jobs and living in a cold-water tenement—then you may feel pity. If you think B.O. is a disqualifying failure for a public service provider working in a closed space, then you may feel disgust.

Is it reasonable to draw inferences from this study for behavior outside of the psychology lab? I’m not enamored with the contrived game-scenarios of social psychology; they are fine as far as they go. However, this paper by Camps et al., suggests some interesting work to be done in the real world—I would love to see a field study based on these ideas. It would be easy enough to rig up an olfactory version of Taxicab Confessions: just put different odors in the ubiquitous dashboard air freshener.

The study discussed here is “Smells like cooperation? Unpleasant body odor and people’s perceptions and helping behaviors,” by Jeroen Camps, Jeroen Stouten, Chloé Tuteleers, and Kirsten van Son, published online December 10, 2013 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. [doi: 10.1111/jasp.12203]

Artsy-Fartsy Comedy

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has launched a comedy series on its YouTube channel MOCAtv. This account by Deborah Vankin in the LAT makes it all sound a bit . . . conceptual; on the other hand it features Jack Black as a super-villain named Unidentifiable Odor. We sniff, you decide.

Gwyneth Paltrow and the Scent of Fame

Gwyneth Paltrow’s movie career stalled for a while following her 1999 Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Now she’s back in the money with a role in the Iron Man franchise. But all may not be well. Based on our careful monitoring of the smellebrity scene we predict major life changes in her future. Doubtful? Think back to when Britney and K-Fed made headlines with their noxious B.O.

Paltrow’s recent Vanity Fair kerfuffle has revived attention to some unkind olfactory observations about her personal hygiene habits. By some accounts she was a bit ripe in the armpits at this spring’s Met Gala, allegedly because she rejects AP/deo products that contain aluminum. One view is that the sniffy comments are payback for her undiplomatic remarks about the event. Whatevs. Here at FN we’re just happy to report on a good, old-fashioned case of smellebrity B.O.-mongering.

Exit question:
If Bruce Jenner really is entertaining the idea of becoming a woman, as our reading in the supermarket check-out lane suggests, then shouldn’t there be some olfactory evidence? Perhaps a change in his cologne purchases? Inquiring nostrils want to know.

Armpit Love

It’s been a while since our first tentative sniff at the case of famously stinky teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson. Now he’s back in the news with remarks to the Portuguese magazine Activa, translated here, regarding the olfactory nature of his attraction to women:

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be perfume. I like the smell of people. It is really strange and I’m sure it has to do with pheromones. We like people because subconsciously we like the way they smell. I always find this very interesting to observe.”

OK, that’s a pretty conventional view. But what struck us was this reference to an article in Vogue that we seem to have missed.

In 2012 [Pattinson’s girlfriend at the time] Kristen [Stewart] told Vogue magazine: “I’m so in love with my boyfriend [Robert Pattinson] I love the way he smells. And him me. 

“Like, he loves to lick under my armpits. I don’t get this obsession with washing the smell off. That smell of someone you love – don’t you think that’s the whole point?”

Pit sniffers of the world, unite!



When it comes to underarm odor, RB apparently works both sides of the street. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Unless you’re one of those prudes on a film crew who find him a little overripe. Or you’re some inhibited loser who doesn’t like having your unwashed armpits licked by a guy nominated for Best Actor in a Canadian Film by the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. Really, loosen up. Get a life.

Exit question: Is there a formal term for people who are pathologically attracted to armpit smell?

Bonus question: If not, what should we call them?

UPDATE October 18, 2013

FN Commenter Lindaloo offers “pitophilia.” Not bad: it is easily understood. Some googling around reveals “maschalagnia” as the appropriately arcane and unpronounceable designation for armpit fetish. But maschalagnia strikes me as one of those formalisms that shows up frequently in tedious academic tracts but is rarely used by clinicians or researchers. For example, it is mentioned in about eight volumes on Google Books (including such time-wasters as There’s a Word for It and Lecher’s Lexicon). Meanwhile on PubMed, the go-to source for working scientists, it doesn’t produce a single hit. QED

Your Cheating Scent

Tempo, an online news site in the Philippines, features advice columnist Manay Gina. Here’s a letter she posted yesterday:

Dear Manay Gina,

One day, while I was putting our clothes away for laundry, I found a shirt my husband had worn to work. Surprisingly, it was scented—a really strong one. I know that my husband does not go to work with cologne on. When I inquired about his change of habit, he got very defensive and asked if I was accusing him of something.

Do you think I should be suspicious?

Tarcy

Manay Gina takes a wait-and-see attitude. Here at FirstNerve we’re more like “duh.” [Yeah, but is he seeing a woman or a man?—Ed.]

How Do I Smell, Kaori-chan?

There’s a lot about Japan that I really like. Among the common elements are a slightly off-kilter (from my perspective) aesthetic and an unbridled enthusiasm for technology and gadgetry.

The former has fascinated me since the badly dubbed sci-fi films I watched on TV on Saturday afternoons. (Who were those tiny women in the rowboat singing to Mothra?) And I fondly remember listening to baseball broadcasts of the San Francisco Giants on my Panasonic transistor radio—my first-ever technology purchase.

Old habits die hard, and since acquiring a Roku box I’ve been catching up on Japanese sci-fi movies. Judging by some of them, the scene has gotten even weirder. Don’t take my word for it, go watch the disturbing imagery in Meatball Machine (2005) and get back to me.

Or check out the claustrophic and bloody Hellevator (2004), written and directed by Hiroki Yamaguchi who after this effort does not appear to have been allowed near a camera for about five years. In fairness, the guy who played the cannibal-rapist convict was awesome. [And the elevator operator chick was hot.—Ed.] [Yes. Yes she was.]

After my late-night sci-fi viewing, this news story seemed almost charmingly droll:

On 24 August, Kanagawa Prefectural Police picked up Joji Kondo for stealing three seats from women’s electric bicycles in a housing complex at around 4:00 in the morning. After searching Kondo’s home they uncovered a further 200 seats.

According to police he admitted to the crimes saying “I wanted to smell the lingering scent of a woman.” MSN News Japan reported the 35-year-old as saying “I like the texture of the leather and the smell it has, I would lick it and sniff it.”

Alright, then.


Via Saga-S.co.jp

Meanwhile, the twin Japanese obsessions of olfactory technology and robotics have merged to produce a Sniff-Me Bot:

The female robot, Kaori-chan, has brown hair and blue eyes. When a person breathes in her face, she analyzes and quantifies components in their breath, and evaluates the smell on a scale of one to four.

I think I get it. Sort of.

UPDATE August 28, 2013
“Hey, wait a minute. Did that robot just fart?”

Riskay Business? Receptors Specialized for Social Smells

Image from Wallrabenstein, et al., 2013

Linda Buck and Richard Axel transformed the study of smell with their Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the mammalian olfactory receptor (OR) genes in 1991. These genes code for a diverse set of cell-surface receptors expressed on the surface of sensory cells in the nose. Receptor diversity enables the detection of a broad array of odor molecules. With as many as 1,500 varieties, the OR gene family is the biggest in the human genome—testimony to the evolutionary importance of odor perception. OR genes create a type of receptor structure that elsewhere in the body figures in the detection of sex hormones and neurotransmitters.

In 2006, Stephen Liberles and Linda Buck found a second class of chemosensory receptors in the nose of humans, mice and fish. It consists of a handful of receptors (six to fifteen, depending on that species) that are structurally unrelated to ORs. Instead, they look like the receptors for biogenic amines, e.g., the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. The new class was dubbed “trace amine-associated receptors” or TAARs because they are exquisitely sensitive to a specific class of molecule—volatile amines—that turns out to be common in mouse urine. Thereby hangs a tale.

Given the affinity of TAARs for the smelly amines in mouse piss, Liberles and Buck speculated that these receptors play a role in social behavior. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds—mice send all sorts of social messages via chemical cues in their urine. This January, Liberles and a team of colleagues advanced the story in much greater detail. They focused on one TAAR receptor which, in an odd resonance for perfume fans, is called TAAR5. It is especially sensitive at detecting trimethylamine (TMA), a molecule famous for having exactly the stink of rotting fish.

But for one enzyme, human urine would also smell of dead fish, since bacteria in our gut turn the choline in food into obnoxious TMA. Thankfully, almost everybody produces the flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 enzyme (FMO3), which chemically converts TMA to a non-smelly molecule. Those few unfortunates born with a defective FMO3 gene suffer from “fish odor syndrome,” and must modify their diet to avoid the stinky stigma.

Meanwhile, male mice have a ton of TMA in their urine while females have almost none. And while the odor of TMA at high levels is aversive to mice, it is attractive to both sexes at the concentrations found in urine. So what’s going on? Liberles et al. found that female mice produce the FMO3 enzyme which keeps TMA out of their pee. Males stop producing FMO3 at puberty and thus have TMA-stinky pee. Genetically controlled production of TMA, coupled with a preference for its odor, seems to occur only in the house mouse Mus musculus and not in other members of the genus Mus or other rodents such as rats. Liberles et al. speculate this synchronous evolution of odor biosynthesis plus behavioral response has something to do with signaling species identity. Research on a variety of rodents species is needed to see if the idea bears out.

In February, Thomas Bozza’s team at Northwestern used a variety of techniques to examine the functional sensory response of TAAR-expressing sensory cells. They conclude that TAARs “serve as high-affinity amine detectors in mammalian olfactory systems.” While TAARs are broadly tuned to detect amines, one in particular (TAAR4) is “exquisitely sensitive” to β-phenylethylamine—so much so that it rivals “the most sensitive mammalian chemosensory neurons yet examined.” And what is β-phenylethylamine? It’s a chemical found in the urine (and therefore scent marks) of carnivorous predators. Not a bad thing to be sensitive to if you’re a prey species like the mouse.

So what of the six human TAARs? Do these receptors make us exquisitely sensitive to TMA or β-phenylethylamine or other biologically relevant amines? Two TAARs are known to be expressed in the human nose. Bozza et al. expressed the human hTAAR5 gene in mouse sensory cells and found that it responds to N,N-dimethylethylamine and somewhat less to TMA.

Finally, also in February, a German team led by Ivonne Wallrabenstein expressed human hTAAR5 in animal cells and measured the receptor’s response to a wide variety of amines (pictured at the top of this post). The human TAAR5 receptor is highly and specifically sensitive to TMA and less so to dimethylethylamine (the two molecules in the shaded portion of the picture). You don’t have to be a specialist to get the gist of the results:



(The big response is TMA; the third response from the left is dimethylethylamine.)

Of what use is a specialized human ability to detect TMA? Wallrabenstein et al. note that besides being found in rotting fish, “TMA arises in rotting male ejaculate and vaginal secretions.” Yes, well . . . there’s that. But is TMA sensitivity simply an evolved reminder to wash after use? My hunch is that it’s more than that—possibly a means of detecting out-of-pair-bond copulation, or what in a less politically correct time we used to refer to as sneaky fucking.

Why u comin home 5 in the mornin
Somethins goin on, can I smell yo dick 

                   --Riskay (2007)

Social smell signals, indeed.

The studies discussed here are “A second class of chemosensory receptors in the olfactory epithelium” by Stephen D. Liberles and Linda B. Buck, published in Nature 442:645-650, 2006; “Synchronous evolution of an odor biosynthesis pathway and behavioral response” by Qian Li, Wayne J. Korzan, David M. Ferrero, Rui B. Chang, Dheeraj S. Roy, Mélanie Buchi, Jamie K. Lemon, Angeldeep W. Kaur, Lisa Stowers, Markus Fendt, and Stephen D. Liberles, published in Current Biology 23:11-20, 2013; “Ultrasensitive detection of amines by a trace amine-associated receptor” by Jingji Zhang, Rodrigo Pacifico, Dillon Cawley, Paul Feinstein, and Thomas Bozza, published in Journal of Neuroscience 33:3228-3239, 2013; and “Human trace amine-associated receptor TAAR5 can be activated by trimethylamine,” by Ivonne Wallrabenstein, Jonas Kuklan, Lea Weber, Sandra Zborala, Markus Werner, Janine Altmüller, Christian Becker, Anna Schmidt, Hans Hatt, Thomas Hummel, and Günter Gisselmann, published in PLoS One 8:e54950, 2013.

Pill Goggles: The Consequences of Oral Contraceptive Use During Mate Choice

There is a well-established bias, in humans and other mammals, to select mates who are genetically dissimilar at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This bias is thought to be the result of preferences for body odor expressed during mate selection. It is also known that oral contraceptive (OC) use by women reduces or reverses this bias, with the result that couples who meet when the woman is on the pill will be more MHC-similar. MHC-similarity has a downside: women in these relationships report reduced sexual satisfaction with their partner and increased interest in other men.

This raises an interesting question: what are the consequences for a relationship that started during OC use when, later in the relationship, the woman quits the pill?

One possibility is that with his MHC-similarity now exposed to her nose, she becomes less satisfied with her partner and the relationship suffers. On the other hand, OC users tend to prefer men with high parental investment traits such as wealth and intelligence, rather than guys with studly masculine traits like a strong chin and dominant behavior (also associated with higher unfaithfulness to partner). So it could be argued that a woman who chooses her partner while on the pill is more likely to remain satisfied with the relationship.

Untangling these possibilities is clearly not something that can be done experimentally. The best approach is to survey large numbers of women regarding various aspects of their relationships. S. Craig Roberts and his research team did this, selecting for study women who had at least one child in the relationship. (This roughly standardized for relationship commitment and guaranteed that women who had been on the pill at the time of mate choice experienced a change in hormone profile when they quit it to become pregnant.)

The researchers surveyed 2,519 women, of whom about 40% were OC users when their relationship was formed; the other 60% were non-users. Among women in currently ongoing relationships (about 70% of the total), the results were striking:

Women who used OC during partner choice (compared with non-users) scored lower on sexual arousal with their partner, on satisfaction with his sexual adventurousness, and on sexual proceptivity and attraction towards him. They also rated their partner’s body lower in attractiveness compared with non-users. By contrast, these women appeared more satisfied with general (nonsexual) aspects of their partner: they were significantly more satisfied with his financial provision compared with women who were not using OC during partner choice.

Even after statistically controlling for several factors unrelated to OC use and mate choice, the main effects remained: OC use at time of partner choice was associated with lower sexual satisfaction and with finding their partner less attractive. Similar results were found for retrospective ratings of ex-partners. When it comes to ending a relationship, women who used OC during partner choice were less likely to split up than were women not using OC. However, when a split did happen, it was more likely to be made by the woman if she was an OC user at the beginning, than if she were not. Interestingly, women who were OC users during partner choice “were more satisfied with non-sexual aspects of their relationship, including the partner’s financial provision.”

Where does all this leave us with respect to our initial questions?

As the authors put it, “a woman’s use of OC at the time when she meets her partner has measurable downstream consequences for partnership outcome.” The results are consistent with the hypothesis that OC use interferes with smell-based adaptive preferences for MHC-dissimilar men: OC users run a greater risk of sexually unsatisfying relationships in the long run. Yet to the extent that OC users tend to select men on the basis of being good providers rather than studly, pill use might increase the odds of successful long-term relationships. One way or another, pill goggles affect how a relationship plays out in the long run

The study discussed here is “Relationship satisfaction and outcome in women who meet their partner while using oral contraception,” by S. Craig Roberts, Kateřina Klapilová, Anthony C. Little, Robert P. Burriss, Benedict C. Jones, Lisa M. DeBruine, Marion Petrie, and Jan Havlícek, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 279:1430-1436, 2012.

Annals of BO: The Librarian’s Nightmare

Hey, campers! It’s the new fad. Build up some BO, get bounced from a public facility, and sue their asses off.

Beats working.

Annals of BO: The Landlord’s Nightmare

 

Gendy Alimurung at LAWeekly has the long, sad story of William Nowell, a street person who sued the Los Angeles MTA for $200,000 and won. Then he moved into a deluxe apartment and somehow never got around to buying new clothes, or wearing shoes, or . . . bathing regularly. When neighbors complained that his overpowering BO was stinking up the building, the landlord successfully sued to have him evicted.

Amid the squalid physical descriptions in Alimurung’s piece is this gem:

Nowell eats only organic food and washes — when he washes — with artisanal, handmade soap from Soaptopia.

Then there’s this:

Diagnosed with a chronic illness that he declines to name, he wound up on the streets, where he remained for the next 20 years. He begged and borrowed. He sold T-shirts slamming George W. Bush, printed with a photo of flag-draped coffins and the sentence, “My kid went to Iraq and all I got was this lousy letter.” Somewhere in there, Nowell stopped bathing. He stopped wearing shoes. He stopped changing his clothes altogether.

Clearly, Nowell’s biggest mistake was renting in LA. He should head up the coast to Berkeley, where he’d fit right in.

Alternatively, he could head to Morristown, New Jersey, which paid off another stinky guy who made a career of suing places that kicked him out—in that case, from the public library.

Big BO in Bollywood B.O.?

This sounds interesting.

Aiyyaa, set in south India, revolves around Meenaxi, a middle-class Indian girl torn between fantasy and reality. When Meenaxi finds her Prince Charming, a rumored drug addict, she isn’t attracted to him for his looks or intellect but for his lingering scent. 

The romantic comedy, which marks the Bollywood debut of Marathi filmmaker Sachin Khudalkar, was widely touted to be Rani Mukherjee’s comeback movie.

I’m Totally Ready to Sniff Martynka Wawrzyniak’s B.O.

Via Huffington Post.

Even if it means going all the way to the Lower East Side.

From Priscilla Frank in the Huffington Post:

Wawrzyniak spent a year working with Hunter College chemistry students to explore her personal brand of perfume. Acting as both the artist and subject, Wawrzyniak used experimental technologies to extract the essence of her signature scent from sweat, hair and tears. 

The artist then collaborated with a professional perfumer and scent director to create a synthetic replication of her organic odor, which will in turn be released inside a specially designed scent chamber. The lucky viewers (or, smellers in this case,) will experience the scent chamber individually, getting a solitary experience with l’eau d’Martynka.

Solitary experience chambers? Hopefully not like the old ones in Times Square that used to take quarters.

From Wawrzyniak’s page at envoy enterprises (the gallery):

[T]he artist underwent multiple experiments to collect aromatic elements from her body.

The fart balloon—a great idea that didn’t work out as planned.

She was subject to rigorous sessions to extract the concentrated essence of her sweat, tears and hair . . .

Fifty Shades of Gray rigorous? Or James Bond at Shrublands rigorous?

“The piece represents the true essence of a woman – free of visual prejudice.”

No problem—I only read Playboy for the articles. BTW what’s the olfactory equivalent of ogle–sniffle? Snoffle? Snogle?

Martynka Wawrzyniak’s exhibit “Smell Me” runs from October 20 through November 18 at envoy enterprises, 87 Rivington Street, in New York (between Orchard and Ludlow). See you there.

Guns, Bows and B.O.

Mention male B.O. and urban sophisticates will talk about Axe body spray or metrosexual grooming products. The rest of the country will talk about hunting.

Hunters use scent-suppression technology, along with camouflage, as a basic tool to avoid being detected by game. The largest supplier of this technology is ALS Enterprises, Inc., the manufacturer of Scent-Lok® odor reduction hunting apparel, which uses activated charcoal to trap B.O.

Scent-Lok apparel has been sold for years through Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops, and Gander Mountain. Lots of hunters swear by it. About five years ago ALS was sued. According to lawsuit, the activated carbon hunting clothes did not work as advertised and Scent-Lok’s claim to be “odor eliminating” was false. The plaintiffs tried to get their case certified as a class action, which would have meant big money for the attorneys handling it.

ALS and its retailing partners fought back and Federal courts denied class standing two years ago. Then last month a Federal District Court in Florida administered the coup de grace by dismissing the original complaint “with prejudice.” That’s legal jargon for get lost and don’t come back.

By way of putting a formal end to the dispute, a Stipulation of Dismissal with Prejudice was filed with the court. It includes a Findings of Fact section that affirms the effectiveness of Scent-Lok’s activated carbon technology while spanking plaintiff Dennis Pickering up and down the block.

[Via Petersen’s Bowhunting.]

Scent of the Hyena Clan

Photo by Jaime Tanner.

My crooked path to the world of perfume began with an undergraduate interest in animal behavior. In the hills above the U.C. Berkeley campus, at the field station off Grizzly Peak Boulevard, I built a semi-natural habitat to study Merriam’s kangaroo rats and their ability to detect rattlesnakes by smell. Years later my faculty advisor, Professor Steve Glickman, received a grant to study the reproductive biology of hyenas. They have a matriarchal social organization in which females are behaviorally dominant to males. The females also have a pseudo-scrotum and an enlarged clitoris that resembles a penis.

Steve was interested in the hormonal and developmental processes underlying this unusual anatomy and behavior. The grant enabled him to set up a hyena colony at the field station. This took some doing: the city of Berkeley demanded extraordinary security as they were not too keen on the idea of escaped hyenas prowling the streets. He also had to smooth some feathers with the neighbors. Nearby was the recently established Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, home to some serious poindexters. (Last week’s seminar was “Quasi Periodic Orbits: The Case of the Non Linear Schrödinger Equation.”) Math types like to work at night and they were freaked out by the nocturnal vocalizations from the colony—Crocuta crocuta isn’t known as the laughing hyena for nothing. Steve once invited me up to meet the study animals. Their vocalizations are truly unsettling. I was happy to have a stout chain link fence between us.

Kay Holekamp is another Berkeley student who progressed from rodents (in her case a Ph.D. on Belding’s ground squirrel) to smellier topics—scent marking in hyenas. Kay is now a professor of zoology at Michigan State but spends a lot of time studying hyenas at the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. She and two colleagues have just published a paper on the bacterial basis of clan-specific social odors.

Hyenas live in small clans and use scent to mark their territory.

A particularly common and conspicuous chemical signaling behavior among hyenas is ‘pasting,’ a form of scent marking wherein a hyena typically straddles a grass stalk, extrudes its anal scent pouch, and drags the exposed pouch across the top of the stalk, leaving behind a thin layer of secretion, called ‘paste’. Paste is composed of lipid-rich sebum and presumably desquamated epithelial cells, and it is produced by a pair of lobulated sebaceous glands that secrete their products directly into the anal scent pouch.

Yummy! And effective:

The major volatile constituents of paste are fatty acids, esters, hydrocarbons, alcohols and aldehydes. Collectively, they give paste a pungent, sour mulch odor that persists, detectable by the human nose, for more than a month after paste is deposited on grass stalks.

Scent glands are “warm, moist, organic-rich and largely anaerobic,” and thus “highly conducive to the proliferation of fermentative symbiotic bacteria.” The fermentation hypothesis for chemical recognition holds that:

as bacteria ferment the protein and lipid-rich substrates in scent glands, they produce odorous metabolites that are co-opted by their mammalian hosts as components of chemical signals.

In other words, the deal works like this: the hyena provides a warm, moist, nutrient-rich habitat for the bacteria which in return produce a stinky brew of by-products useful in scent marking.

A corollary of the fermentation hypothesis is that species differences in the hosted bacteria could account for odor differences between individuals or groups. Having identified four separate hyena clans at the Kenyan reserve, Kay and colleagues were perfectly situated to test this idea. So they collected paste samples from the anal scent pouches of 16 lactating hyenas. (You need a reliable tranquilizer dart gun for this step.)

Back home the samples were analyzed. Bacteria could be seen under high magnification as well as tiny, lipid-containing droplets—the hyena’s gift of food to the bacteria. To identify the bacteria by species, the sample were screened for 16S rRNA genes. This is the DNA that codes for a piece of the ribosome and which is useful in constructing bacterial phylogenies. The genetic survey identified a rich assortment of bacteria from 78 different genera. More than half the bacterial DNA sequences couldn’t be classified—they appear to be new to science. Goes to show what cool new stuff you can find when you get far enough up a hyena’s butt.

And what of the fermentation hypothesis of chemical recognition? All four clans from the Masai reserve had the same types of bacteria; what varied between clans was the proportion of various types of bacteria. Three of the four clans had statistically distinctive bacteria profiles; the fourth did not. By showing that the most prominent bacteria in the scent gland are known producers of short-chain fatty acids—key to odor differences between hyena clans—Kay and colleagues have provided a critical piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis.

The study discussed here is “Evidence for a bacterial mechanism for group-specific social odors among hyenas,” by Kevin R. Theis, Thomas M. Schmidt, & Kay E. Holekamp, published in Scientific Reports 2:61, 201. It can be downloaded here for free.

True Love Smells

In cleaning out the attic of FirstNerve Manor, I recently came across a box of letters to the editor of the National Geographic magazine. They were written in response to the Sense of Smell Survey which I co-authored back in the last century. A number of letters were from ladies who described the bodily scent that had initially attracted each to her husband. The accounts were quite graphic in a matter-of-fact, Middle America sort of way. Having heard many such stories in person since then, I’m convinced that B.O. can be a game changer in the relationship department.

By coincidence there’s an article on this topic in the new Australian edition* of Marie Claire. It’s written by one E.J. Balloch and it’s a brutally frank account of the body odor mismatch that sank her first marriage and led to a happier second one. There have been plenty of he-smells-so-sexy pieces in women’s magazines, but I don’t recall one as remarkable as this. It may even be the launch of a new literary genre—the first-person B.O. confessional.

Ms. Balloch was married to a great guy. But there was one little problem:

The truth is, I was never drawn to my ex’s smell. My first scent memory of him, as we tipsily leaned into each other after a holiday party, was of expensive, tasteful cologne, like the men’s section at Saks. His clothes, when they came off, smelled of Tide and Downy. He was too pristine, too sanitized. There was no man smell undergirding the perfume. I craved masculine sweat, heat, and tuber-like earthiness. There was none there. But I ignored my desire to love my mate’s scent because he was, in every other way, an amazing guy: a natural leader, an intellect, and a killer poker player.

Her husband was lacking in natural manly scent. Fair enough. But how does that square with her statement a paragraph later?

. . . when I was choosing a husband, hot sex was hardly on my list of requirements. Stability, kindness, and protection were. Blood, sweat, and prurient connections to other sundry bodily fluids? No, thanks. I pretended that sex wasn’t important to a marriage, and in doing so, I ignored the fact that I couldn’t stand the smell of the only person I’d vowed to sleep with for the rest of my life.

This sounds as if she actively disliked his scent. So which was it? Did he lack a personal scent or was his personal scent disagreeable? Also: if Tide and Downy were too pristine and sanitized, why not ask him to switch brands? Maybe butch him up with some Arm & Hammer®.

It turns out that Mr. Pristine-Sanitized also had his own issues.

He was a bit more vocal about his disdain for my scent. When we first got together, he’d wrinkle his nose after kissing me first thing in the morning. As time went by, he asked me to switch from my brand of antiperspirant to something with more “muscle,” perhaps to disguise my natural odor. Eventually, he suggested that we wash our laundry separately. (Was my unappetizing scent rubbing off on his clothes?) In the end, he flat out told me that I literally stunk like hell to him.

Oof!

Not surprisingly given the extent of their mutual olfactory incompatibility Ms. Balloch and Mr. Pristine-Sanitized eventually went their separate ways. That’s when she decides to hoist the “Love me, love my B.O.” banner, although she phrases it oddly:

After my divorce, my olfactory sensitivity was on fire. [Huh?—Ed.] If a man didn’t like my scent, screw it. I let loose and wore a non-scented hippie brand of antiperspirant. I just didn’t care anymore. 

Then, a guy I liked a lot texted me after our first night together to say that he had tucked his shirt into a Ziploc bag to preserve my smell embedded in it. I fully appreciate that many women might have run from such a person, suspecting lurking fetishes of a most delinquent order. Me? I actually cried when I got that message: He loved me—he wanted me! Best of all, the feeling was mutual. I felt at home in his warmth and aroma of salt and grassiness. A few years later, I married him.

Ms. Balloch and Mr. Lurking Fetish are now living happily ever after, i.e., having hot monkey sex on a daily basis:

we’re so intoxicated by each other’s smell, we’ve also had sex every day for the four years we’ve been together. As a 42-year-old mother of three, this is no small thing. Every day. I’m not joking.

Here Ms. Balloch throws perfume on the violet and takes her story to ridiculous excess. It’s almost enough to make one suspicious of the rest of the tale, which was too neat to begin with. The fact that E.J. Balloch doesn’t Google well and is probably a pseudonym doesn’t help.

Then again, perhaps true love is your nose’s recognition of its counterpoint in another’s B.O.

Sometimes we’ll sniff,
Sometimes we’ll whiff,
And we’ll know why,
Just you and I
Know true love smells.

*I now realize the piece was posted originally in the American edition in May, 2012.

Sniffing Notes from a Pheromone Speed-Dating Party

Image via ZoeCormier.


Male #1
A musky warmth. Very manly. Slightly acrid overtones of an athlete after a workout. Hint of Old Spice AP/deo—a traditionalist. Starchy, cottony nuance suggestive of fresh Franklins.
Interest Level (1 – 10) = 10

Female #1
Faint aroma of wet potato. Sweaty fat girl. Chalky, powdery, reminds me of fresh kitty litter. Trace of amines: tuna salad for lunch or Friskies in the bowl.
Interest Level (1 – 10) = 1

Male #2
Damp cloth and citrus (orange soda?). Sharp culinary note—mustard? Cheddar cheese, toasted corn. Ewww! Just snorted Cheeto dust.
Interest Level (1 – 10) = 2

Female #2
Strong black tea or chai, with a milky impression. Cinnamon, maybe nutmeg. Hemp scent: sandals, yoga mat? Hint of shallots in the armpits. Perfume free, no additives.
Interest Level (1 – 10) = 2

Male #3
Axe. Bronzer. Hair gel (Redken—classy!) Fabric softener—his mother loves him. Slight metallic note, gold crucifix or St. Francis on tight abs.
Interest Level (1 – 10) = 7 (9 if he lives above exit 17)

Female #3
Big perfumey scent like that old Calvin Klein perfume. Lime, maybe bitter orange, plus something fruity like cranberry juice. Waxy smell: lipstick? Fresh Marlboros. Whoa . . . Stifler’s mom!
Interest Level (1 – 10) = 11