Book: Nose, the olfactory review – #19 – Good and evil

"Good and evil, kind and bad, beautiful and ugly, kind and wicked, truth and lies, virtuous and diabolical... In a society plagued by growing polarization and Manichaeism, neutrality and nuance struggle to find their place. Smells are no exception: it smells good or it smells bad, the two categories often constituting the only alternatives when it comes to qualifying what we smell. Estrangely, in this register, aversion seems to feed a much broader lexical field than inclination. A glance at the dictionary of synonyms teaches us that, compared to the few words "smell good", "embalm" or "flower", a host of "puer", "foudre", "cocotter", "schlinguer", "empester", "poquer", "emboucaner" and other "fetid", "malodorant", "nauseabond", "pestilential" or "infectious" allow us to be much more expressive when it comes to expressing our olfactory disapproval.  In the vocabulary of smell, would expressing the beautiful, the good, the beneficial be less useful to our survival? Or are we simply insufficiently trained to explore this range of intimate feelings with subtlety, more readily allowing a visceral rejection to emerge, because it is instinctive and uncontrolled? When we benefit from olfactory education, on the other hand, the nose gradually begins to move away from the usual dichotomy to become more of a benevolent observer, more analytical and less impulsive. We thus short-circuit the primitive functioning of our brain to better understand this invisible, apparently inaccessible universe. What if learning to listen better to smells to discern their facets, their reasons for being, the information they transmit to us, was already a way of fighting on our own scale against the bipolarization of the world? » Jeanne Doré (Editorial Director of Nez) Nez offers to discover the world through our olfactory sensations, with a multidisciplinary approach: art, literature, photography, science, history, gastronomy, perfumery… To understand the essential role of smell in our lives.