Bloodhound

spring ’16 issue 1
curated scents
Sweating
Scared
The Female
Nostril
Body Odor
Lineups
An Olfaction
Attraction

omas
scratch ‘n
eleanor
sniff
seeing
smell bacon
pick your
osewhiff
scent of
attraction
subconscious
anosmia
phantom
aroma
synethesia
table of
con t e n
t
1 table of contents

s
3 5 7 9 11 13
pick your nose : what’s that smell??
apple pie : bacon fest
skunk : zebra mussle invasion
eleanor : Malle master of smell
scratch ‘n sniff : O’notes
amygdala : phantom aromas
Seeing Smell : how those with a form of synethesia visualize scents
You’ve Been Skunked : an olfaction expert debunks smell myths
Love at First Scent? : body odor’s subconscious affect on attraction
Sweating Scared : can you really smell someone else’s fear?
The Anosmia Abyss : you don’t know what you smell until it is gone
15 21 25 29 33
2 table of contents

pick your nose
Bloodhound covers everything
relating to the sense of smell. In
general there is a wide lack of
understanding and appreciation
regarding this powerful sense
as it is perceived as an esoteric
experience that is difficult to
describe in words, and is often
overlooked compared with the
other more dominant senses of
sight, taste, hearing, touch.
However, smell is one of the
oldest of the senses and is
arguably the most powerful
because of its rare and unique
association with the parts of
the brain controlling memory,
emotion and mood. We feel that
smell has an untapped potential
in many broad areas ranging
from medicine to advertising.
w h a t ’ s t
some things remain mysterious
and obscurely abstract. We are
definitely not purely a scientific
publication, while our subject
matter is biological we always
put just as much emphasis on
the unique sensory experience
which is not always as easily
describable, but is emotional
on every level in every way.
We are unique because we are
taking a non-visual experience
that is hard to put into words
and turning it into something
you can read and look at and
hold in your hands. We are in
the business of smells.
All of us here at Bloodhound
are fascinated by scents and how
they affect us as people as well
as a culture, and aim to increase
awareness about the incredibly
powerful sense of smell. Scents
are highly stimulating sensations
and evoke vivid associations,
yet there is still so much to be
learned about this subject and
Henri Gusteau
Editor-in-chief
3 pick your nose

h a t s m e l l ? ?
“
Scents
are HIGHLY stimulating
and EVOKE vivid associations ”
4 pick your nose

Apple Pie
“one w h i
scented narratives
f f and I . . . . . .
Peter’s midnight bacon work
Peering into the cooling
room at Crane’s Meat
Processing, only the back
of Bill Crane’s hunched
shoulders are visible as he
inspects slabs of hanging
pork that reach to his shins.
He selects two pale hog
carcasses and slides them
down a roller track and into
the meat processing room.
Crane, in a large red apron
and blue latex gloves, tackles
the slabs with the precision
of a surgeon and the agility.
His motions are hypnotic.
b a c
He slices off a marbled hunk
of the belly and plops it on a
large, silver metal tray.
“That’s the bacon,” he says.
He trims off layers of fat
and lobs them into a bucket.
That’s for breakfast sausage.
He separates another hunk
and moves it under a buzzing
sharp meat saw, rhythmically
shearing off perfect little
circular cuts. Those will be
the best pork chops.
~ Written by Peter Dempsey
5 apple pie

When Matt Stonie has a bad
day at work, it must be hard
for him to find someone who
can sympathize with him.
. . . . .
. NEED it now.
.”
That’s because the 22-yearold
Stonie is a competitive
eater specializing in, you
guessed it, bacon.
o n
TIME
He then passes the cuts
to his family members,
the only other employees
at Crane’s. His grandson
grinds the sausage into
plastic sleeves, his wife
puts them all through
a heat-sealing machine
and his two pretty young
granddaughters carry
the packaged meat to
bins. Crane’s small family
business has outlasted the
arrival of corporations.
But that task may pale in
comparison to what Stonie
pulled off very recently at the
Daytona 500. In a competition
sponsored by big Smithfield
Meats, Stonie set a new world
record by eating 182 slices of
bacon in five minutes Yum?
Stonie is one of the fastest
rising stars in competitive
eating. He’s currently the
youngest member of Major
League Eating and is already
its second-ranked competitor,
behind only Joey Chestnut.
Indeed, Chestnut had some
words for his young rival after
Stonie’s great performance.
~ Written by Matt Stonie
In 1969, Crane worked as a
meat cutter at IGA, a small
grocer in Columbia. After
he returned from the army,
the small grocery business
floundered as big chains
moved in. So he decided
to start his own business.
In the very beginning,
everything was housed
in a tiny side room of
Bill and his wife, Linda’s,
house. As the business
grew, it widely expanded.
~ Written by Susan Bracket
Crane shows off his plate of soon-to-be devoured bacon
6 apple pie

Eleanor
conversations with
experts in scent
“ P e o p l e
f i n d
f r
a g r
a n c
e
s t h a t
e p i t o m i z e
It may come as little surprise that Frédéric Malle, 51, the founder of the
fragrance company Editions de Parfums, possesses a singularly sensitive
nose, though he insists that the mark of a great perfumer is not a physical
but a mental capacity for distinguishing scents. “I think it was Voltaire who
said, ‘What is well-conceived is easily spoken,’ “ he says. Nonetheless, if
anyone is genetically suited to the profession, it’s Malle. His grandfather
founded Christian Dior’s perfume line in 1947, and his mother was its art
director, helping to develop the classic Eau Sauvage fragrance for men. A
precocious child, Malle began serving as Mom’s test subject for scents at
The role he plays today at his company (which has counted Catherine
Deneuve and Naomi Campbell as devotees) is modeled after a literary
publisher: the name and the color scheme (red, white and black) of his
business reference Éditions Gallimard, a hallowed French book publisher.
As a Maxwell Perkins overseeing the F. Scott Fitzgeralds of the fragrance
world, he celebrates perfumers he works with regularly, hanging their
portraits on the walls of his stores and printing their names. These are
often inspired by real people, such as his aunt, sister, mother, and father.
Frédéric’s Scent Trail
1947
Frédéric born July
17th in Paris
2000
Malle Perfumes bought
by Estée Lauder
Grandfather founds Christian
Dior’s perfume line
1962
First Editions de Parfums
shop opens in Paris
2014
9 eleanor

t h e i r p e r s o n a l i t y W I T H O U T e v e n k n ow i n g
i t ”
His emphasis on individuality is in sharp contrast to the large corporate
fragrance world, where Malle cut his teeth consulting before becoming
disillusioned with the direction of the perfume behemoths. His first shop
opened in Paris in 2000, and he now has three stores there and one in New
York, with new locations forthcoming: in Rome, in April; and New York.
In Malle’s eyes, the fragrance
industry, much like Hollywood,
is obsessed with one-size-fitsall
blockbusters that manage to
please precisely no one. These
are often inspired by real people,
such as his aunt or his father’s
charismatic best friend. As a
Maxwell Perkins overseeing the F.
Scott Fitzgeralds of the fragrance
world, he celebrates the perfumers
he works with regularly, hanging
their portraits on all the walls
“People will find fragrances that
epitomize their personality without
even knowing it,” he says. “They do
it in a primal way.”
10 eleanor

the magic behind a form of
synethesia, in which smells are
visualized as shapes and colors

INE YEARS AGO, on an April morning in San
Francisco, I awoke to a concussion that seemed
to silence everything around me. I noticed halfpainted
canvases lying haphazardly around the room; I ran
my fingers along an eggshell-white wall punctuated with
slivers of light filtering through half-shuttered windows.
I felt strangely disconnected from my environment.
There was something that hung
like a veil over my perception. It
was first apparent that something
was wrong when I took a bite of a
falafel sandwich that morning and it
hung like tasteless cardboard in my
mouth. Later that morning, I drove
through the rush-hour traffic on the
smoggy highway that cuts through
the valley between San Francisco
and Sacramento, unmoved by the
exhaust that was out streaming in
through my open window.
At a time I had worked at a fondue
restaurant where the odors of
melted cheese and broth were
particularly strong. Some days they
made me want to gag, and some
days they made me hungry, but they
were always there, permeating my
clothes and hair long after they were
washed. For some reason, I didn’t
notice them that day. I thought it had
something to do with the fog of my
concussion, but when I went back to
the kitchen to dump out a pot of
My concussion came after a day
of trespassing to take photos in a
Bayview-Hunters Point graffiti yard
with an old college friend. Afterward
we went to a bar, where after one
single beer and a puff of medical
marijuana, They told me I’d passed
out cold, and promptly transported
me to a hospital by an ambulance
where I was given a dismissive
diagnosis of a mild concussion.
“You’re in the Tenderloin—we see
this all the time,” the attending ER
physician told me, before sending
me home to be watched by my
friend overnight. Other than the
bruise to my head, I thought I was
okay when I drove home to work the
very next morning.
ater my general practitioner
would order a string of tests—an
EEG with forced hyperventilation
and strobes to test for epilepsy,
a fasting blood-glucose test, and
an MRI to look for potential brain
and skull injury all in an attempt to
17 seeing smell

“Chocolate smells
pink and stripy”
identify why I passed out. He told
me my blood tests showed I’m
hypoglycemic, and the low blood
sugar could have caused me to pass
out. But when I asked about my
inability to smell, he shrugged off
the thing he couldn’t see, the ailment
readily invisible toeveryone other
than just me.
perfume, which suddenly
seemed a vacuous luxury.
But I also began to
feel new insecurities
about my own scent
and the smells in my
environment, and I
began to dissociate
from certain aspects
of my complex life. My
sense of smell was once
so keen it would turn me off from
certain people and places. In a city,
it’s surreal not to smell the putrid
decay of garbage bags piled high
on the street, not to be romanced
by fresh-baked pastries in the wee
hours of the morning.
Right after the accident, I remember
driving on the way to my parents’
house, distraught, crying madly. I felt
cut off from the world around me,
trapped inside a body that wasn’t
functioning properly. The world
seemed flat and dull, as if drained
of color. I didn’t want to live without
a sense-and-a-half. I realized, this
loss meant there were suddenly new
and unexpected ways my life could
end—by gas leak, by fire, or from
disgustingly spoiled gross food.
In a city, it’s surreal not to smell
the putrid decay of garbage bags
piled high on the street, not to be
romanced by fresh-baked delicious
warm pastries.The months after
the accident were a blur. My first
reaction to my loss of smell was
curiosity and awe. What a strange
thing to suddenly be stripped from
one of the antennas I had to the
entire world and beyond.
ince around 75% of the flavor we
detect in food comes from the
sense of smell, bacon just didn’t do
it for me anymore. So I committed
to vegetarianism. I stopped wearing
A synethesiac’s visual representation
of smelling freshly cut grass
18 seeing smell

Despite the various ways smell
protects us, humans often count
it as one of the senses they could
do without. In a recent study by
McCann Worldgroup, “53 percent of
those aged 16-22 and 48 percent of
those aged 23-30 would give up their
own sense of smell if it meant they
could keep an item of technology.”
For me, too, it was a sense I thought
I could do without—until I lost it.
The more I researched anosmia—the
medical term for my condition—the
more questions I had. Smell is
strongly tied to memory, so did this
mean that the memories I would
make as an anosmic would be
more difficult to recall years later?
Would I ever fall in love again if I
couldn’t physically smell another’s
scent, the chemicals intimately
communicated by the human body?
Would I have trouble bonding with
my own child one day? Would I lose
my connection to myself if I no
longer was acquainted with my own
body odor? And why did a minor
concussion entirely knock out my
ability to smell?
y own research suggests
that likely my loss of smell
was caused by my brain bouncing
against the front of my skull when
it hit the ground, severing some 400
hair like olfactory receptors that bind
odor molecules at the back of the
nasal cavity, which pass through a
honeycomb-like cribriform plate, and
carry signals to the olfactory bulb
in the brain. When the nerves are
damaged, they are no longer able to
send signals to the olfactory bulb,
which connects to the amygdala,
interpreting and mapping up to one
trillion different odors.
Wafts of fruity aromas form a
soft blue cloud over one’s face
People can live without their sense
of smell, so there have been fewer
resources devoted to the research
on the topic. But according to the
researchers at the Monell Center in
Philadelphia, almost more than 6.3
million Americans are living without
their sense of smell. Founded in
1968 as the center for taste and
smell research, the institution is
attempting to learn more about our
sense and its relation to quality of
life and overall wellbeing.
In early 2014, the center began A
Sense of Hope which is a three-year
awareness and research campaign
for anosmia. If some odor input to
the brain ceases, it can be assumed
that behavioral or even an emotional
changes might occur.
19 seeing smell

If odor input to the brain ceases,
it can be assumed that behavioral
or emotional changes might occur.
When I visited the center recently,
I learned why I’ve been depressed
lately. According to Pamela Dalton,
an great experimental psychologist
at Monell, the direct connections
between olfactory receptors and the
amygdala creates a feedback loop in
the brain when you smell something.
If odor input to the brain ceases,
behavioral or emotional changes
might actually occur.
“In some animal studies where
researchers have ablated all the
animalss sense of smell, they do
see behavioral changes,” she says.
“The animals seem to have certain
neurotransmitters reduced in the
circulation of their bloodstream,
which may be associated with a
certain blunted emotional state.”
When I describe my olfactory
condition, she offers, “[It’s like] you’re
getting the broad brush strokes but
not all of the detail, right?” This is
exactly it, I think.
rowing up in the suburbs of
Sacramento, one of the smells
I do remember is that of freshly
cut grass in the summertime. Its
scent signaled freedom because
it was the sweetest and most
verdant right around the
time school let out for
summer vacation.
In summer, the
smell of chlorine
became my eau-detoilette.
My sister
and I learned how
to swim at our next
door neighbor’s house,
and while we were
in the pool, the smell of
homemade potato pancakes.
“the smell of fresh
air is rectangular, coffee is a
bubbly cloud shape and people
could smell round or square”
Also, I distinctly remember those fall days the rice fields were burned in the
lowest recesses of valley in Sacramento County. The brown smog hung thick
in the air, burning my eyes. An acrid odor held on, nestling in my hair, hinting
at the sickening smell of too much caramel corn.
Purple daisies smell like yellow
triangles and purple squiggles
20 seeing smell

The
Anosmia
A b y s s

Call it “love at first sniff.”
In animals and humans, scent plays a bigger role in
romance than you might think. Take the Coquerel’s
sifaka, a type of lemur. New research published in the
journal Animal Behavior shows that two sifakas start
mimicking the other’s scent-marking behavior early on
in courtship. "It's like singing a duet, but with smells
instead of sounds," Duke University scientist Christine
Drea, co-author of the lemur study, said in a statement.