After a short hiatus to share other exciting content like RICE and our reflections on the Oxford Real Farming Conference, our BODY issue is back! Our first BODY essay of 2025 is about our desires to render ourselves edible through cosmetics — with preferences for scents and aesthetics that we may feel are biologically ingrained but have roots in colonial, racial, gender, and class-based control.
By Lily Wakeley | Premium subscribers have access to an audio reading of this piece on our podcast.
What is a body without a smell?
In Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, the character Jean-Baptiste Grenouille suffers the strange affliction of having no personal body odour to call his own. In Süskind’s created world, Grenouille’s lack of scent precludes the possibility of having an identity entirely. It’s as though he’s a ghost, barely existing at all.
When he was young, fellow children feared Grenouille, unable to “stand the nonsmell of him”. But in a cruel stroke of irony, Grenouille himself is gifted with a hyperactive sense of smell. Walking the stinking streets of Paris, he is accosted by “thousands upon thousands of odours”: of “water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw.”
As he ages, Grenouille becomes a callous, calloused, lonely man. Eventually, his sole motivation in life becomes the creation of the most delectable smell in the world, which he hopes will finally transform him into something — and even someone — lovable.
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Süskind’s world is allegorical of our own, where smell is fundamental to our sense of identity and how we make sense of the world. Unlike our four other senses, smell bypasses the logical part of our brain. It’s processed in the frontal lobe and associated with our emotions, memory, and personality.1
Through our noses (sometimes in collaboration with our tongues), we map associations onto the world, including our relations with other people. Have you ever stood near a stranger in public so close you can smell their shampoo? It can almost feel like a transference of something, a visceral intimacy that ignites a fantasy feeling of knowing them.
These experiences of smell might seem innate or biologically determined but in reality, our tastes are just as shaped by learned behaviour and context. And the context most of us exist in is defined by heteronormative, misogynistic, capitalist systems which police our bodies — particularly gendered and racialized bodies — and make us believe that our happiness is linked to our ability to consume and to be consumed. It is this system that has taught us that smelling human — particularly as a woman — is bad and unattractive, something that needs to be covered up with perfume and deodorant and controlled through what we eat. Like Süskind’s character, we are made to believe that to be loved, we need to smell delectable.
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For millennia, humans have experimented with borrowing from the natural world to perfume ourselves, to cover up what lies below — the smell of sweat, of breath, of intimate parts of our bodies — the scents that remind us that we are animals.
Smell influences our judgment of others and has as long been used as an instrument to control our perceptions and behaviour. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates famously regarded perfume as a dangerous threat to the ability to discern enslaved people from free men by masking what he considered to be the enslaved’s innate and distinctive “bad” smell.
Later, the 19th century saw the advent of what historian Alain Corbin terms the “era of deodorization” when the governments of richer nations embarked on large-scale hygiene projects, like slum clearances and the creation of subterranean sewers, a lot of which was done in the name of public health. Smells perceived by the elite as animalistic became a badge of the subaltern, and discourses about hygiene produced identities of inclusion and exclusion along both racial and class lines. In Victorian Australia, for example, coercive powers were granted to public health authorities to educate and control Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on the basis that their smell demonstrated poor hygiene and unfitness to reproduce.
These classed and/or racialized discourses continue in the present day: though fictional, it is telling that the 2019 film Parasite uses body odour and smell as the defining motif for the violence of social class and inequality in Korean society. As the family at the center of the story, the Kims, try to claw their way from poverty by infiltrating the affluent lives of the Parks, it is their smell that threatens to expose them.
Beyond the silver screen, intolerance to the bodily or food smells of others can be a cover for xenophobia. In 2017, one of the UK’s biggest buy-to-let landlords instructed his properties not to be rented out to “coloured people” because the “smell of curry” stuck to carpets. Research carried out by Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute suggests that there is even a psychological link between xenophobia and disgust towards body odours.
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Beginning around the 1920s, capitalistic interests began preying more directly on our fears of not smelling as we should. Companies in the West realized that latching onto women’s anxieties about smell was a particularly effective sales tactic. It was at this time that the oral antiseptic brand Listerine coined the phrase, “Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride” as a means of describing the impact of bad breath on women as “life-destroying” in its advertisements. To this day, women continue to be taught — through social norms, perpetuated by the media — that smelling good is essential to our happiness.2
Scent artist Clara Ursitti explored the gendered dimensions of scent in her series of “scent portraits”, which kicked off in 1994 with Self-Portrait in Scent, Sketch no. 1 exhibited at The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. She synthesized the smells produced from different and specific parts of her body, such as her vagina, armpit, and scalp. Ursitii’s work sought to discombobulate audiences by inserting smells into public spaces where they don’t belong, forcing us to recognize the strangeness of our fear of smelling human. She found that men and women in the audience tended to respond very differently to the work: women tended to appreciate it, whereas many men expressed disgust with the smells.
These findings are unsurprising on a personal level: My friends and I grew up in the late nineties/early noughties at an all-girls school in the relatively sheltered English countryside. Despite the lack of proximity to the boys we pined for, we gorged ourselves on a fear-inducing diet of information that drilled into us the do’s and don'ts of smells. Rule number one: a “fishy fanny” was total social suicide. Tasting of copper was also bad.3
It may sound like adolescent folly, but the pressure on women to hide intimate odour creates health risks. Vaginal douches, sprays, gels and wipes which seek to neutralize intimate smells (a market worth over $286 million in the US, 2018), ironically wreak havoc on the vaginal biome responsible for moderating them. These so-called “feminine hygiene” products have been linked to the increased likelihood of yeast infections, UTIs, bacterial vaginosis, and even cervical cancer and pelvic inflammatory disease. The pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson has paid out hundreds of millions in compensation in recent years to women who have developed ovarian cancer as a result of using their baby talcum powder as vaginal deodorant, despite the company knowing its carcinogenic risk from 1979.4 The company were found to have particularly targeted Black American women in their marketing, profiting from the longstanding stigma around the imagined “excessive black vagina” and exposing the noxious intersection of misogyny and racism.
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Although we’re all told we need to spritz and spray our natural smells away, there are gendered parameters within which this should be done. Through years of effective marketing, determining gender by associating smells with either “manliness” or “femininity” has, for many of us, become practically intuitive.
In their aromatic installation, (De)Constructed Masculinities, shown at London’s V&A in 2018, Tasha Marks and Brian J Morrison sought to examine how smell changes our perception of shapes or bodies. The artists created sculptures of androgynous “morphic blobs” moulded from Brian’s body; Tasha scented the sculptures with perfumes she created inspired by Coco Mademoiselle and Terres d’Hermes — the leading fragrances in their gender categories at the time. The F3, the “feminine” scent, was a floral concoction of jasmine, rose, vanilla, and patchouli. M4, the “masculine” one, was spicy and earthy, scented with black pepper, nutmeg and bergamot.
Tasha and Brian watched audiences interact with their art. Interestingly, members of the public were influenced by gender norms in describing the shapes and smells. The “morphic blobs” perfumed with F3 were perceived as “voluptuous” and “curvy”, whereas the ones fragranced by M4 were seen as “rounded” or smelling of “tension”.
Part of what got Tasha interested in this idea of gender and smell in the first place was the rise she was observing in unisex fragrances. This trend was most notably embodied by CK One, which launched in 1994 alongside unforgettable black-and-white footage of beautiful androgynous bodies playfully pawing at one another. She wondered if these marketing campaigns had done anything to the public’s idea of what it meant to smell like a man or a woman. Feedback from the audience at the exhibition showed that fourteen years on from CK One’s launch, while the perfume industry had changed substantially, there was still a great number of learned, unconscious biases to unpick. Though CK One had certainly sold beauty successfully, it didn’t spark the attrition of the gender binary — even if, not insignificantly, it had made it cool to entertain the idea.
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CK One was an era-defining perfume, not only because it played with sexuality and gender but also because it kicked off what scent designer and historian Ermano Picco has termed the “anti-perfume perfume” era. He believes that the AIDS epidemic created an insidious, Victorian-like fear of bodies and sex, which had echoes into many realms of life, including the perfume industry. Sex as an aesthetic — wood and patchouli — was out: “clean”, minimalism was in. In this context, CK One was born, combining a heady mix of hedione, dihydromyrcenol, and galaxolide compounds to create a breezy, bright “clean” impression. Galaxolide is the synthetic musk used frequently to fragrance cleaning products like body washes and detergents, which mask the odour of bodies. The clean smell was meant to assuage fears of bodies that can arouse desire, transgress and misbehave, and ultimately spread disease. It reiterated society’s response to the epidemic in re-equating ideas of morality with sexlessness.
In the new millennium, trends became more maximalist — rendering us ripe for consumption in an era defined by paparazzi buzz around young women icons. Britney was eaten alive by the press; Jessica Simpson’s 2004 edible beauty line, Dessert Beauty, promised to offer us up for dinner too. It was as if the advent of raunchy music videos splashing across our TV screens allowed us to move away from a society scrubbed of any indication of temptation and embrace the carnal desire to stuff our faces — but only with the right flavour.
Beauty critic Jessica DeFino calls the fad for turning women into “lickable, kissable and taste-able” food “cosmetic cannibalism” and “bite-me beauty”, achieved by lathering our bodies with apricot scrubs, butterscotch whips, and strawberry mists. This “food face” aesthetic is having a recent resurgence: Rhodes sells products like a “glazing milk” advertised by a photograph of the brand owner Hailey Beiber pouring a pitcher of milk over her body like she’s about to dive into a bowl of cereal. The message: skin should be as plump and dewy as a dumpling, with a sheen that would make Krispy Creme blush.
DeFino ascribes this continued trend of making ourselves consumable — achieved through wanton consumption — to a sublimated desire for connection. In an increasingly online, transactional world operated by the expediency of capitalism, a slippage has emerged between “being seen” and “being validated”. Algorithms and advertisements, that overwhelmingly target women and a specifically gendered fear of being undesirable, tell us that there is a pipeline between “buying” it, “applying it” and “becoming it”. With the right products, we can become as desirable as a commodity ourselves. As Hailey Beiber explained in an interview with The Cut: “I want someone to want to take a bite out of my skin… I want you to want to bite me because it looks so delicious that you can’t resist”.
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Recently, a friend of mine went on a date with a man she fancied. She instantly became enamoured with his scent and asked him to spray some on her jacket when she said goodbye in the morning. She sat in my kitchen, jittery with excitement, and told me how much she coveted her scented sleeve, sniffing it often like an addict. But when she went upstairs to my bathroom, her eyes widened in disbelief: there on my brother’s shelf, was the same scent. We laughed: whilst also giving her a chance to re-spritz the now waning smell, the deeply personal connection she felt to it and to the man she fancied dissolved ever so slightly, sullied by the fragrance’s apparent ubiquity.
On the one hand, the ubiquity of these smells (trend scents or the smell of common household products like washing detergent) can create a cozy familiarity wherever we go: a conduit to something known and something shared. But they also remind us that we co-exist in a market-led realm of taste — where 95 percent of fragrances are made by just five companies — that dictates what is and isn’t permissible. Although self-identification may feel possible through scent, it's the market that guides our collective desires to smell like galaxolide and be as luminous as milk. The global perfume industry is worth an estimated $68.9 billion. Fine fragrance brands innovate new products and market them as exclusive and luxurious, whilst paradoxically pushing them as far and wide as they can.
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Clara Ursitti, the scent artist, once told Roots and Routes magazine that scents are “like dressing up, trying to be someone else or something that you are not. They are about desire, aspirations, fantasies.” I myself have never actually had a signature perfume, but one Christmas approximately a decade and a half ago, in a flash commitment to femininity, I asked for Chanel lipstick and a bottle of perfume (any would do). I still haven’t finished either. Now and then, though, and often before a night out, I spritz myself in the ways I’ve admired others doing: I rub my wrists against one another and dab my neck, or release a mist to step into, coating my body in an invisible cloak of something more than myself.
Although I delight in this occasional performance, I always have a slight niggle that I’m cosplaying a shinier, more palatable version of myself. And to what end? Does “soft, desert wind” with notes of cardamom, iris and violet really smell better than the naked skin of a neck you kiss for the first time? The world of smells and fragrances is part of an infinite world of artistry and expression, but there are great strides we must take in disentangling them from an industry that feeds off misogyny and never-ending consumption.
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In the Süskind novel, the character Grenouille eventually discovers the provenance of the most delectable smell in the world: young, virginal girls. The sweat of his first discovery “smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals… as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, [and] her skin as apricot blossom”. He is so intoxicated by her smell that he murders her. He feels he must possess this enragingly delectable smell so he kills her to bottle it. Grenouille soon learns, however, that his single conquest was not enough: not long after his first kill, he grows dissatisfied and begins the chase for the next.
Lily Wakeley is a writer based in London who is sometimes guilty of forgetting to wear deodorant. She likes adding to her cornucopia of half-baked projects, which include following the UK herring girl trail, dreaming up the best fish-finger sandwich, and writing about women’s appetites, some of which you can find here.
This is the science behind the infamous moment in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time when the taste and smell of a madeleine triggers a childhood memory — a phenomenon that has since become known as a “Proustian moment”. It’s why the woody, tobacco inflection of a mothball becomes a route back to times nestled in the arms of a grandparent. Or why the smell of vanilla might transport us back to our earliest birthday when we happily smooshed cake between our fingers and into our mouths (taste and smell are, as we know, inextricably interlinked).ha
A 2005 patent application seeks to capitalize on the finding that the smell of pink grapefruit will make a man perceive a woman to be younger than she actually is.
This fear was later confirmed by the humiliating slander Lamar Odom made in his divorce court hearing, accusing his then-wife, Khloe Kardashian, of having genitals that smelled like “earring backs”.
Jacqueline Fox was the first Black plaintiff to receive compensation from the company, eventually dying of ovarian cancer after using the product for 40 years, raised on the idea that it helped women stay “fresh and clean”. Fox has set a profound precedent inspiring thousands of lawsuits by other women seeking justice.
what a terrific post, beautifully written and thoughtful.