Raising a Stink
by Mad Dog

   But smell is an important sense. It’s closely tied to taste so it helps you distinguish between something good to eat, like Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, and something that’s not, like your dirty sweat socks. Okay, so being able to see doesn’t hurt either. Scientists say there are actually certain foods we can identify only if we smell them while we eat, like raspberries. Here’s an experiment: try holding your nose, closing your eyes tightly, and putting a raspberry on the tip of your tongue. There, now don’t you feel silly?

   Smells can repel and attract. Rotten eggs, limburger cheese, and that guy sitting next to you on the bus are examples of repellent smells. A company in Philadelphia, Monell Chemical Senses Center, spends a lot of time and money recreating smells like these. Some of their finer brews include aroma of armpit, essence of rotting flesh, and that old favorite, U.S. Government Standard Bathroom Malodor. Seriously. The government actually had Monell design this standardized fragrance to emulate one of the world’s worst odors: English Leather cologne. Just kidding, actually it’s Old Spice. Okay, the truth is it reproduces a typical bathroom smell so the government can test deodorizers. Which end up smelling like English Leather.

   Once scientists started creating synthetic smells they figured they needed artificial noses with which to smell them. These are a great invention because they don’t clog up by catching a cold, meaning they can always give advance warning when one of the government’s stink bombs accidentally goes off, which is bound to happen if they’re manufactured by Bell/Boeing, those fine folks who make the V-22 Osprey rotorcraft (motto: “What goes up must come down”). Trust me, the first time you hear an alarm going off announcing, “Who cut the cheese? Stand back from the car. Who cut the cheese?”, you’ll be happy there’s something that saved you from having to wash your nose out with soap.

   Actually, artificial noses aren’t new, they’ve been around since 1982 when the first one was transplanted onto Barbra Streisand’s face. Like most inventions, it took them a while to figure out how to make them smaller. Just kidding. Actually they’re box-like gadgets which are used in industry to smell whether meat has spoiled, sense if chemicals are leaking, or detect if you’re the one who cut the cheese. In an effort to cash in on new and emerging markets, one company is trying to build an artificial nose that can smell anthrax. “Clear the room! Clear the room! Something stinks! This area is either contaminated by anthrax or American Pie 3 is being shown. Clear the room! Clear the room!”

   Smells don’t just repel, they can also attract. And interestingly it may be some of the same stinky stuff that does it. George Preti, a chemist at the Monell Chemical Sense Center, claims that men’s armpit sweat can stimulate a woman’s menstrual cycle. He also says it can increase deodorant sales, stain T-shirts so badly nothing can remove the yellow color, and help make better fart noises when you put your hand under your armpit and pump your arm.

   Apparently the active ingredient in men’s sweat is androstenone, which also happens to be a sex pheromone in wild pigs. Put men’s sweat on a boar’s nose and the sows go wild. This may help explain why big, beefy, sweaty guys tend to attract pigs. The animal kind, of course. What it doesn’t explain is why men have to surreptitiously wipe their hand under their armpit and sniff it to detect an aroma, why they can’t smell that the T-shirt they’ve been wearing for 12 straight days is beyond hope, and why cutting the cheese in mixed company isn’t an endearing trait. Come to think of it, maybe the artificial nose isn’t such a bad idea after all.

©2002 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them while holding your nose.