The Nose That Doesn't

We were at the Cannes Film Festival and had a free day, so we decided to do some local sightseeing and visit the Perfume Museum in nearby Grasse. Up the hill we drove to the sun-soaked, steep-streeted medieval town which for some three centuries now has been producing some of the most celebrated perfumes in the world. The fields beside the roads were ablaze with May flowers, and as we approached the town, posters for the museum sprang up on walls showing ethereally glamorous women sniffing ecstatically at bottles that looked as if they had flown directly from the Arabian Nights. It should all have been idyllic; yet for some reason I could not yet identify, the closer we drew to the museum the more sad I felt.

Photo by Omkar Jadhav on Unsplash

It was not until we had actually drawn into the museum’s parking lot and Mr. Los Angeles had shut off the engine preparatory to exiting the car that the reason at last occurred to me.

“You do realize,” I said, “that taking me here is sort of like taking Stevie Wonder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”

Mr. Los Angeles looked at me for a moment in puzzlement. Then his brow cleared.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. He replaced the key in the ignition, started the engine again and back we drove down the hill and into Cannes.

Welcome to anosmia, the disability so overlooked that even a sufferer will forget she has it.

I was born with what appears to be about five per cent of a sense of smell. That is, I think I was born that way: my mother used to tell a story from my baby days about a visiting neighbor child cracking a large wooden clothespin down on my newborn skull, which she seemed to think had not much effect, although I’ve sometimes since wondered; but we’ll never know now, and whatever the cause or lack of it, this is how I have been since before I can remember.

I am familiar enough with the general idea of smells to be aware that they exist. I can even identify those of coffee and lemons, although probably not from very far away; I can recognize the sweet warmth of entering a bakery; and when I walk down the street, I can very faintly sense different waves in the air as I pass certain plants, although I could no more tell one from the other than describe the surface of Jupiter. The rest is simply a blank canvas. If it were my vision, you’d call me legally blind.

Strangely, my taste buds appear to work just fine. People tell me, in tones ranging from the suspicious to the outright accusatory, that this is physically impossible; all I can say is that here I am, and that enough people have commented enthusiastically enough on my cooking that I must conclude that I know which taste goes with which. If this makes me an aberration of nature, it’s a deviation which I accept with gratitude.

It was some years before I realized quite how sensorily deprived I was. I was a hopelessly impractical little girl, and when I was small I somewhat assumed that smelling was one of the many things I would get the hang of one of these days but had not yet, like tying my shoelaces or eating an orange without covering myself in juice (truth to tell, I’m still working on the second). When it became apparent that this was something I was not going to be growing into, I decided it must be a rare and special talent, that a few people really had and others only pretended to have, just as sturdy ginger-haired Sheila Cassidy, who was met at the school gates each afternoon by a sturdy ginger-haired woman who kissed her fondly and led her away, would maintain unblinkingly that her mother was an Indian princess.

I was about 13 and being scolded in the school lavatory when it fully dawned on me that I was different. The lavatory had cubicles that backed, not onto a wall, but onto a long window with a deep sill, and my friend Kate and I had discovered that, if we went into adjoining cubicles, stood on the toilet seats and leaned our elbows on the window sill, we could enjoy the superior experience of having a conversation, not in the classroom or on the playground, but, thrillingly, behind the lavatories instead.

One day, when we were about this uplifting pursuit, we were discovered by a teacher.

The teacher was young, and more sympathetic than many.

“Of all the places you could choose to be,” she said, tones of honest bafflement mixing with her reproof, “I can’t think of a nastier or smellier one than this.”

I don’t know what it was in those particular words; but for the first time, they communicated to me that the ability to smell was neither an exceptional skill nor a self-aggrandizing fantasy, but a very basic human capability that most people had, and I had not. That I was – albeit in a manageable and almost unnoticeable way – disabled.

For years, I hid my condition. I was an eccentric teenager, which already did not go down well in 1960s London, where girls were expected not to draw attention to themselves: I was afraid that if I were to round out the cocktail of incessant poetry quoting, terminal clumsiness, and a swooning crush on Bonnie Prince Charlie with a disability no one had even heard of, I would be chased out of the pack altogether. So I pretended. I nodded knowingly whenever the conversation turned to the olfactory, and quickly perfected the art, should someone wonder what particular smell was in the air, of wrinkling my nose, adopting whichever level of expression of delight or disgust seemed appropriate, and remarking in mild puzzlement, and by the way, without a word of a lie, “Do you know, I don’t know!”

The act worked. Granted, there was the occasional wobble. There was the time I rushed rapturously to bury my nose in flowers which turned out to be made of silk; the time I arrived for dinner at the house of a rather stern woman I didn’t know at all well and offered my usual dinner guest greeting of “Mmm, something smells good,” to be told in some surprise that she hadn’t started cooking yet. But nobody really noticed. People don’t notice very much about other people anyway; and the idea that I might be bothering to dissemble about something so unremarkable as the smell of roses or roasting chicken was so bizarre that it apparently never even entered anybody’s head.

As I grew older and more confident, I began gradually to confess my disability. To my relief, this caused the reverse of drama. Nobody demanded I carry a bell to warn the innocent of my monstrous approach; nobody issued me with a scarlet F for Freak to wear on my clothing. Nobody – as had been my secret fear – clapped her brow with a triumphant cry of “Aha! That explains it!” It appears, in fact, to be so thoroughly boring a piece of information about me that friends will time and again forget it and thrust flowers or perfume or soap into the dead space beneath my nostrils with the cheerful exhortation to “smell this! … oh, but you can’t, can you? Never mind.”

Do I mind not having a sense of smell? To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure. My dear friend Jo Fairley, one of Britain’s leading authorities on perfume, co-founder of On The Scent Media, and multiple winner of something celestially fragrant-sounding called the Jasmine Award (yes, I know, and she hangs out with me anyway, which is impressive of her) will occasionally suggest I try nasal exercises which she says will improve my nose’s function, but for some reason I have never done so: probably because I did try quite hard when I was younger, it never worked then, and I don’t want to be disappointed again now. Mine is the only world I have ever known; and if it would be richer with all five senses involved instead of just the four, well, it’s still plenty rich enough for me as it is.

It’s true that it has required a few adaptations. There are always some trusted people I rely on to tell me if I should start to smell bad – for the record, I wash as often as most and more than many, but anyone can step into or brush against something unsavory, and if I were to do that I would have no way of knowing. I am obviously more at risk than others for a variety of household disasters – I still feel a little sick when I think of the cozy winter afternoon when I set a slow-cooking casserole into the oven, and a couple of hours later was standing at the stove top and literally reaching for the matches to begin cooking the vegetables when Mr. Los Angeles burst through the door, knocked the matches from my hand, and flung open the oven door to release the gas which had been collecting there. But it’s not something I dwell on. Even people with five senses have near misses from time to time.

It’s lonely, though, being anosmic. I don’t know anyone else who suffers from it, and I rarely read about it, either: it’s not a dramatic disability, after all, and there’s really not a lot of colorful conversation to be mined from it. We had a brief moment in the sun when Covid caused temporary loss of smell in some sufferers; but time passed, and life and medicine moved on, and now we’re back hiding in the shadows again. Call me Mrs. Cellophane.

A couple of years ago, Mr. Los Angeles and I did what many Californians have done, and converted our bedraggled and too-thirsty front lawn into a more water-wise collection of waving grasses, sages, and lavenders. I chose the plants for it, and both I and the many passers-by who stop to compliment it think it looks beautiful. To my surprise and delight, and by the purest of happy coincidence, I appear to have accidentally chosen plants that smell beautiful too.

It makes me feel very good when people tell me I have made a yard that looks pretty. But when they tell me I have made a yard that smells sweet, well, that makes me feel like the cat’s pajamas.