Smell & Tell | Getting to Know Your Sense of Smell

When

Wednesday October 29, 2025: 6:00pm to 7:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: 4th Floor Program Room

Description

The sense of smell lingers in the shadow of vision as the butt of stink jokes. Once considered a throw-away sense in random online polls, smell had a problem—no one took it seriously. Smell inhabits two classes of words. As a noun, it refers to the sensation of an odor or the odor itself. As a verb, it refers to the perception of an odor, or suggests something that's suspicious or undesirable (as in "stink", e.g. "Something is rotten in Denmark," in Hamlet.).
 
Smell is getting cooler by the second as you read this. Smell research increased in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to grow. Small- and large-scale olfactory art, which was already on the rise, endures. Museums are considering the addition of smell alongside relevant collections because smell bypasses the thalamus, and has a more direct connection to the memory and emotion centers of the brain—areas that are activated when we interact with art.
 
Artificial intelligence, digitization of smells, smell as cultural heritage, the list goes on and on. Curious? The best way to get to know your sense of smell is by SMELLING. We'll smell aromas on fragrance blotters using professional sensory evaluation techniques, so we can better understand their character and a secret theme in the scent flight sextet, which will be revealed at the end of the presentation.
 
The Smell and Tell series of art+science programming is led by Michelle Krell Kydd, a trained nose in flavors and fragrance who shares her passion for gastronomy, sensory evaluation and the perfume arts in Glass Petal Smoke. Smell & Tell builds community through interactions with flavor, fragrance and storytelling.

Smell and Tell is presented remotely by Michelle Krell Kydd to an in-person audience. Fragrances and other materials are provided to in-person attendees.