How to Become a Better Smeller: Train Your Brain

In What the Nose Knows, I stressed that what sets perfumers apart from the rest of us is not the sensitivity of their noses, but the way they have learned to think about smell. They learn to identify the raw materials of perfumery by memorizing ever-finer discriminations within the basic fragrance families: floral, citrus, woody, etc. They learn to mentally analyze novel perfumes with reference first to general types (e.g., Oriental) and then to more specific subtypes (floral-Oriental). Anyone with a working sense of smell can attempt this training, just as anyone so inclined can learn to distinguish the varietal character of different types of wine.

In the physical realm, professional practice of this sort results in measurable changes in brain organization. For example, the motor control areas devoted to fine movements of the left hand is bigger than average in violinists, suggesting that the brain reorganizes according to the functional demands made upon it. Now a team of French researchers has extended this logic into the realm of perfumery.

Jane Plailly and her colleagues studied brain activation during odor perception and odor imagination in 14 student perfumers and 14 full-fledged professionals. Why odor imagery?

for the average person it is much easier to imagine visual images than olfactory ones. In contrast, perfumers have learned to form olfactory sensory representations through daily practice and extensive training. Furthermore, they claim to have the ability to produce perceptual images of smells in the total absence of odorants. Forming mental images of odors is thus a crucial component of the perfumer’s expertise.

Another reason is to compare brain activity during odor imagery and actual odor perception. We know that visual imagery is a real mental phenomenon because it activates the same brain areas that function during actual visual stimulation. Thus, Plailly et al. recorded brain activity with fMRI as each subject sniffed 20 different odors; they compared the results to activity as the subject imagined the same 20 odors (cued by their printed names).

The students were from ISIPCA in Versailles and therefore familiar with the raw materials and their names. The odors were delivered through a standard oxygen mask as the subject lay in the MRI magnet; delivery was timed to the subject’s respiratory cycle. The odors used were:

aldehyde C-11, alpha-damascone, benzyl acetate, beta-ionone, citronellol, dihydromyrcenol, eucalyptol, eugenol, lavandin (essential oil: EO), lemon (EO), linalyl acetate, linanol, methyl anthranylate, orange (EO), phenylethyl alcohol, sandalwood (EO), spearmint, tangerine (EO), triplal, and vanillin.

Plailly’s team compared brain activity while smelling odor X to brain activity while imagining odor X. Across students and professionals, similar areas were active during perception and imagery. “This result showed that mental imagery can induce the activation of the primary olfactory brain region.” In other words, olfactory mental imagery is real and it happens the same way as visual imagery.

The researchers found no difference between professionals and students in response to actual odors. When it came to odor imagery, however, there were significant differences. Compared to students, the professional perfumers showed decreased activity in three specific mini-regions of the brain. This seems paradoxical at first—remember that violin practice creates larger left-hand motor control areas—but it can be explained.

The areas in question deal with olfactory character and association. With a professional’s experience, it takes relatively less mental effort to imagine a specific odor. Tell him “dihydromyrcenol” and he quickly brings it to mind; activation of the brain areas used during odor identification is no longer necessary to create a mental image of a familiar smell.

Think of crossword puzzles as an analogy. A novice counts the squares before filling in a likely word; the seasoned crossword hound knows at a glance if his answer fits the spaces available. As Plailly et al., point out, this automatization of response is a useful thing: it is, for example, what frees the piano player from thinking about the notes and allows him to relax and concentrate on the expressive aspects of the music.

Our findings thus demonstrate that training can alter the neural processes that are activated when imagining an odor. Whereas the creation of an odor mental image was a more automatic mnestic process in professional perfumers, this process needed to be supported by previously encoded associations in student perfumers. More strikingly, by comparing the functional data obtained during odor imagery with the level of experience in professional perfumers, we revealed the functional reorganization of several brain regions. When imagining an odor, the experienced perfumers exhibited lower levels of activity in key regions involved in olfactory and memory processing: the primary olfactory cortex (bilateral aPC [anterior piriform cortex] and right pPC [posterior piriform cortex]), the left and right hippocampus and the left olfactory orbitofrontal cortex.

I like this study for a couple of reasons. It examines a phenomenon—olfactory mental imagery—that happens in the real world, and uses naturally occurring groups—students and professionals—in its experimental design. Finally, it gets at the cognitive processes that are central to the sense of smell. There’s a lot more to be done, but this is a fine start.

The study discussed here is “Experience induces functional reorganization in brain regions involved in odor imagery in perfumers,” by Jane Plailly, Chantal Delon-Martin, Jean-Pierre Royet. It was published in Human Brain Mapping 33:224-234, 2012.

The 2011 FiFi Awards Shows: Comedy Gold

This year, as most, I didn’t pay much attention to the Fragrance Foundation’s annual FiFi Awards show. Back in the day, I would don the striped pants and Brooks Bros. cummerbund and go in person, largely for the pre-show industry power-schmoozing at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. It was fun to catch up with all my French colleagues chain-smoking out on the balcony overlooking the fountain. But those days are gone. And not just the outdoor smoking. The post-show dinner used to be held in a tent in adjacent Damrosch Park; now that’s the venue for the entire show. The experience is a little less . . . grand.

However, since my friend Mandy Aftel had three creations in the running for the Indie Brand award, I checked The Fragrance Foundation’s website for a list of the winners. Here’s what I found 24 hours after the awards ceremony:



D’oh!

I looked around for more news, but found mostly celebrity sites and 300,000 pictures of Fergie who won New Fragrance Celebrity of the Year. This drew an unkind comment over on Celebrity-Gossip.net:

Most Likely to Own a Food Chain Restaurant
Submitted by mannequin (not verified) on Thu, 2011-05-26 06:20.

Fragrance Celebrity of the Year Award? Please. It’s like elementary school where they think up mindless meaningless awards for each student, no matter how untalented, just so no one gets their feelings hurt. Actors and actors should get acting awards, period.

C’mon, Mannequin, don’t be a hater!

Eventually I found this morning’s New York Post story headlined “Unwelcome Scent”:

A bad smell of smoke plunged the Fragrance Foundation’s 2011 FiFi Awards into the dark when Lincoln Center officials turned off the power -- leaving Fergie, Halle Berry, Tom Ford, Mary J. Blige, Desiree Rogers and beauty executives shuffling in their seats.

Uh oh!

And that wasn’t all:

Paz de la Huerta [of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire] couldn’t announce one winner because there was no name in the envelope, leaving her looking confused at the podium.

Whaaat the . . . ?

I dug around a little more and saw that Basenotes had run the whole ceremony in real time with a LiveStream feed, and sponsored Twitter commentary by PinkManhattan’s Sali Oguri.

The video is still there, so I poured a double martini and hit play. I’m so glad I did—it’s pure comedy gold. Start with the first five minutes in which FF president Rochelle Bloom takes the stage and attempts to hush the unruly tent-full of power schmoozers and super-excited Celebrities of the Year. She fails and throws a mini hissy fit, all recorded with excellent audio. All the while a red spray behind her skull made me think I was witnessing the lost head-shot frame from the Zapruder film. But no, it’s not brain splatter, it’s Ms. Bloom’s hat thingy.

If you are an awards show masochist you can watch the entire event—all 2 hours, 14 minutes of tedium, complete with cheesy PowerPoint slides. If you just want the funny bits, check out Kate Walsh presenting in the dark (starts at 14:15) and Paz de la Huerta’s empty envelope (starting at 49:20).

Enjoy.

Rochelle Bloom Gets Her Bell Rung

The Fragrance Foundation tried to promote perfume use with the image of an atomizer—an obsolete delivery device.

Now they are promoting the FiFi Awards with an equally obsolete trope: “ringing the closing bell” on the NASDAQ, an electronic stock exchange that doesn’t even have a trading floor.

So how is that One Mighty Drop campaign going, anyway?



As of May 22, 16 out of the 18 fragrance blogs on the FirstNerve Solo Blog Index have Alexa traffic rankings higher than OneMightyDrop.com.

The FF could have gotten more eyeballs more cheaply buying ad space on a few smelly blogs.

Tripping the Light Transgressive

What is it with British art students? First we had Jammie Nicholas who decided to create a perfume from a BM instead of flushing it down the toilet. Now we have Leah Capaldi, one of five artists shortlisted for The Catlin Art Prize in England. Emma Love in The Independent describes her entry:

Leah Capaldi’s performance piece involves two actors at a time (one female, one male), who will each be sprayed with a whole bottle of Chanel Allure or Allure Pour Homme. They will walk among visitors at The Tramshed in London . . .

What do you mean, you don’t get it? Have you no appreciation for Art? Alright then, let Ms. Capaldi spell it out for you:

“The idea came from when I was at the British Museum a while ago looking at a statue and a woman walked past me wearing so much perfume it was unbelievable. I found it stifling and had a real physical reaction; I had to walk to the other end of the gallery to get out of that space,” says the RCA sculpture graduate Capaldi, who has already sprayed herself with perfume and travelled on public transport around London in the rush hour to see how people would react.

Now do you get it? Brilliant, yes? She’s grossing people out with perfume. It’s transgressive. Therefore, it’s Art.

Ms. Capaldi is a multi-media artist; she also uses a giant Mickey Mouse head and chocolate cake.

Sounds like fun and free government grant money to me. I’m already working on my first performance piece. It involves students from the Royal College of Art, his-and-her thongs printed with the Union Jack, and a bucket of KFC Fiery Buffalo Wings. The piece is called “Flaming British Assholes.”

Transgressive!

ISDP: Merry Month of May Edition

[This installment of ISDP couldn’t be posted on Friday the 13th because of the Blogger outage.—Ed.]

I Smell Dead People began life, so to speak, two years ago on a Friday the 13th. It still gives us goose bumps when we post an update on that auspicious day. Little did we know at the time that the Uncle Fester demographic was so widespread on the Web. But to all you ghoulish olfactophiles who keep coming back for more, we say welcome and breath deep! Here’s your monthly roundup of the macabre incidents that begin with a foul odor and all end in the same dismal place.

In many ISDP incidents, it falls to the local building manager or maintenance guy to open up the premises in question. On occasion they are also the ones who first pick up the scent. That was the case in Los Angeles on April 15:

a foul odor led a manager at the residential facility at 622 S. Wall to find the body of a 47-year-old man who had been dead approximately three days. Detectives confirmed the man died of blunt force trama.

Parking lots are a surprisingly frequent location for ISDP incidents. The latest example comes from Mooresville, Indiana:

An employee of a local Meijer store found the body of a missing Danville woman Saturday in her van weeks after she was reported missing. . . .

Employees indicated that because it is a 24-hour store with a large parking area, it isn’t uncommon for cars to be there numerous days. [The Hendricks County Sheriff’s public information officer] said an employee finally became suspicious after noticing a foul smell and flies around the minivan.

2011 is turning into a banner year for Norman Bates Award nominees. Here we present John Clauer of Santa Cruz, California. The remains of Heather Stearns, his 30-year-old girlfriend, were found in his apartment on April 26.

Stearns’ body was found in the apartment of 63-year-old John Clauer in Santa Cruz on Tuesday after neighbors complained about an unusual odor. Authorities say she had likely been dead for more than a week.

The circumstances were suspicious and authorities later determined that Stearns has been subjected to significant physical trauma. Clauer, meanwhile, was on parole for a burglary conviction.

A parole officer had visited the room on the afternoon of his arrest, but the officer apparently did not notice the corpse’s stench, authorities said.

State Parole spokesman Fred Bridgewater said Thursday that a report was due today on the parole officer’s visit. He declined to comment further.

Who says that California isn’t getting its money’s worth from its massive public employee sector?



Finally, this is not exactly an ISDP story, but having watched Attack of the 50-Foot Woman on TV as a kid, this item brought us a pang of nostalgia.

Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said. (. . .)

Susan Savage, an actress, went to check on Vickers after noticing old letters and cobwebs in her elderly neighbor's mailbox.

Sic transit gloria mundi.


Yvette Vickers

Farting on the Bus: Questions for Daniel Senu-Oke

Our new hero is Anthony Nichols, a thirteen-year-old student at the Canal Winchester Middle School, in Ohio.

Anthony and his buddy were on the school bus last week when they cut the cheese in a big way. This led to an utterly predictable response by their fellow riders:

the flatulence apparently caused a ruckus on the bus amid a flurry of laughs, jeers and lowering of windows

Pretty standard stuff for a middle school bus.

The bus driver, ticked off because he had previously warned the dastardly duo that this behavior was unacceptable, turned Anthony and his buddy over to Assistant Principal Seymour Skinner Daniel Senu-Oke for discipline.

Also pretty standard stuff.

But then Mr. Senu-Oke guaranteed himself a place in the annals of school administration idiocy when he suspended the boys from the bus for “making an obscene gesture in violation of the student code of conduct”. According to the boy’s father, Mr. Senu-Oke also “suggested my son should hold his gas on this hourlong bus ride”.


Assistant Principal Daniel “Hold It In” Senu-Oke

The social psychology of farting is something we take seriously here at FirstNerve. But the notion that farting constitutes an obscene gesture breaks new ground in semiotic theory. It raises some philosophical questions we’d like to ask Mr. Senu-Oke:

Does the gestural equivalent reside in the sound or in the smell?

In your view of Canal Winchester community standards, is a Silent-But-Deadly not obscene?

Is a Bart Simpsonesque armpit fart noise obscene?

And finally, when someone cuts you off in traffic, is your response to fart loudly?

When a Scent Becomes a Thought Crime

Bastards.

The Coffee Bean Meme: Olfactory Palate Cleanser?

One of the cultural myths of smell that I blew up in What the Nose Knows concerns those jars of coffee beans you often see on the fragrance counter in the department store. The idea is that sniffing coffee beans acts as an olfactory palate cleanser, or a “reset button for the nose.”

There is a basis in psychophysiology for expecting difficulties when sampling one perfume after another. A person might adapt or become temporarily less sensitive to certain notes. His nasal passages might become flooded with a cacophony of scent, making it difficult to tell one sample from another. On the other hand, there is no scientific explanation—none, zip, nada—why the hundreds of different volatile compounds in coffee aroma would help with either of these scenarios.

In fact, the very concept of a palate cleanser is suspect. The one good study on the topic found that none of the usual palate cleansing methods (eating bread, rinsing with water, etc.) made any difference whatsoever in flavor perception.

Now comes a study in Perceptual and Motor Skills by psychologist Alexis Grosofsky and her colleagues at Beloit College in Wisconsin. They tackle the Bean Meme head-on, in a sniff test with college students and four commercial perfumes. (Somewhat hilariously, the scents are from the Designer Imposter collection of Parfums de Coeur. You know the ones: “If you like Calvin Klein’s Obsession, you’ll love our Confess.” Hey, Calvin Klein doesn’t fit into every research budget. And in any case, it makes absolutely no difference to the experiment.)

Each participant smelled three of the four perfumes from a dry down blotter in a jar, and rated them for pleasantness, intensity, and masculinity/femininity. Next came the palate cleanser: the subject sniffed a container full of coffee beans, lemon slices, or just plain air. Then the subject was given all four perfume samples—the original three plus a new one—and asked to pick out the new fragrance.

College students do pretty well on this test: they correctly fingered the new perfume 57% of the time after sniffing plain air, 62% of the time after sniffing beans, and 86% of the time after lemon. The differences between “palate cleansing” treatments were not statistically significant.

Smelling coffee beans did not results in higher mean accuracy of identification of novel fragrances. . . . Coffee beans and lemon seem to have no special refreshing properties. Fragrance sellers may wish to reconsider the practice of providing coffee beans to their customers.

Amen to that.

Whispers in the Wind

Anyone with a dead-tree or digital subscription to the Times of London will have received their copy of the monthly science magazine Eureka over the weekend. The May issue is about plants and I have a piece in it about plant scents titled “Whispers in the Wind.” Here's a taste:

Orchids, it turns out, have raised trans-species sexual deception to an art form. About one-third of all orchid species dupe their pollinators by mean of chemical mimicry. Insects often depend on smell to find mates and are hard-wired to be exquisitely aware of a few key odour molecules produced by females. Orchids take advantage of the insect’s narrow sensory focus by providing the lure but not the payoff. We have known since 1793 that orchids use false odour cues, but have been slow to fully credit the evolutionary cleverness of plants. Even Charles Darwin doubted the existence of such “an organized system of deception.” He wrote that anyone who believes in “so gigantic an imposture” must necessarily “rank the sense or instinctive knowledge of many kinds of insects, even bees, very low in the scale.” Today, we understand how powerfully insects are led by their nose (or antennae); still, some might consider an orchid’s deceit to be a harmless evolutionary prank. But from the point of view of a short-lived insect, the time wasted is costly indeed.

Sexual odours are not the only ones exploited by plants. In an equally perverse ruse, some plants attract blowflies by mimicking the stench of rotting meat. A female blowfly wants to lay her eggs on a ripe piece of carrion but is misdirected by the olfactory posings of Helicodiceros muscivorus, a Mediterranean lily also known as the dead-horse arum. The lily gets pollinated but the wasp’s offspring are destined for a brief and hungry life. Recently, directors of botanical gardens have taken to using rotting flesh scent as a revenue-enhancing tactic. Morbidly inclined members of the public will pay for the privilege of smelling the six foot tall flowering stalk of Amorphophallus titanum, an exotic tropical tuber with the stage name of Corpse Flower. A given tuber produces a stalk every six years or so, and the stinking protuberance lasts only a few days, or what carnival pitchmen used to call a short stand. Step right up, folks, and sniff while the sniffing’s good!

Plants are also quite adept at mimicking the smell of dung, a resource of great interest to many insect species which comes in a variety of olfactory shadings. Horse dung, for example, is characterized by monoterpenes, such as limonene, while the typical aroma of cow and pig manure is produced by p-cresol. In carnivores, such as dogs, the defining scat note is phenol. The quality of a plant’s false fecal odor is precisely tuned to the poop preference of its insect dupe.

How Fares the Smelly Web?

In the previous post, I explained why two sites were being dropped from the Solo Blog Index. Today, I introduce their replacements and review what’s happened since our last look at traffic rankings in the smelly blogosphere.

Our first new addition to the Solo Blog Index is BonkersAboutPerfume; the owner is Vanessa, who lives in Stafford, England and has been blogging since February 2008. The second is FragranceBouquet, run by Divina, a university student who has been blogging since April 2007. Welcome aboard!

The new sites were swapped in as of December 26, 2010. Here is the revised lineup of the Solo Blog Index, along with Alexa web traffic rankings from December 26, 2010 and the rankings as of today. The Solo Blog Index stood at 82 on December 26, and is at 86 today. (It began life, like all the indexes, at 100 on August 9, 2009.)



The index runs the gamut from highly-ranked, big-time sites down to the smaller blogs. The extensive range is a deliberate attempt to capture traffic trends at all sorts of sites. As usual, there is a lot of variability in traffic ranking over time among the solo blogs. Sorcery of Scent, for example, has been cruising the low 3 million range until suddenly losing altitude in the past two months. On the other hand, FirstNerve got back on its game after losing traffic to slow posting over Christmas and New Year’s.

Here is the Team Blog lineup; no changes have been made since the index began.



And here is the lineup of the Corporate and Community Blog Index, which has also remained unchanged since the beginning.



Alexa traffic rankings of sites in the Team and C&C indexes are much more stable than those in the Solo index. Why? Probably because they post more frequently.

Finally, look at how the Indexes have performed since our inspection on November 7, 2010.



The Team Blog Index, which has been higher than the others since January, 2010, slid below them in January 2011, bottomed out in late February, and climbed back to the top in April. This coincides with a ranking slump at PerfumeDaRosaNega.

The Solo Blog Index, which had been riding high, slumped this past month but is well within its normal range.

Meanwhile, the Corporate & Community Blog Index, which was near historic lows in November 2010, recovered nicely and has been steady though at non-spectacular levels.

For the moment, the smelly blogosphere seems to be chugging along just fine.

The Smelly Web: Time for a Change

It’s been six months since my last report on The Smell Web Indexes. The idea was to track the popularity of fragrance-related blogs according to their Alexa site traffic rankings. It made it possible to see who was up and who was down, and more importantly, see how this section of the blogosphere was faring in general. There was an index just for solo author blogs, another for team blogs, and a third for corporate and community blogs.

While I haven’t posted the results in a while, the data monkeys locked in the subcellar of FirstNerve Manor have continued to collect the data on a weekly basis. I recently visited some of the smelly sites and realized it is time to make some changes to the Indexes. I have done this before when sites were discontinued by their owners or simply fell off the Alexa traffic charts. I also knew I would have to stop tracking a blog if it ceased to be about smell; until now, this hasn’t happened.

On Vetivresse, a solo blog by Christopher Voigt, the last new post was on January 20, 2010. Three months later there was a post indicating that the blog had moved, but it actually seems to have ceased publishing. I’ve had no success finding it in a new location or in getting a response from Christopher. Therefore Vetivresse will be removed from the index.

In the absence of fresh posts, Alexa traffic rankings do not reflect current readership levels. When the Brazilian team blog Perfume da Rosa Negra went silent in November, 2010, I came close to removing them from the Team Blog Index. The site resumed posting on March 3 of this year, so the Rosa Negra team gets a reprieve.

Finally, over at Bitter Grace Notes, Maria Browning has written about perfumes in a blog that has a decidedly literary and artistic bent. Maria’s blog aesthetic—poetry matched to exquisite artwork—is exceptional and always interesting. I had never read D.H. Lawrence’s poem Dolor of Autumn before she posted it:

The acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.

Maria is not primarily a perfumer blogger, but when she writes about perfume her insights are worthwhile. Lately, she has written about it less; her last scented post was on October 17, 2010. In it she paired reflections on the movie Carnival of Souls with a consideration of Enigma, “a largely forgotten fragrance from the largely forgotten Alexandra de Markoff line”. It’s a good example of her style.

Bitter Grace Notes was quiet from November 12, 2010 until January 19, 2011. But since Maria’s reappearance there have been no new fragrance posts. Reluctantly, I’ve decided to remove the site from the Solo Blog Index. Even so, I will still be dropping by now and again because I enjoy it.

Blogging is hard work. Interests change. My decision to replace these blogs is based strictly on maintaining the concept and data integrity of the Smelly Web Indexes. It is not a reflection on the quality of the blogs.

Coming soon: Introducing the new players on the Indexes.

Texas Justice: The Stinky Case of the Italian Cowboy

Steve Korris, over at The Southeast Texas Record, describes the twists and turns in a legal dispute over an improperly installed grease trap that led to the odor of raw sewage plaguing two consecutive tenants of a mall-based restaurant space. It’s a malodorous tale of who knew what and when.

The second tenants—a couple who opened The Italian Cowboy restaurant in the Keystone Park Mall in Dallas—sued the mall manager after the “unbearable and ungodly odor” forced them out of business. They claim the manager knew about the malodor problem, and that in fact it was the reason the previous restaurant to occupy the site had closed. The couple accused the manager of fraud for misrepresenting that the space was suitable for the purpose for which it was being leased.

The mall manager’s response was that the lease agreement specified that the only representations being made about the property were those listed in the lease, and bad smell was not among them. In other words, we might or might not have known there was an odor problem, but since we didn’t assert that the premises smelled fine the tenant has no grounds for backing out of the lease.

Lower courts, and even three of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court of Texas, sided with the mall manager. But the majority ruing, issued by the Court last month, said the Italian Cowboy owners had established misrepresentation by the mall manager despite the restrictions of the lease.

The opinion has some piquant Texas flavor of its own. Writing in dissent, Justice Nathan Hecht was skeptical of tenants Francesco and Jane Secchi, noting they had been in the restaurant business for 25 years: “This was not their first rodeo.”

Get Your Chakra On

“Het-Heru Maatkeru is the goddess of magical scents.

Neato! How did she get that gig? By

“bridging the physical and spiritual realms using smell as the vehicle.

Evidently she’s tapped the “insight and traditions of the ancient Egyptians” to create “incredulous scents that vibrate with high frequency.”

Whoa. Is there a vibration theorist in the house? Paging Thomas Prevenslik. Maybe he can explain how high frequencies produce “incredulous” scents.

The Goddess has transublimated herself to the ethereal plane of PRWeb to disclose the latest:

Het-Heru has unveiled yet another dimension to her mastery, “The 28 Day Chakra Balancing Program.” “The 28 Day Chakra Balancing Program,” is a mesmerizing blend of exotic essentials oils created to coincide with the seven sacred power points within us all, known as chakras.

OK people, let’s stimulate those chakras. Boom, chakra, boom, chakra, boom, boom, boom! And remember,

we can activate ancient power daily by connecting with our higher selves through our sense of smell and touch.

Wait. I have a higher self? Where the hell is he? Probably off having a daiquiri while I pound out the blog posts. Lazy bastard.

Exit question: What happens when the Professeur de Parfums meets the Goddess of Magical Scents?