Category Archives: Scent Culture Monitor

SCNews

New York’s Smell Dating

“The first mail odor dating service.”

smelldating

“Love at first whiff is the idea behind Smell Dating, a New York matchmaking service that promises to help single people sniff out their perfect match by breathing in the odors from dirty T-shirts.

Artist Tega Brain, who teaches at New York’s School for Poetic Computation, and Sam Lavigne, an editor and researcher at New York University, created Smell Dating, which they describe as an art project.

Each of its first 100 clients received a T-shirt to wear for three days straight without bathing. The clients then mailed the T-shirts back to Brain and Lavigne’s “Sweat Shop” at NYU, where they were cut into swatches. Smell Dating then sent batches of 10 mixed swatches back to the clients to sniff this week.

A match will be made if one client likes the scent of another and the olfactory attraction is mutual…”

Read more at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bodyodor-idUSKCN0WQ1K7

SCNews

AJ+ Segment & Al Jazeera Documentary about Oud

AJ+ Arabic has produced a brief segment about oud:
“The price per kilogram for one of the finest kinds of oud incense is $9 million! als does it smell?”

Screenshot 2016-03-28 16.15.45

“80 Ferrari cars equal the price of this piece of wood, a very rare piece that weights 16 kilograms.
20 million dollars = 80 Ferrari cars!
If you owned it, you’d burn it. Don’t be amazed! This piece is one of the highest quality ouds called kinam.
There are many kinds of oud. It prices have risen rapidly due to the high demand on it in the past ten years.
The regions of the world that consume the most oud are: the Arab Gulf countries, China, and perfume-producing European countries.
The trees that produce out grow in southeast Asia.”

Al Jazeera has also produced a documentary titled “The Smoke of Gold” which examines oud as a social icon in the Arabian Gulf states, a symbol of hospitality and warmth, the smell of which is purported to chase away the blues. The documentary is filled with details and valuable information about this beguiling material and its methods of extraction and production. It charts its journey from India and Southeast Asia (Thailand and Malaysia), the only areas where the trees it’s extracted from grow, to France and Britain. The full documentary is available to watch online (in Arabic, without subtitles) on Al Jazeera Arabic YouTube channel: http://ajar.io/am5j

(Translated by Ashraf Osman)

event, SCNews

Elodie Pong: “Paradise Paradoxe”

A fragrant exhibition at Helmhaus Zürich
11 March – 8 May 2016 

You can close your eyes but you can’t turn off your nose. Elodie Pong, video and installation artist from Zurich, investigates the invisible olfactory architecture that surrounds us as the point of departure for her solo exhibition at Helmhaus Zürich. Visitors encounter plants that ripened in a 3-D printer, a robot that hurls the names of perfumes at the wall – and a fragrance that has never been smelled before (White, developed in collaboration with Roman Kaiser of Givaudan).

You can find more information (in German) here, or in English (as PDF).

And if you’re in Zurich, please join us tomorrow for the first meet-up of the Scent Culture Club (SCC) at the Karl der Grosse Center in the heart of the city (right across from Grossmünster)!