Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Perfume Works

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

Women consistently rate scent as the most important factor in a man's attractiveness and men have been manipulating that for centuries with scents of all sorts. Learn about the fascinating history -- and, well, art -- of making perfumes in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Jers. That'd be great if that was your name. Jerry Jerry Jers. Yeah.

Like Tony Tony Tony. My friend used to call them Tony, Tony, Tonyi, Tonyi, because of the spelling. Oh, no, I know. Oh, okay. But I thought the last one was an E with a little accent. Well, that was Tony, but he didn't say Tony accent. I would say that's Tony. Well, the point is it's E-I-Y, or the three letters.

When Jerry pressed your cord, did you think we were going to be talking about Tony, Tony, Tony? I never know what the heck we're going to talk about for the first 30 seconds. I would not have predicted that one. I was going to tell a little story, but I'm not going to now. What's that scent you're wearing? Is Eau de Chuck Musk. It's called Chusk.

In French, that means water of Chuck Musk. Gross. Yeah. I'm wearing Dracar Noir. Are you really? No. No. Did you think you'd be able to smell it?

Well, yeah. Sure. I never know. I don't want to, like, I'm very sensitive to making fun of people and what they choose to do. You know? I'm not making fun of anybody. No, but I didn't want to say you're wearing cologne, you're wearing Dracar Noir.

Gross. I used to love Dracar Noir back when I was in seventh, eighth grade. I believe it. Man, alive. Those were the cologne days. I looked it up and I was like, what does Dracar Noir mean? Noir, black, right? Sure.

What is Dracar? Apparently, Dracar or Dakar is a name for a Viking ship. Nice. Dracar has kind of come into French colloquially as a big ship or yacht. So I think Dracar Noir, here's the fact of the podcast sadly, means black yacht. Nice. Yeah. That means you are very fine because all you see is white yachts.

Have you ever seen a black yacht? Nope. That would be pretty slick. Yeah. It'd be very hot. That's why they don't paint yachts black, I would imagine. Oh, yeah, I guess so. Because they sit out in the sun all day.

So I wore Benetton colors. I never wore that one. And that smell today is still very evocative because I have the bottle, I don't know if I still had it. You had it. Keister? Yeah. What?

Yeah, I keistered it in 1989. Every once in a while when you're feeling nostalgic, you just shed it. No, I can't find it. I just... Oh, where is it? I thought you were saying you still had the bottle. I keistered it and I can't find it. Oh, I see.

Somewhere up in there. Somewhere in your abdomen. No, I had it for the longest time. I don't think I still have it though. And as we'll see, cologne can go bad, but this was in a dark drawer and it seemed to smell the same to me. Yeah. That sounded like a perfume industry propaganda that no matter what you do to protect it,

it's still going to go bad in two years. That's like these Vicodin are no good anymore. Exactly. Don't believe that for a second. No, but definitely don't just assume that they've downgraded in potency and take like four. Right. Although I do think... I do think cologne and perfume could definitely go bad if not

cared for correctly. Right, but if you care for it correctly, we should probably just go ahead and say, if you keep it out of the sunlight, keep the artificial light to a minimum, keep it in its original bottle. Capped. Yeah. Supposedly, it stays good for two years. Yeah, yeah.

That's the problem that I think is BS. As long as you don't expose it to the outside air, keeping it in its original bottle, and the sunlight's not saying they're breaking its molecular chains, it's going to be fine and stable. Yeah. I mean, I had literally had proof on cologne and Vicodin that I'm happy to come out on the record about. That's great, man.

All right. This is a good article, I thought, a nice choice. Yeah. I agree. I think perfume is surprisingly interesting. It's one of those things where you just take for granted or you think, oh, that's just for the fashionista, glitterati types or Madison Avenue folks kind of thing. Then you dig into it and you're like, no, that's pretty cool.

Perfumes for everyone. Even if you don't wear it, it's still interesting to know about. For example, the history. Did you read much of the history? Yeah. You sent me some pretty cool stuff. This isn't necessarily perfume, but I guess perfume is really anything that smells. Yes.

It doesn't have to smell great. Yeah. We're generally talking about perfume, meaning like a product that you go buy to change or enhance your scent, right? Yeah. But if you look around, everything is perfumed unless it's specifically marketed as unscented or non-perfumed. But just about everything else has some sort of perfuming to it.

Yeah. But it has to be a substance. That's what is the distinction between like a perfume and an odor. Yeah. Yeah. Like I guess the odor actually comes off as say the plant. Right. The perfume is when you go to that plant and squeeze the odor out of it, put it in a bottle,

put it on your skin. Yeah. Well, you don't need to put it in a bottle. Yeah, I guess not. You just rub those leaves all over you. But like I said, back in the day, ancient priests, you sent me this thing and said they burned incense initially to cover up stinky dead animal carcasses that they were sacrificing, which makes sense that the Latin translation is through the smoke.

So perfume means? Yeah. Like you can smell it through the smoke of I guess these burning dead animals. Or through the smoke, you feel a lot better about sacrificing animals because you can't smell the death. Yeah. The ancient Egyptians very quickly. So like originally these were priests using perfume to cover up animal sacrifices.

Right. The ancient Egyptians said, we got a better idea. Let's use the glands from those animals to send ourselves for lovin'. Yeah. Let's put it on our stinky parts. Yeah. Originally it was animal sacrifice and it went very quickly into sexuality. And ever since then, the purpose of perfume has remained virtually unchanged.

It is to stimulate sexuality in some form or fashion. Yeah. Especially men wearing cologne. Yeah. And we'll get to some of those reasons in a bit. But that's a good primer. I never really thought about that. But I guess you're right.

You're wearing it to smell more attractive even on the friendship tip. Sure. Doesn't necessarily have to be sexual, I don't think. Well it depends because some of the early ingredients that stuck around until in some cases the 1990s and are still being used in other cases are from basically the sex glands, the scent glands of animals. Yeah. And this article points out, it's funny to think about the first person who saw a skunk

and said, you know what, I'm going to get all up in that anal gland and rub some of that on me. Exactly. And the musk deer. The musk deer, I'm going to get some of that. The beaver produces castorium, the civet cat, which is a Himalayan cat, the anal glands. That's the skunk one? Yeah.

There's like a dozen animals they classify as civet cats. And then ambergris. Yeah. Or ambergris. I don't, I can't remember which way to pronounce it. Let's just say both are acceptable. Okay. We'll agree to disagree.

Ambergris. I can't remember. It's the whale stuff. Yes. So supposedly everybody said, well, it's a whale vomit. When a whale eats a squid and its beak gets kind of in its stomach and it needs to dislodge it. Beak?

Yeah. A squid beak. Oh, okay. I thought I had another one called beaks. Yeah. Oh, it's a beak. It's probably the most disturbing part on any animal on the planet. The fact that a squid has a hard beak just like a bird is...

Why is it disturbing? It just keeps me up at night. Because a squid is like gelatinous and flimsy. It's not supposed to have a hard beak that can break bone. Well, I think it is supposed to. That's wrong to me. So if a whale has that beak in its stomach after eating a squid, it needs to get rid of it.

So the common wisdom was that it puked up this stuff and that's what ambergris is. Yeah. This is the sperm whale specifically. Right. Yeah. So ambergris is like this, well, it's just like bile and puke and that kind of thing, but it floats on the surface of the ocean and photo degrades and hardens and turns into this waxy substance that's actually flammable that can have its own scent that

has long been and in some cases used as a major ingredient in perfume, right? Yeah. I think it's supposed to make perfume stick to your body more. Right. It's a fixative is what it's called. The weird thing is, is they're recently finding out that it's possible that ambergris, it comes out of the bottom end of the whale. Yeah, they don't puk it up.

Not the mouth. Sure. They poop it out. It's basically whale diarrhea that you're using in your perfume. So consider this, depending on the perfume and the fixatives it uses, you could be using anal glands from a beaver and diarrhea from a whale in order to make yourself smell sexy. Yeah. So what's insane, Chuck, is that it actually works?

Well, sure. That's debatable, depending on who you are, I guess. Right. I hate the smell of perfume. All perfumes. There's not a single perfume scent, even a component of a perfume that you find pleasant. I don't like scented perfume for women specifically is what I'm talking about as far as working sexually.

I don't even mean sexually necessarily that you're worked up, getting a little hotter to the collar, even just relaxing. Not pleasing to me at all. Really? Nope. Don't like it. Do you like scents of anything? I mean, Emily makes all sorts of soaps and stuff, do you like any of those scents?

Those are all natural. That's the difference. Most every perfumed product is synthetic, it's on the market. It depends, for sure, the cheaper ones definitely are, but not all of them are. Most of them. I mean, there's still plenty of that used like ambergris, what's more natural than whale diarrhea. Well, that's true.

Not here in the US, though, we should point out is illegal to use that in perfumes in the US of A. But the European perfume houses still do. But no, I'm very specifically averse to most scents because we don't use chemical products as much as possible, so I don't use scented sprays, scented deodorants, like febrize to me is the most disgusting thing you can do to your home. Fabric softener, sheets, laundry detergent, nothing, nothing with scents, I hate it. There's nothing to me worse than going to a hotel and smelling scented sheets that have

clearly been washed with some kind of perfumy detergent. What if it smells like something pleasant, though? There's nothing. I understand why. No, they're all supposed to be pleasant. This smells like lavender. And none of it does. To you, it's just like this is synthetic, so it feels bad to me.

And smells bad, yeah. I got you. But the idea, you just rattle off a bunch of uses for perfume beyond actual perfume. That's actually kind of an old concept. The what's long been considered the seat of Europe's perfume industry is a gross, I think GRASSE in the south of France. And it's got this unusual microclimate to where all of these wonderful plants like jasmine and orange blossoms and lavender and all this stuff can grow and the locals figured

out number one that they needed to grow the stuff, but also to extract it in different ways. You can extract essential oils, you can extract absolutes, you can extract concretes, but what you're doing is extracting these odorant molecules from plants and using it to perfume. What they were originally using it to perfume, and I think like the 14th or 13th century were leather gloves. So remember Catherine de' Medici? Oh yeah, she's been coming up a lot lately.

A lot. She was given some scented gloves by the tanners of GRASSE France, which was originally there. That was their gig, was making leather goods, but they stunk like death. So just like those ancient priests, the people of GRASSE said, we need to perfume these. They came up and started this whole trend of perfumed leather gloves by sending a complimentary parrot to Catherine de' Medici who loved them and then all of a sudden bam, GRASSE is not only making these awesome leather goods, it becomes the perfume capital of the world and stays that way for a very long time.

Because she essentially was the first celebrity sponsor of a product. She was in the copies of the local rag saying, I love the smell of my lavender leathers. Exactly. That's a pretty cool story. And so that was the heart of it all then. Yeah, and GRASSE still makes not nearly as much as they used to, but they still produce tons of essential oils every year of all these wonderful plants. Nice.

Yeah. See, I'm down with the essential oils. That's different. Right, but that stuff is frequently used in perfumes. I mean, they might not be using it in like you're tired or anything like that. That's probably a synthetic scent. Not probably. It's absolutely a synthetic scent.

But there are still plenty of perfumes that do use essential oils in there as a smell molecule. Sure. Well, they don't because it's expensive. Right. So let's talk a little bit about what perfume as the stinky stuff that you use in atomizer, if you're fancy, to spray on your body to smell sexy. And a little bit about smell in general, I guess.

The liquid perfume that we're talking about is basically just a concoction of alcohol and water and these smell molecules that basically what you're smelling is evaporation into the air. And they do point out in the article, not everything, it's light enough to float, but not everything that's light enough to float has a smell. Right. And what do they point out? Carbon monoxide is the common danger.

Right. You can't smell it. You might be dying. That's why you have the detectors in your home. Yeah. If all of a sudden you can't think right, and there's no other reason why, it's probably carbon monoxide leak in your house. That's right.

There's no old bucket in around. You should check the battery on your carbon monoxide detector. So not only do some molecules not have a scent, they're just not odorants. Some odorants aren't smelled by all people. Like apparently sandalwood, natural sandalwood is the most commonly uncensed odorant. Yeah. The natural original, the OG. Right.

Yeah. If you are making a perfume or something like that, you may be making something that can't be smelled by a significant portion of the population, which is a challenge in making perfume. Yeah. And the whole cilantro thing, I've posted a link to a story about that. I know we've talked about it before. It's like 10% of the population has a genetic marker that thinks it tastes or tastes and

smells soapy. Yeah. And this article points out that what's going on is not that there's some alteration of the smell or taste of cilantro, but that there's a note to it missing so that it's incomplete what people are sensing and therefore they find it gross. But I saw another study that showed that 30% of odorant receptors are different from person to person. Take any two people, 30% of their odorant receptors are going to be just wildly different.

So it is a real challenge to make a perfume that is pleasing to enough people, and as a result, some people have gone the opposite way and they're just making exactly what they think is super cool. And if you like it, awesome. If it smells good, great. If not, whatever. Right. But that's kind of counter to the main mode of thinking in the perfume industry, which

is... Why this audience is the best. Exactly because more people are going to buy it and you're going to make more money. And if it's a really good one, it'll be a classic that people develop like a brand loyalty to and buy again and again and again year after year. Chanel number five. Yeah. Which...

Classic perfume. It is. And it was the first perfume to use synthetic ingredients. Did you know that? I did not. And apparently it was not a hit right out of the gate. It was created in the 20s for Chanel, but it wasn't until Marilyn Monroe in an interview in the mid 50s said that all she wears to bed are two drops of Chanel number five that

all of a sudden it was like forever. The forever perfume. So every guy bought it for his wife. Yeah. Because it would make him think of Marilyn Monroe. But it's just stayed that way ever since, even though the Marilyn Monroe story's been kind of lost mostly to popular culture. There's a documentary on Coco Chanel.

I haven't seen it yet. It's supposed to be good. Oh yeah? Yeah. So perfume oil specifically is a super, you know, this is what we're talking about being like steamed or pressed out of like a fruit or a plant or something. It's super concentrated. So it's only, it's going to be a 98% alcohol and 2% water.

So that's the solvent. Yeah. And then you take the solvent and the amount of solvent that's combined with perfume oil, you have different types of perfume. Yeah. Exactly. And you know, it'll say this on the bottle if you, if you go to, if you ever read the back of a perfume bottle, which I haven't.

But a perfume, P-A-R-F-U-M is at least 25% perfume oil, eau de parfum 15 to 18%, eau de toilette or toilet water is 10% and eau de cologne is like 2 to 5%. That's Axe body spray. It's light. It's very light. Yeah. And talking about like a, just a straight up cologne can also mean a man's scent, right? Which is sometimes way more than 5%.

Yeah. I think I've said this before when I lived in Yuma, Arizona, post college, there was a lot of dudes wearing cologne and I was like, you guys are still wearing cologne, huh? Yeah. Like, yeah, man. You don't wear cologne? I was like, nope. Where's your curve?

Yeah. It was a very strange thing to me because I'm just, I don't know, I don't see a lot of guys that wear cologne anymore. Oh, it's definitely fallen away again. Maybe I'm traveling in the wrong circles. Well, in America, it was cool at first and then it kind of fell away and then thanks to Marilyn Monroe and Chanel, it kind of came back big time. And then it kind of peaked, I think, in the 90s for men especially.

But it's still going strong. One Armani, G.O.D. Armani, I think, I can't remember what it's called. It made several hundred million dollars in 2006. Is that one of the unisex ones? No, but it's for men. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I always thought that whole new, well it seems new, the unisex cologne.

I always thought that was interesting to try and design something for both men and women. Right. It's like actually, originally there were no gender differences among any perfumes, especially in France, in the French court. Men like to smell like lilac as well. Right. And you know, nothing wrong with that. The idea that lilac is a feminine scent is a new and social construct, you know, or the

idea that cedar is a manly scent, that's a new and social construct too, and very American as well. Sure. And it comes to categorizing, like we were just talking about, there are terms that are used in the biz, but it's not like there's any rule about it. It's just basically how people have grown to talk about perfume. Right. They're in the business of perfume.

But generally there are these categorizations, floral, that's a no-brainer, fruity, that's a no-brainer, green, that might be grassy or leafy, I like stuff like that. Like the olive oils that taste like grass, you ever had those? Yeah. Man, those are good. Or wheatgrass shot. That is not good. Ooh, I love it.

Do you? You don't like it? No. Oh man, I love it. It's like drinking down some grass clippings. I think I would rather drink grass clippings than wheatgrass. Really? Well, it is grass clippings actually.

But like fescue or something. Sure. We'll take a fescue shot then. I will. Urbaceous, like herbs, woody, like wood, amber, tree resin, thought that was interesting. Every time I want to say animal, like I want to say anemaniac for some reason, bodily smells, that's gross. Well, that's like from, that's musk.

Yeah. It's a bodily smell. Well, but then there's musk as its own category too, because it's just so singular. Right. I mean, there's also supposedly also, I guess either, I don't know if it's a subtype of musk or anemallic or whatever, but fecal is another thing too. Yeah. Calvin Klein's obsession is among the perfume industry well known as a very famous fecally

perfume. Yeah. Which one? Obsession. Obsession. Yeah. Like a hugely selling, very popular perfume being worn by people, if you walk past someone in the perfume industry, they're going to be like, there's some real fecal notes to

that one. Well, they said in the top notes, they say sometimes can be something really nasty just to attract you. I don't know what attract means, but I guess get your attention maybe, but that'll wear off the quickest. Right. It's not what lasts on your body. Right.

Which we'll get into that in a sec. Let me just finish this little list here. Okay, sorry. So the oriental, and it's proper usage here, amber and spice. And then a few other ones are categorized by the actual molecules like phenolic might smell like tar or lectonic, creamy lactate, lactose obviously, or aldehydeic, which is fatty. So those are the main categories, and we will get a little bit more into that chemistry

that we teased you with right after this. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it.

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podcasts. So Chuck, we talked about perfume being diluted, like heavily diluted. What a ripoff. It's almost all alcohol. Yeah, what a rip. The reason why though, it's not a rip. You would not want the perfume oil, which again is just essential oils or synthetic versions of those oils, and fixatives or synthetic versions of the fixatives.

So it might be essential oil lavender, some muskrat anal gland, and then solvent is most of the other stuff. It's laughing, but it's true. And then bam, you got a perfume right there. But the reason why it's so dissolved and why so much of it is alcohol is because the way that perfumes are designed is so that the different types of molecules, when they interact with the alcohol and the alcohol evaporates, will evaporate in a certain progression of time.

Yeah, I thought this is the most interesting part of this whole thing. The alcohol actually makes it possible to separate those notes. And they likened this article to hearing all the parts of a symphony at once. Like a lot of pleasing things all at one time is not necessarily a good thing. No, and that's what you would get if you stuck your face in a one-ton barrel of perfume oil. Yeah, you might say, man, this is sweet, but you wouldn't pick up on the subtleties of those odors.

Yeah, exactly. But what alcohol does is it takes that concentrated form and not only dilutes it, but it again spreads it out temporally. So when you first put it on, you put on a little perfume, right? The immediate notes, the top notes are what you smell immediately. And they go from anywhere, like immediate to maybe a few minutes usually. Yeah, the first ones you'll smell and the first one to leave your body. Exactly.

That's the top notes. And a perfume is designed so that as each set of notes, and there are three, there's top, heart, and bass notes, as each one is leaving, the next one is starting up. So you have this basically flowing transition, comparing it to a symphony is so apt. Because it's just like this kind of flowing melody of sense that work together by I guess dissolving, evaporating at a certain time, at a certain rate. Yeah, and like we said before the break there, a lot of times they will put something unpleasant in that first top note, and I guess it will just get your attention in the store.

Yeah, you're just like, oh, it's so fecal. Yeah, exactly. Or like, what was it, an anchorman? Oh, the musk? Yeah, it was like Puma musk. Oh, that one. The Puma urine or something. Paul Rudd's Cologne.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can't remember the exact line, but like 70% of the time it works all the time. Was it Panther? Yeah, it was Panther something. Man, that was a funny movie. And then you've got your heart notes next, right? Yeah.

How long did they last? They kick in anywhere and last for starting at two minutes to about an hour from what I saw. Those are going to be, it can be entirely different. It depends as we'll see what you're trying to get across. But you could do woody top notes with a vanilla base, or heart note. So it'll go from wood to vanilla to lemon citrus, base note, right? Or you could do it completely opposite.

You can just mix and match. It's like the Oak Ridge boys. It depends, right? It depends on the type of molecule you use. And as you're making synthetic odorants, you can make a synthetic odorant that's going to stick around as a base note, even though if you had an essential oil of that lemon, it would be just a top note because it's going to go away so quick. Yeah, and as we'll see later when you're making these perfumes, it's a real science

and a balancing act of getting exactly what they want because these smells as you said are coming and going and it is sort of like composing a symphony. Again. Again, man. So the base note, that's the one that's going to stick around the longest though, right? And come out latest. Yeah, it can come out starting usually about 30 minutes after you put it on and can stick around for a day if you're not careful.

And didn't you find something where no perfume is going to smell the same on any two people? Exactly. Right. Not only is it not going to smell the same on any two people, it's going to smell different to any two people, right? Because again, 30% of our odor receptors are different in every single person, plus also an odorant can activate different kinds of receptors depending on the person. And then lastly, that person is going to encode it differently.

Because scent is definitely its own thing as far as our senses go. And it's the only sense that's directly hardwired to the brain. So the odorant receptors go straight to the brain. Yeah, it doesn't send it to a nerve cell that's nearby first, right? Exactly. So it's like our scent of smell is hardwired to our brain. So it evokes some serious reaction in the brain. And there's also a hypothesis that the lobes of our brain evolved from olfactory buds,

that that's what they started out as. That would make sense. And then it just grew and grew and grew. And then we were all like brainstem and olfactory buds. And then the brain grew from that, which would be like hats off to the sense of smell because that's what started it all. Interesting. So the point is that our sense of smell, it's a big deal.

But it's different in each of us. And when you factor in our body chemistry, our skin, that's when it genuinely does smell differently on different people. Well, I would think it has to because everyone has a natural scent, I think, just as a person that's different from one another. Exactly. So when you put this... So you combine it, it's got to make a different thing, you know?

Right. It's kind of like a cherry pie, which you do throw some cool whip on me, which I would. I wouldn't do anything. I just throw a cool whip on you, you know, in the form of a pie to the face. Why not? That old gag. But when you're putting on the perfume, this is all coming around to this point. There are ways to do it supposedly that will get the most out of your perfume.

Like you shouldn't put it and rub it into your skin real hard. You don't want to like heat it up right away or anything like that. No, because then you break the chains of the top notes and you wear them out before your finger even comes away from your skin. Yeah. You just kind of dab it on lightly. Yeah, sure. You just did like the old lady move, dab it behind the ear, maybe.

Yeah. Or I've seen the other lady move to do it on the wrists and maybe rub that together a little bit. And then my big trick was to, because I liked the Benetton colors, but even back then didn't want to be super cologne-y. So I did the deal where I spray it in the air, then like walk through it, you know. That's even, I think, mentioned in this article. Oh, is it?

Is it a method? Yeah, that's a method. Okay. I was really onto something at 16. I think even rubbing your wrists together though would probably, no, because you don't want to generate heat. And one of the reasons why people put it behind their ears or on their wrists. It's stinky behind your ears for one.

That's one. You can also smell it yourself right there. Oh, yeah. But if you put your fingers behind your ears and then put them like, I don't know, on your head or something, you'll see that behind your ears is warm. Yeah, sure. On your wrists is warm. These are pulse points, right?

So your hot blood is close to the surface of your skin, so then that heat will start to break up the alcohol, will make it evaporate, and will hence make those different notes come out. Nice. That's all the heat you need. Any friction is too much heat. Right. So you say no on the wrist rub?

No wrist rub. Okay. I mean, if you want to waste your money and just get heart and base notes and no top notes, go for it. All right, Josh. So let's say, I thought this was all pretty interesting to you actually. Yeah. Let's say you want to launch Joshness.

You work for Polo and you just, you want to do Joshness. You're in their perfume department and you say, guys, this is going to be a, trust me on this one. You'll be a top seller. Right. So you go to Polo, your bosses, and they say, all right, Josh, what we need here is a brief. And the brief is going to outline, because, you know, again, you can't say, this is a perfume everyone's going to love, because they're like, there is no such thing.

So write up a brief, tell me who is going to love it, who it's going to appeal to. What do you want it to smell like? Yeah. What do you want this to say even? So Tom Ford launched one, it became very successful called Black Orchid, and he said, I want this to smell like a man's crotch. That was one. Can I give you another brief?

Please. For pure poison from Dior, the brief included, what is it like to have something soft and hard at the same time? Oh, I think we all know that. All right. And then here's another one. I don't know what this one was for, but... It's a Viagra ad as well.

So yeah, I don't know which one this is, but one brief described what they were after as, give us the scent of a warm cloud floating in a fresh spring sky over Sicily, raining titanium raindrops on a woman with emerald eyes. That's what somebody wrote down when they were trying to describe what scent they wanted. Yeah. I mean, those are legit briefs. That's how you're supposed to do it, describe not just the specific scents that you want, but what do you want it to say?

Generally, it's probably more something like classy or prosperous or something like that. Fecal. Then you want to write out how you're going to sell it, what form it's going to take. You also want to have a marketing plan. I think we could sell this in South America for the next five years. They're going to go crazy for it. Yeah, exactly. Then after that, it's going to go to a chemist and it's going to get mailed to what are called

fragrance houses because Polo doesn't make it themselves. They don't come up with it themselves, that is. And the chemist is employed by the fragrance houses and they send this brief out to a bunch of different fragrance houses and basically start a competition, like who's going to land this account? Yeah, exactly. See what you can do. So this fragrance house, they do a couple of things.

They have the perfumers who they actually are the chemists who come up with the formula. Yeah, they've got all these scents in their head and they know, like, oh, I know exactly what smells like a woman with emerald eyes. Sure. Super smellers, I would imagine. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's an odor tester job out there that's supposed to be great.

I don't know if I'd do so hot on that. Oh, yeah, you have to have just a naturally wonderful nose. Yeah, my nose is not naturally wonderful. It has to make like a curly Q. These fragrance houses also have, they don't just write the formulas. They also have the stuff in stock, all these different ingredients in warehouses, or they will work with another company who has it. If they're like, we don't have, you know, papaya, odor papaya, so we need to work with

a company who does. Right. They will sub that out. And then they have these chemists that actually work with gas chromatography mass spectrometry, which we've talked about in something. I can't remember what it was. It's going to be used for other things. Basically it analyzes odorant molecules.

Yeah, to say, here's what it's made of and here's how you can make a synthetic version of it. Exactly. For cheaper. Right, exactly. So then you have those people, those chemist analysts, and then you also have synthetic chemists who take the readouts from the gas chromatography and say, oh, I can build this. And then they build the synthetic molecules.

Exactly. Which is just mind-blowing. It is mind-blowing. All of these people are employed by the fragrance houses. That's right. One thing that they do, we did talk earlier about how they have this stuff in stock. A lot of times it can be the actual oils from pressing it and steaming it. But there's another...

Put it in a headlock. Exactly. There's another cool thing they have, though, called headspace. And that is when, if they want an odor or fragrance, they will put like an avocado in a jar and suck out the air every hour or constantly for hours. Right. And then they use gas chromatography to analyze that. And analyze that.

There you go. And then somebody goes and builds that, right? And that's what's called the headspace. The headspace is basically a synthetic version of an existing natural scent that somebody trademarks. And then all of a sudden it becomes part of the perfume industry's repertoire. Yeah. I mean, that's the space in the jar that's the literal headspace that has got the odor.

There's a dude named Christopher Broceus, and he started a company called Demeter. And they're known for making really weird perfumes like birthday cake, baseball mitt, baby aspirin, just weird stuff like that. Ooh, baby aspirin. But what's neat is they nail it. And one of the ways they nail it is by using, by making headspaces, one of the first ones they did was called soaked earth. He took some dirt from his parents' farm, put it in a bag, and took it to New York and

threw it on the table and said, I want this. Nice. And they analyzed it. And by God, they came up with dirt, the smell of dirt. Specific to his region though, I imagine. I think Pennsylvania. Interesting. I guess here we can briefly mention that knockoff colognes and perfumes is a very common thing

because you're copyright, I mean, you can tweak your formula slightly and it's totally legal to sell that essentially the same thing that's just oh, so slightly different under a different name. Right. It's like the same thing as design or drugs, except with perfumes. Remember that? Like the gas station, if you like Giorgio, you'll love whatever we're calling this. Sure.

What was the knockoff name for Giorgio? Giorgi. But there was like a whole generic ripoff line called if you like blank, you'll love blank. It's hilarious. So Chuck, you take all this stuff, you take your head space, you take your existing head space, you take your essential oils, and you put them all together to create that Emerald Eye woman who has titanium raindrops raining on her in Sicily on a spring day.

Yeah. Well, you do anywhere from 10 to 100 of them. Each fragrance house does. Then they send them to their odor testers, and the odor tester goes, no, no, no. This one's a maybe. No, no. I like this one. Yeah.

No, no. Maybe again. Yes. And then no. And then Polo at this point has not smelled any Joshness yet. No. This is all they're trying to weed out the gunk because they don't want to waste Polo's time.

Right. You know? Yeah. They don't want to send them 400 Joshnesses. Exactly. No, they want to send them like one, maybe two, and they do. Sure. And then Polo will then get it and say, I like this second one, but it's a little too

strong on this one scent. So it'll go back again, and it's just a process, basically. Maybe they nail it on the first time. Probably not. But probably not. It's a back and forth, basically. It's just like working with an editor, and they'll swap in ingredients, and they'll, you know, like we said earlier, it's a science, basically, of the right combination in the

right order of evaporation. Right. I think it's just super interesting. They put it through product testing, of course, to see what people think of it, because they're not just going to launch it out of the blue. They want it to, like you said, appeal to either the right demographic or the most people possible. Right.

And so the one that Polo decides that is Joshness, they win. That perfume house wins. And so they get a contract to produce X number of tons or gallons of this particular perfume. Well, of the perfume oil. Yeah, exactly. The undiluted stuff. Yeah. Polo actually produces, they take that and produce the perfume.

Right. They add the solvent to produce the perfume, the eau de toilette, the eau de cologne, all that stuff in the different concentrations. They will probably also use it in maybe like a deodorant, a body lotion, all that stuff. But they deliver them in like one ton drums of the perfume oil that you don't want to smell until it's been diluted. That's right. And then the Joshness is released into the world.

Literally. And becomes the number one selling cologne of all time. Well, and Polo never knows the exact concoction that makes Joshness either, which I thought was super interesting. Right. It's literally the perfumer knows this little secret. Yeah. It's going to need.

That's exactly right. So after this, we're going to talk a little bit about the science of scent and whether or not it's something that we're born with or that we learn. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so Chuck, why do people wear perfume? Depends on who you ask. Okay. There's a lady named Rachel Hertz from Brown University.

She wrote a book called The Scent of Desire, discovering our enigmatic sense of smell. And she postulates that depending on how old you are and what gender you are, you have your different reasons that young men do it to attract women. That's why I did it. Older men do it out of gratitude to the women who gave it to them. Yeah. Honey, you'd smell nice with this on. So sure, I'll wear it, dear.

Women, depending on how old you are in the 20s, you're more affected by, I guess, inspired by your friends in the media. Beyonce? Sure. She has her own perfume, doesn't she? Yeah. You know who has a surprise runaway smash hit right now is Sarah Jessica Parker. That didn't surprise me.

It does me a little bit. She's okay. She wouldn't have surprised me in 2002, but it is a top seller right now. She's like a goddess to a certain age group of women, though, like still. I guess you're right. But even still, you'd think like, I don't know, maybe they're right in the perfume wheelhouse. It could be an awesome smelling perfume, I've never smelled it.

I was just surprised because, you know, you're like Beyonce, Derek Jeter, like these are the celebrities that have these top selling like colognes, and then Sarah Jessica Parker. I just don't think of her like that. I like her. She's great. Yeah, I get it. I just don't think of her as that, and I'm happy for her success. Yeah, she's iconic to a certain demographic.

Not to me. But she's an icon to you? No, she's an icon to Emily, I think. She was a big fan of that show. Women in their 30s, they say follow no particular pattern. They're just, I don't know what they're doing. They don't know what's going on yet. They just like what they like, I think, is what that means.

Well, by the time they're 40, they say that's simply because they like it. Like, I just like the way this smells, and I'm 40, so I'm going to just wear it. I see. I don't know what my husband thinks at this point, or what my friends think at this point. In their 60s, they say women think of other peoples, which is like their friends or loved ones say they like the way it smells, which is a really nice thing. And then a lot of people choose perfumes, apparently, that their mother wore, or in the same scent family, either knowingly or not.

But probably knowingly, because there's an associative learning theory of smell. You were saying before the break, we were going to talk about whether smell is learned or if we're born with it, the idea that smell is learned is called the associative learning hypothesis. That it's learned? Yeah. We come to like smells based on social constructs, based on experience. There's supposedly evidence that smell learning begins in the womb even, that odorant molecules

can be passed along from mother to child, and that the stuff you're exposed to in the womb, you can show a preference for later on down the road. Yeah, and Rachel Hertz is a member of that camp. Yeah, and by the way, I want to give a shout out. Rachel Hertz wrote a chapter for the book Neurobiology of Sensation and Reward, which is a gas in general, right? But she wrote chapter 17, Perfume is the title of it, and it's on the NIH website, the NCBI website.

Just search for that and it'll come up. The whole chapter's right there and it's really interesting and exhausting. But she is one of the ones who's like, this is a learned behavior and lays out some really great evidence for it. Yeah, one of her points is that babies basically don't think anything smells bad or good. I don't know how they know this. I guess wafting things under a baby's face to see what face they make. Including poop.

Well, yeah, you never see the baby like curling up. Not complaining. No. Like I'll wallow in poop. I don't care. I'm a baby. I don't mind the smell. You ever farted right in a baby's face?

No reaction. They just blink? Nothing. A couple of times? They're delighted. Well, plus also, other studies of adults, not even babies, have shown that the same smell can be preferred or disliked in very similar groups. In the UK, the smell of wintergreen in a study after World War II was found to be just generally

disliked. In the US, like a decade later, the smell of wintergreen was found to be generally preferred. In the US, wintergreen is used for candy and gum and it's associated with positive stuff. In the UK, wintergreen was used during World War II for medicines that were used in the field. There's associations with battle, war, maiming, disease. That's what wintergreen is to people in the UK, whereas in the US, the exact same smell is pleasant.

It's not like the Americans and the Brits are the exact same people, but they're in the same cohort, a very similar cohort. They showed opposite preferences, which is really great evidence for associative learning hypothesis. Yeah. It's also a reason why in the early 2000s, the US Army was not able to come up with a stink bomb that was universally upsetting to people's noses across cultures. They contracted out the Monal Chemical Sensor Center in Philly and they tried to curate

a universal stink bomb smell. They said because of cultural specific products and things, we had to avoid anything like food related, even if we think it really stinks, some other culture might like it. Right, exactly. They had to basically go to... They focused on stuff with biological origins like vomit and human waste and burnt hair. They made synthetic versions of all these and got some people in Philly and put them in a hood and introduced these.

Those poor people. I know. I thought it was funny that it was Philly though. They're probably like, hey, it's not so bad. They introduced, they slowly infused it and they said people thought it was the worst thing they'd ever smell. Their heads would jerk back. They would contort with revulsion and then basically just try and hold their breath as

long as possible or take little shallow breaths. Sounds like a great stink bomb to unleash on people in Philadelphia at least. They couldn't come up with anything that was universally hated. Do you remember the Air Force also tried to come up with a gay bomb that used some sort of perfume to turn enemy combatants into gay lovers? So silly. It's a shame though because the stink bomb is actually really... It's a great idea. It doesn't hurt anyone.

It's not like a chemical... What do you call it? The spray? An irritant. Yeah. It's not an irritant in any way. It stinks and it would keep people out of a sensitive area if they didn't want them there. Well, chemical irritation is a sensation that your nose experiences along with odors.

So it is technically a stink bomb, like pepper spray is a stink bomb. Oh yeah, yeah, but it has an actual physical effect on your skin, which a stink bomb wouldn't hurt. But the other school of thought though is that it comes via evolution basically. Yeah. That it's innate. Yeah. Which this kind of makes sense.

They both make sense to me. I think it might be a mixture of both. But what's his name? Gilbert? Or Hilbert? Hilbert. One of the two. So if you're in the Gilbert camp though, you're going to go with the evolution because he

points out that when we were evolving, you know, apples smell good because you're meant to eat them and you're meant to spread the seed. So that smell is associated with living and living well by eating fruits. Conversely, the smell of poop and vomit and urine, which convey disease and bacteria and all of the stuff you're not supposed to be with under innate hypothesis. It would be, that's why we avoid those because we need to avoid the substances that carry those obnoxious smells. Makes sense.

Oh, it totally makes sense. I just think to me the evidence is more there for associative learning. Yeah. I think it can be both. I don't think it has to be mutually exclusive. And I think it can be overwritten by the learning as well, whatever innate things we have. And I remember we did a bit on a study years ago about people looking for their mates according to having a different immune system, which would in turn make their children immune to

more possible things. Yeah, more robust immunity in the kids because you take immunity A and immunity B and put them together, you got immunity C, which is the best of A and B, right? So this is like a whole idea of why or how people select mates is based on that. Which is scent based, right? That's what they think. And apparently this is evidenced by study after study after study that finds consistently that women rate a man's scent as the number one factor in attractiveness.

More than his appearance, more than wealth, more than anything else, scent is perennially the number one most important thing. They think that it's possible that the reason why is because our senses are attuned, our scent is attuned so that we can sniff out somebody with a different immune system so we can reproduce more robust kids. The problem is if you factor in cologne, what you're doing is deceiving that natural drive and all of a sudden you're going to have kids with like zero immune system because the guy was wearing cologne.

Yeah, that makes total sense. You don't want to confuse your potential mating mate. It's a pretty good argument against wearing cologne. And then there is the, of course, the whole does this stuff work anyway as far as being a sexual attractant. And there's zero scientific proof that there was any kind of aphrodisiac, acic, aphrodisiac, ick, compound that you can concoct that will literally draw someone to you sexually as much as they've tried and tried to advertise that subtly or not so subtly.

We are not pigs who apparently do have mating pheromones that actually work that way. They have something called an accessory olifactory system and in pigs they have something in their nose called the vomeronasal organ which is specifically specialized to pick up on these molecules and we don't have them as humans. No, we don't have the curly tails either. Or they say we may have them but it just doesn't work, I don't know, which is the case. Who knows? Maybe we just use our normal olfactory senses and it's not pheromones, it's just smells.

You know? Sure. Or they say maybe it'll make you think that you're more sexually attractive so that'll make you more confident. Exactly. And thus make you more sexually attractive. Right. I got one more thing.

What you got? So I mentioned Giorgio. Yeah. It's a huge, hugely popular, maybe the number one cent of the 1980s and it was famously banned from some restaurants. Because it was so stinky? Yes. Wow.

Because some restaurateurs are like, if you got a couple of people wearing Giorgio in here, it's going to overpower the smell of the food and the taste of the food so they banned Giorgio, which all it did was accelerate sales. Well, there are some people in this building that I wish would be banned from our elevators. I almost never run into that anymore. Oh boy. I've smelled some stuff. They're not even in the elevator car.

It's a fecal? And I step in and I'm like, whoa. Is it like obsession? No, it's usually like super perfumey lady stuff. Oh, I got you. Yeah. You got anything else? No.

I mean, there's plenty more. Yeah. But yeah. I only got so much time. If you want to know more about perfume, you can type that word in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and since I said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this a little Nostradamus bit from a Canadian.

Hey guys, I'd like to say how great, first of all, that you make my hour long commutes to work every morning. So thanks. It's a pleasure to listen to the show, especially on Nostradamus. I thought I'd give you another example of what he supposedly said, quote, from the calm morning, the end will come when of the dancing horse, the number of circles will be nine. That's from Nostradamus 1503. She says...

I'm talking about a circus, obviously. She says it was said that Nostradamus predicted the end of the world and was explained as follows. Korea is the calm morning country. Psy dancing, as in doing the dancing horse, is Gangnam style. On December 21st, that song reached one million views on YouTube, nine zeros. In summary, people were claiming that Nostradamus' prediction was the end of the world would be on December 21st.

So that's it guys. Keep on doing what you do. You do a great job and you're always a pleasure. And oh, the sound effects are awesome. Kudos to Jerry. Way to go Jerry. That is from Julia Kay in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Hey, we love Toronto, aka Toronto, right?

That's right. We love it. Let's see, we want to hear from you. Let us know about your perfume preference. You can tweet us, your favorite perfume of all time or your most hated perfume of all time. Sure. At S-Y-S-K podcast, you can let us know on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the

White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.