Under Your Nose - The Pleasures and Politics of Smell

Why do some smells comfort us while others repel us – and what does that reveal about who we are? Social media’s ‘smell queen’ Dr Ally Louks reveals the secrets of our most overlooked sense.

Take a deep sniff. Before you have time to think, your body will react. Our noses have around 400 smell receptors that can process up to a trillion different smells. But it is in our brains that the magic happens: smells transport, attract, please and seduce us, but they also disgust, unsettle, even anger us. They draw us closer, or make us recoil.

Humans smell – in every way: our bodies emit smells, we scent ourselves and our homes with fragrances, and we inhale smells with every breath we take. Smell warns us of danger, deepens our experience of food and intimacy, and binds us to our memories and identities. Yet we tend to think of smell as our least important sense. This is because the way we value smell is shaped by myths: that we're bad at smelling, that smell contributes little to flavour perception, that it doesn’t pay to train our sense of smell.

In Under Your Nose, Dr Ally Louks uncovers the hidden influence of smell in our lives. Drawing on science, literature, history and pop culture, she shows how smell is never neutral: it is shaped by culture, and in turn reinforces the biases that shape our world. At once entertaining and revelatory, Under Your Nose transforms how we think about our most misunderstood sense – and invites us to become more aware of the invisible forces shaping our perceptions, our relationships and ourselves.