Smell & Tell | Inside the Writer's Study (A Mystery in Seven Scents)

Une collaboration visuelle avec l'intelligence artificielle qui n'a donné lieu à aucune « hallucination » grâce à Nano Banana ; un phénomène pour le moins rare. Cela n'aurait pas été possible sans les principes mathématiques du cubisme et écouter la musique d'Angine de Poitrine tout en donnant des consignes à l'IA (vivement recommandé). Et voilà! Apologies if I butchered the French language; I'm a non-French Michelle.

EVENT

What: Smell & Tell | Inside the Writer's Study

Where: Ann Arbor District Library (D/T Branch, 4th Floor)

Evening: Tuesday, September 8th, 6:00 PM-7:30 PM  

Daytime*: Wednesday, September 9th, 1:30 PM-3:00 PM                                  

A study door in the museum is left ajar. Curiosity gets the best of you, and you decide to enter the room. The first thing you notice is a cloisonné box sitting on top of a meticulously organized desk. The room is immaculate. Everything is in its place except for the box. There's something different about it. 

You lift the lid and discover seven glass vials. The wood-lined box smells familiar, but you can't quite place the smell. The atmosphere in the room speaks to your senses as you consider whether to open the vials and smell them. After all, you weren't exactly invited. 

It's then that you notice a small note card beneath the vials that reads, "Each of the seven vials contains a specific memory from this room. Take good care of them and allow them to breathe once in a while. When you're done smelling them you'll understand why." 

With an invitation like that, how could anyone refuse? Especially you, dear reader. Step into a writer’s study for an evening of olfactory intrigue as we evaluate the essence inside each of the seven vials on fragrance blotters and solve a mystery. 

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.

Notes & Curiosities: 

Daytime Smell & Tell events at the Ann Arbor District Library are new in 2026. The addition was sparked by growing interest in Smell & Tell programming across ages and life stages in the Ann Arbor community. Smell & Tell debuted at the library in June 2012. It's been many trips around the sun since then.

Research Paper Puts Sensory Evaluation in the Higher Ed Classroom

Armonía (Harmony) by Remedios Varo (1956)

A peer-reviewed paper I co-authored with collaborators at the University of Michigan is published in the current edition of the Journal of Statistics and Data Science in Education (JSDSE). The paper outlines a pilot educational module at the University of Michigan that integrates machine olfaction into an undergraduate deep learning course. By combining chemistry, machine learning, and sensory evaluation, the curriculum challenges students to work with subjective sensory data, demonstrating the feasibility of teaching multimodal data science.

The inclusion of sensory evaluation in a deep learning course is novel as far as papers accepted by JSDSE go. The good news is that our pedagogy-driven endeavor doesn't end with our paper. Dr. Ambuj Tewari received a second New Initiatives/New Instructions (NINI) grant from the University of Michigan that will allow us to take our findings to the next level (which is why I'll be busy teaching this summer). 

Curious? Read the paper and sniff out the facts in the sensory evaluation portion. Readers of Glass Petal Smoke who work in the flavor and fragrance industry will appreciate it. Perfume fans may also find it interesting, and don't have to worry about decoding a research paper. It's all about learning in small incremental steps. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

Citation: Han, Y., Kydd, M. K., Ward, J., & Tewari, A. (2026). Teaching Machine Olfaction in an Undergraduate Deep Learning Course: A Pilot Integrating Chemistry, Machine Learning, and Sensory Evaluation. Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 34(3), 372–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2026.2665103

Notes & Curiosities

Teaching 100+ students in a large auditorium how to evaluate smells using fragrance blotters was and remains one of the most satisfying teaching experiences I've had at the University of Michigan to date. It proved what I've always known by experience; that sensory evaluation is a powerful multisensory teaching and learning tool when combined with other disciplines. The sense of smell is memory's sense; it doesn't get more pedagogical than that.

I have many students to thank with regard to the evolution of Smell & Tell lectures, especially those that were part of summer boot camps held by MSTEM Academies at the university. Thanks also go out to students who invited me to give a TEDxUofM talk in 2015 (a talk that resonated with a wider audience after the COVID-19 pandemic) and students who shared their anosmia and congenital anosmia stories with me after the event. 

BTW: One of the reasons why Dr. Tewari and I ended up collaborating was the presence of my TEDxUofM talk online; the rest, as they say, is history.

I would be remiss if I didn't thank the Ann Arbor District Library for saying yes to monthly "Smell & Tell" events in 2012, and every year afterward. There isn't a day that goes by that I don’t forget how much creative freedom the library gives me. Honestly, writing this post makes me feel like I'm dreaming with my eyes open.  

Eau Maybe: Inspiration for Dr. Carruthers Character in The Devil Bat (1940)

Bela Lugosi as Dr. Carruthers, a perfumer, in The Devil Bat (L),
and Dr. Wallace Hume Carothers, a chemist, as himself (R). 

 

  

Thirteen is a lucky number. Why? Because thirteen years after posting "Bella Lugosi was a Perfumer: Strange Oriental Perfume" led to a light-bulb moment that may or may not be a matter of coincidence. 

Bela Lugosi portrayed a perfumer named Dr. Carruthers in the film The Devil Bat (1940). There's another Carruthers, a real one, with a slightly different spelling of the same last name. Does one inform the other?

Wallace Hume Carothers (April 27, 1896 – April 29, 1937) was an American chemist, inventor, and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont, who was credited with the invention of nylon. 

Carothers' research into cyclic compounds led to the discovery of Astrotone (1934), aka ethylene brassylate, a synthetic macrocyclic musk used in perfumes. It smells powdery, sweet, floral, ambrette-like, woody and musky. 

Is there a connection between Carothers and Carruthers? Variants in the spelling of the last name exist (Irish and Scottish for the curious, with debates regarding what defines a real member of the clan). 

Consider the image that accompanies this post. One man is an actor pretending to be a scientist bent on corporate revenge with deadly aftershave, the other is a scientist performing his job. 

Did the accomplishments of Dr. William Hume Carothers inspire story writer George Bricker and screenwriter John Thomas Neville to use the chemist's last name for Lugosi's character in The Devil Bat? 

The discovery of Astrotone and year The Devil Bat was released are only six years apart. Whether it's probable deserves further investigation with respect to the history of perfume plots in film.

Notes & Curiosities:

Curious about industrial fragrance chemistry? This research paper is for you: 

David, O., & Doro, F. (2023). Industrial Fragrance Chemistry: A Brief Historical Perspective. European Journal of Organic Chemistry, 26(44). https://doi.org/10.1002/ejoc.202300900

To learn more about reading science papers, visit the March 3, 2025 post, and scroll down to the "Notes & Curiosities" section. You'll find helpful tools and a method I created for use at lectures called "Clouseau It!" 

Marcel Duchamp & Georges Perec Write a Faux Fragrance Article in the Afterlife

Image of Grey-Crowned Cranes by Frankie from Germany via Pixabay

Part I: The Article

A novel line of seven perfumes is created by an eclectic perfumer. Each is named “smell” in a non-English language. The olfactive noun appears in calligraphic script on each of the labels with a foreshadowing twist. Ingredients in the formula are procured from the country of origin where the language on the bottle is spoken.

Phonetic transcriptions of “smell” appear in English below a western or non-western word for “smell” on each bottle. This inspires a mélange of phonetic murmurations whenever more than one customer engages with an interactive retail display featuring testers and perfume blotters. Ensuing conversations are convivial and attract curious onlookers. 

The effect is choreographed by design. 

The perfumer considers the challenge of learning a new language from his own experience: “Mouthing a new language in an adopted country is akin to chewing sinewy meat while attempting to avoid notice. In contrast, the sound of customers articulating phonetic translations at the counter is musical, playful and guileless."

The MakeSense line of international “smell” perfumes is built on aromatic materials associated with a country’s landscape and culture. MakeSense has polarizing plans for the next iteration of scents, which arrive at counter on October 31st. The olfactive theme is "disgust and avoidance", and evocative of scent-shunning encounters. 

The perfumer relates the concept in a different light: “Focusing on liking or not liking a smell is about as valuable as arguing about which end of a magnet is more desirable. Opposite poles attract and similar poles repel. This defines a magnet's essence, its potential, its character. And in perfumery, as in life, character is everything.”

Part II: Fictive Truth

Belle Helaine Advertisement for Un Air Enbaumeé
Rigaud Perfume, La Rire no. 88, Oct 9, 1920

Duchamp and Perec don't engage in writing in the afterlife; they play with magnetic fields and randomly break glass in the homes of charlatans that charge money to communicate with the dead. (For the record, the racket made by the invisible Oulipo duo when they're engaged in spirited shenanigans reinforces a charlatan's delusion of power with respect to affecting the beyond. Within three months, they beg to be fitted with a straitjacket.) 

Once in a while, after a glorious mischief binge, the pair are permitted to smell something that each of them misses from their days of earthly existence. Perec misses the scent of a cigarette from a freshly opened pack of Galoises, and the infrathin of its trace in his mouth after smoking. This, despite the fact that smoking cigarettes resulted in an irrevocable trip to a columbarium at Pére Lechaise Cemetery at the age of 45, which offers an extended, albeit ironic, infrathin.

As for Duchamp, he misses the smell of sunlight streaming through a window as it warmed a spot on the wooden floor of his apartment at 33 West 67th Street in New York City, resurrecting the aroma of a bottle of tawny port that the previous owner spilled on the floor a year before Duchamp moved in, which in turn, made Duchamp want to drink the floor on several occasions. Whenever the urge became too strong, he was deterred by a pair of hangry skittering cockroaches.

Part III: Wine Pairing Recommendation

Glass Petal Smoke asked sommelier Jaime Smith to recommend a wine that best complements this post. (No offense to the spirit of Marcel Duchamp and his nostalgia for the sun-warmed residue of spilled port emanating from a wooden floor.) Smith, whose superpower is smell-color synesthesia, chose Pietradolci Archineri Etna Bianco DOC as an accompaniment to this post. The wine's flavor profile varies from one vintage to the next. Fruity, herbal, floral, mineral and savory notes are common. The profile grows more complex as the wine ages (it has an aging potential of 15 years).  BTW: Empson & Company offers a more detailed tech sheet here.