The world hasn’t become less smelly — we’ve just lost our nasal knowledge View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed The world hasn’t become less smelly — we’ve just lost our nasal knowledge The modern world is still rich with scents, but we've become less adept at navigating life with our noses. This article has been excerpted from Sniff: A History of Smells by William Tullett, new from Yale University Press. Copyright © 2026 William Tullett.
Our world is characterized by a proliferating variety of uncertain scents. Yet our noses are ill-equipped to discern between them. Pollution, pandemics, and poverty have conspired to reduce our sensitivity.
Some gases, such as the rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulfide emitted by industries and waste sites, induce a selective loss of smell. These substances are most dangerous when they are least odorous. When we try to use our noses, the result can be confusion.
Supermarkets across the globe have begun to remove “best before” dates from products such as milk and yogurt in an attempt to avoid food waste. They have encouraged consumers to deploy the sniff test to distinguish the sweet, mild, scent of fresh milk from a sour spoiled odor. Sniffing was one of the main ways in which premodern people could discern the freshness of food; but thanks to the arrival of cellophane packaging and refrigeration, we have allowed our nasal knowledge to deteriorate.
Many consumers still confuse the “best before” date, a measure of quality, with the “use by” date, a measure of safety, and end up endangering themselves by relying on the nose too much or wasting food by relying on it too little. When it comes to the olfactory — the scientific term for all things smell-related — we are living in a land of confusion. One reason that we seldom rely on our sense of smell is that we value it so little.
In response to a 2011 worldwide survey of 7,000 16- to 30-year-olds, over half said they would give up their sense of smell before handing over their technology. Ten years later, a survey of 407 college students and adults in the U.S. found that one-quarter of the college student respondents said that they would give up their sense of smell in order to keep their phone, and nearly half of all women would give up their sense of smell to keep their hair. We also generally believe that humans are poor smellers.
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