In 1892, Oscar Wilde proposed perfume orchestras for Salome. He imagined smell as a compositional medium — sequences of fragrance moving through a room, “arpeggios of thyme and lavender.” The idea went nowhere. No one tried to build it for seventy years.
Then, in 1959, they tried.
The race to add smell to cinema produced two competing systems. Aromarama came first: aerosol canisters pumped scent into a theater’s general air supply. Smell-O-Vision followed — more ambitious, more expensive, more precise. Swiss chemist Hans Laube spent years developing thirty distinct essences: roses, peaches, garlic, gun smoke, fresh air. Individual nozzles at each seat would release exactly two centiliters of fragrance on cue, triggered by a fourth track on the film.
The film that premiered with Smell-O-Vision was called Scent of Mystery, directed by Jack Cardiff. Elizabeth Taylor played a woman identified only by her perfume. The mystery required audiences to follow a scent trail to identify the villain. The smell was the clue. Not a gimmick layered on top of the story — the smell was the story.
It failed. Not because the technology didn’t work. It failed because smell persists.
You couldn’t clear the roses before the garlic arrived. Gun smoke lingered through the romance. Critics couldn’t resist the puns. Laube’s daughter later said he died penniless, about sixteen years after the film’s debut. The Cinestage in Chicago, which had been retrofitted with Smell-O-Vision nozzles, became an adult film venue, then was demolished.
Every sense has its relationship with time.
Vision is simultaneous. A frame contains everything at once — foreground, background, color, motion. The eye moves through it, but the image doesn’t have to wait.
Hearing is sequential. A note disappears when the next arrives. Music is made possible by this — the chord resolves because the tension ends. Silence is meaningful because sound can stop.
Smell is neither. It accumulates. Each new note adds to the previous ones rather than replacing them. You can’t clear an aroma between sequences the way you can cut from one frame to another or rest between notes. There is no silence in smell. There is only the present compound of everything you’ve been smelling.
This is why Laube failed. He tried to deploy smell like it deploys light — controllable, clearable, sequenced. But smell isn’t light. It’s more like memory: once it’s in the room, it stays.
John Waters solved the problem in 1981 by surrendering to it.
Polyester used Odorama: a scratch-and-sniff card, numbered one through ten. At certain moments, a number would flash on screen, and the audience would scratch the corresponding circle and inhale. No nozzles, no canisters, no synchronized release. The theater smelled like popcorn and other people, same as always. What changed was what the audience held in their hands.
Waters gave the instrument to the audience. He couldn’t control when or how hard they scratched. He couldn’t ensure they were smelling the right panel. The whole thing was unreliable and slightly chaotic, which was exactly the point — it was Polyester. The joke was in the cards.
But there was something else going on. By giving the audience the scratch card, Waters was acknowledging what smell actually is: intimate and personal. The scent you smell is the scent you chose to release, at the moment you chose to release it. There’s a reason we associate smell with memory — its trigger is private, its response is involuntary, and its link to the past is immediate in a way that images and sounds rarely achieve. Scratch the card at the wrong moment and you’re smelling something when the director didn’t intend it. Which means: you’re making the film.
Wilde was right to leave his perfume orchestra as a proposal.
The score would have been a sequence of cues, not frequencies. The performers would have been chemists, not musicians. The audience would have had to be stationary, breathing in unison, with no windows open and no way to scrub the previous note before the next arrived.
He imagined it anyway. “Arpeggios of thyme and lavender” is a phrase that does something that Laube’s nozzles could never do: it lets you smell without actually smelling, which means you keep control of the note. You decide what thyme and lavender mean to you. The composition completes itself in the reader, not in the room.
Maybe that’s the only place a perfume orchestra can actually work.
Source: Christopher Turner, “Cinematic Airs,” Cabinet Magazine Issue 64.