This was not a book for me. I was fascinated by the topic, but felt like it was going around in circles. There were some new points but I was not drawn o the discussion.
The book is about the progression of the concept of losing the sense of smell, and its links to the covid spread. Overall something worthwhile for people more interested in the technical side of such investigations.
I was only able to read half way through before I gave up.
Since I did not completely finish the book, I cannot provide a complete review.

When Paola Totaro caught Covid, she lost her sense of smell and taste. She used that experience to write On the Scent with her husband, Robert Wainwright. The book is a wide-ranging exploration of how, what and why we smell. It also hammers home the message that loss of smell was not initially recognised as a symptom of Covid. That mattered because it meant people didn’t realise they were infected and thus infectious.

Despite the book’s name, this is NOT a book just about scent. It covers the mechanics of our smell mechanism. I learned that people who have a smaller olfactory bulbs (it’s located at the front of your brain, above the nasal cavity and receives messages from your scent receptors) are more likely to be depressed. We’re still learning about how it all works. For example, why does benzaldehyde (a single molecule) smell like marzipan to some people and like maraschino cherries to others?

Yes, there’s some fascinating scientific detail like that in the book, but it also ponders the emotions of smell. Wordsworth had no sense of smell – although he wrote about the sight and beauty of daffodils, he didn’t mention the smell that must have accompanied a field of them. The book covers history: the Great Stink of 1858 that persuaded Parliament to fund Joseph Bazalgette’s building of the London sewer system. It also covers the nineteenth century development of synthetic scents. Remember: these are chemically identical to natural ingredients. I can promise you that the molecule of Sir William Perkin’s artificial coumarin has exactly the same atoms (C9H6O2) as that of naturally occurring coumarin.

The authors talk to experts like Professor Barry Smith (always huge fun) about why society is much more sympathetic to blind or deaf people than to those who have lost their sense of smell or taste. I’m sure my gut reaction was the same as yours, “Well of course it doesn’t matter as much. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”. This book will perhaps give us a different perspective: the one forced upon Paola by Covid, where we think a lot more about smell and taste. Would you enjoy life as much if you couldn’t taste anything? All food – absolutely everything - is simply flavourless stuff to be chewed and swallowed? What if you couldn’t smell anything? Burnt toast, curry, your body odour, the house on fire? And what about the awful experiences of parosmia (existing smells are distorted) and phantosmia (smells are hallucinated)? So many people had that with Covid, where everything smells of poo. The authors write about all these in gripping prose. This really is an excellent book, written in a highly readable style. It far far exceeded my expectations because it covers so much, so well.

#OntheScent #NetGalley

LinkedIn post:
On The Scent by Paola Totaro & Robert Wainwright looks at the experiences of those born without the sense of smell as well as those who lose it, explores how smell can be a key indicator of declining physical health and new research on solutions for those who have suffered sensory loss.

A very detailed and engaging book on the science of smell, it makes you realise the scientific workings of this sense and how it builds up our world. Losing it, collapses a chunk of our world.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Smell- the most underrated human sense. A sense well developed in animals- especially useful to us is that of dogs. This scientific examination of the workings of odor perception is an easy and entertaining read.

It is safe to say that there are not many books that talk about perfumery or scents, and therefore each new one I manage to find feels like a special treat. I am an avid perfume collector (or hoarder?) and I am interested in everything concerning the topic - from the chemistry aspect to the reviews of cult classics. On the Scent is a refreshing, more scientific research into the cultural problematic of forgetting the importance of the sense of smell and the ways how to find a new appreciation for it. After the author became anosmic for more than a year due to covid, she became interested in finding out experiences of other people who went through the same thing. This lead her to discover a new world of people who were born anosmic or lost smell permanently, as well as to participate in discussions with the leaders in the scientific olfactory research. This books shows that as a society we tend to forget the crucial role this specific sense has for us, from alerting us to imminent danger to connect us with memories once we smell certain perfumes. I found especially intriguing a chapter about the linguistic problems of expressing the world of scents and the lack of vocabulary for it in the majority of spoken languages.
Overall, this book is an easy introduction to a very complicated and still widely underrated field of science, that as the author suggests, may experience a much needed attention in near future.