'The biggest seller is something called flatulence'

From Gautam Naik's very entertaining October 11 Wall Street Journal front-page story about Frank Knight, owner of Dale Air.

This little British company specializes in creating bizarre, sometimes repulsive odors.

They have about 300 in their repertoire; most sell for $160 a liter, although difficult-to-synthesize ones command premium prices of up to $380 a liter.

A few weeks ago, Knight was asked by both an English zoo and an artist to come up with a dead-body odor.

He's still working on it.

Knight is very tight-lipped about what goes into his recipes.

Asked about a flask labeled "Japanese Prisoner of War," he replied, "I can tell you that it combines tropical smells and the odor of sweaty feet."

A one-time life insurance salesman and taxi driver, Knight has no training in chemistry or perfumery.

He stumbled into his profession after selling air fresheners for Fred Dale, the founder and former owner of Dale Air.

It seems that Dale, who died earlier this year, concocted peculiar odors as a sideline.

His first customers were doctors who used smells such as "Granny's Kitchen" and "Coal Fire" to jog the memories of elderly dementia patients in British nursing homes.

Knight bought Dale Air in 1999 and expanded the "themed aromas" business.

"Sports Changing Room" is another perennial best-seller.

Here's the story.
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The Smell of Success Isn't Always Sweet In This Line of Work

Mr. Knight Brews Up Odors Of Sweaty Locker Rooms And Egyptian Mummies

Two years ago, the City Museum of Stockholm contacted Frank Knight with a strange request: Could he re-create the smell of an Egyptian mummy?

Mr. Knight, who is in the smell business in a small way, had no firsthand knowledge.

So he consulted the Internet, identified embalming fluids and perfumes likely to have been used by the Egyptians, mixed them up, threw in a few other odors, and came up with an essence that smelled really bad.

"It's a very eerie smell. It's one my wife doesn't like," says Mr. Knight, owner of a little company here that comes up with unusual aromas with peculiar names.

A curator for the Stockholm museum says that although the smell is "disgusting," it worked for an exhibit on ancient medicines.

The demand for oddball odors is on the rise.

Retail stores, as well as museums and exhibitions are using aromas to give their displays an added air of realism.

Lunn Poly, a United Kingdom travel firm, uses electric dispensers in some of its stores to warm and exude a coconut scent devised by Mr. Knight.

"It had an immediate reaction with customers because it reminded them of suntan lotion and tropical places," says a spokesman for Lunn Poly.

International Flavors & Fragrances, the big purveyor of flavors and fragrances in New York, is creating the smells of meteorites and body odor, among others, for the pending New York Hall of Science exhibit on extraterrestrial life.

A hospital in Orlando, Fla., called Florida Hospital Celebration Health, uses coconut smells to create a "seaside theme" in its X-ray and imaging department.

The hospital says the enticing gimmick has reduced appointment cancellations.

There are no standard chemical recipes for Mr. Knight's offbeat aromas, such as "Sports Changing Room," which he sells online, and "Dragon's Breath."

Operating as others in the field do, he uses a kind of hit-or-miss approach, isolating dominant smell "notes," finding chemicals that match them, and then experimenting with various additives until he feels he has achieved the desired result.

"It's a bit of science and a bit of art," says Simon Harrop, managing director of Aroma Co., of Oxfordshire, England, which makes a "new-car smell" that British car maker Vauxhall uses in some of the used cars it sells.

Aroma Co.'s other products include the artificial marijuana smell it created for a party following a showing of the movie "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

It concocted one called "human sacrifice" for a theatrical production of Oedipus.

ScentAir Technologies of Santa Barbara, Calif., makes smells such as "machine oil" and "rain forest."

Its "evil cotton candy" smell contains a hint of dill pickles.

"That's the evil bit," says Pamela Knock, director of operations at ScentAir.

The smell was used in Florida last year for a haunted house at the Universal Orlando Resort.

Few have gone as far in the search for evil odors as the 58-year-old Mr. Knight, who is untrained in chemistry or perfumery and whose business, Dale Air, is a modest operation.

Mr. Knight invents the smells, and his wife and a colleague help run the office.

Most orders are the result of word of mouth, so marketing is minimal.

Dale Air has about 300 scents in its repertoire.

Mr. Knight won't discuss earnings.

Most of Mr. Knight's odors sell for roughly $160 a liter, although the elusive ones can be more expensive. Frankincense, created for a Queen of Sheba exhibit, goes for about $380.

A few weeks ago, an English zoo and an artist independently asked Mr. Knight to come up with a dead-body odor.

With the help of another Internet search, Mr. Knight discovered that a key chemical associated with the odor of putrefaction is diaminobutane.

He ordered some and diluted it in a solvent called dipropylene glycol.

But the result - a greenish liquid - didn't quite smell like decaying bodies, at least to him.

So, Mr. Knight continued to refine it.

On a Web site devoted to forensics, he learned that a decomposing body often releases sulfurous gases.

Confident that he had found the missing ingredient, he added a few drops from a flask he had labeled "rotten eggs," then stepped back.

The room reeked and so did Mr. Knight, but he was not yet satisfied.

"It's still not right," he said with a sigh.

"At some stage, I'll have to visit a mortuary and see what rotting flesh really smells like."

Mr. Knight mixes his potions in a one-room lab containing beakers, goggles, a bottle-sealing machine, and a wall of aluminum flasks containing different odors.

The potions are mostly in liquid form and slowly release their aromas when heated in electric dispensers.

"Havana cigar" is sickly sweet, while "iron smelting" smells like a rusty pipe.

Mr. Knight is tight-lipped about most of his recipes.

Picking up a flask labeled "Japanese Prisoner of War," he says: "I can tell you that it combines tropical smells and the odor of sweaty feet."

But he would go no further: "Anything more would be like asking Coca-Cola how they make their drink."

A onetime life-insurance salesman and taxi driver, Mr. Knight stumbled into his vocation after a stint selling air fresheners for Fred Dale, the former owner of Dale Air.

Mr. Dale, who died earlier this year, concocted peculiar odors as a sideline.

His first customers were doctors who used smells such as "Granny's Kitchen" and "Coal Fire" to jog the memories of elderly dementia patients in British nursing homes.

Mr. Knight bought Dale Air in 1999 and expanded the "themed aromas" business.

A longtime customer is the Jorvik Viking Center in the town of York, England, which sits atop a 10th-century Viking site excavated in the 1970s.

The thousand-year-old smells of cesspools, household remains and horse manure "hit us at full blast," says Richard Hall, the archaeologist who led the excavation.

A Viking museum was built over the site in 1984.

Visitors travel in a "time car" that takes them past various Viking scenes, and many of them - such as the butcher, fishmonger and latrine - have appropriate odors supplied by Mr. Knight.

It's a "glorious smell-o-rama" says Mr. Hall.

Mr. Knight's biggest seller is something called flatulence.

He won't venture near it without donning a white coat and latex gloves.

But it added grim realism to an exhibit on trench warfare at London's Imperial War Museum.