Sissel Tolaas is 'The Odor Artist'

Sally McGrane profiled this unique woman (above) and her favorite party scent (it's essence of fear, distilled from the armpit sweat of a man Ms. Tolaas calls "Guy No. 3") in the latest Wired magazine.

Here's the heady article.

The Odor Artist

Animals can smell fear. Now you can, too — on walls, maybe cars.

Sissel Tolaas holds out a sealed bottle. "So," she says, sniffing gingerly, "this is the S&M Guy." She hands over the bottle with a warning: "Just smell from the top. If you open it, it's very extreme." I inhale cautiously. The scent is... heavy? Musky? There are definite deodorant notes, plus an undefinable, unfamiliar something that, after a deeper whiff, nearly makes me gag.

We are sitting in an elegant, high-ceilinged room adjacent to the laboratory in Tolaas' turn-of-the-century Berlin apartment. The leggy blonde, who wears a skirt and high-heeled boots, grabs another glass bottle and sprays her wrist liberally with what she calls Guy No. 3. "I wear it to parties," she says.

S&M Guy and Guy No. 3 were derived from the sweat of two of the nine men who were the subject of Tolaas' 2006 exhibit "the FEAR of Smell — the Smell of FEAR" at MIT's List Visual Arts Center. The men suffer from acute, chronic fear. To capture the smell of their sweat, Tolaas, the world's preeminent odor artist, designed a small device that subjects placed in their armpits when they were likely to be afraid. The S&M guy, for instance, collected his perspiration when he visited sex clubs. He and the other men mailed their samples to Tolaas' lab, which is funded by International Flavors and Fragrances, a $4 billion company that makes perfumes for Prada and Calvin Klein.

For her MIT show, Tolaas synthetically rendered each man's unique scent. Then, using IFF's industrial micro encapsulation process (today's answer to scratch-and-sniff), she created a special paint. When visitors touched the exhibit walls, microscopic capsules broke, releasing scents into the air.

The 45-year-old Tolaas, who has graduate degrees in chemistry, art, and language, plus an undergraduate degree in math, began working with smell after chemicals she was using for an art project blew up in a particularly stinky way. "I realized we have only two words to communicate about smells: bad or good," she says. "I thought, something is wrong with that."

Tolaas traveled the world collecting odors, building a library of 6,763 scents, including dirt, toys, and rotten bananas. Ultimately, her reputation led her to the perfume industry. Tolaas' collaboration with IFF allows her to concentrate on scent 24/7. In turn, the company gets her maverick sensibility, which may lead it to untapped markets. Tolaas has also worked with companies like Ikea and Volvo to add a scent to their brands. This could mean that in the future we'll know a company not just by its logo or jingle, but also by its smell.

As Tolaas shows me to the door, she offers me her wrist, where Guy No. 3 has been percolating with her body's chemicals for the last couple of hours. "What do you think?" she asks. "Owah!" I say, and make a face. She shrugs, smiles, lifts her forearm to her nose, and inhales. "Ah!" she says. "You really don't like it?" She inhales again, with gusto. "I think it's wonderful!"