By
Raewyn Turner
My interest in exploring the creation of a perfume reflecting numerous smells arising from global dynamics, economics and technologies led me to the scientific creation of ‘Olfactory White’ ( Weiss, T. et al., 2012). “Olfactory White” emerges when you mix 30–40 diverse odorants with equal intensity. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23169632/
Could ‘olfactory white’ which is unlike anything else in smell create a unique kind of sensory ‘blank canvas’ for synaesthetes? The resulting mixture:
● smells neutral, vague, and “flattened”
● has no recognizable note
● is perceptually similar to any other sufficiently complex mixture
Olfactory White occurs when complexity produces featurelessness. The Sobel group’s work was one of the first rigorous attempts to define a neutral or achromatic percept in smell—the analogue to white light or white noise although each sense has a different dimensionality, mechanism and natural occurrence. In the process of creating ‘Olfactory white’ it was found that mixtures of around 30 odorants started to smell alike even if they contained no common components.
White light is common (sunlight).
White noise is rarely encountered but easy to synthesize.
Olfactory white almost never occurs naturally because it requires engineered mixtures.
Olfactory White is itself a synaesthetic metaphor grounded in a real structure. It shows that the senses share parallel rules for constructing perceptual neutrality. To create ‘white’ in vision or audition requires spanning the perceptual range and balancing component intensities Sobel’s team equalized the perceived intensity of each odorant and mixed them in equal amounts. Intensity is the axis most likely to dominate perceptual judgment. The percept converges to a neutral, nondescript smell—the analog of visual white or auditory white noise.
I made an ‘olfactory grey’ perfume as a combination of components that ordinarily infuse the sea and the sky. For materials I posted a notice on social media requesting ‘unwanted perfumes’ and received abundant synthetic perfumes from friends and acquaintances. I referenced the scientific method of creating ‘Olfactory White’ where the mixture was made from ‘nonoverlapping, equal-intensity components in odorant mixtures’,
I sorted the perfumes by dissimilarity and pitch of smell, calibrated them to equal intensity and then mixed them together. The result is a perfume which smells bland and similar to the odour of the perfume section in stores and airports. For me it appears as a horizontal smell.
Raewyn Turner 2025
As the Sea the Sky –creating olfactory grey.
