On the nose: Step inside the laboratory of smell artist Sissel Tolaas

Anyone who has sat in the audience at a Balenciaga runway show in the last couple of years will tell you that – in addition to the spectacle of next season’s cerebrally ironic dressing, the artist-designed immersive sets, and the uber cool lineup of models – there’s a distinctive smell in the air. In fact, distinctive olfactory atmospheres have become integral to Balenciaga’s presentations, triggering the senses and imprinting the experience on show-goers. It’s also a clever way of maintaining the specific thrill of having been there, present in the rarefied space. Smell, and its impact on one’s state of mind, is the true signatory of one’s physical presence; the antidote to consuming an event’s digital residue on a screen.

There’s a single mastermind – and nose – behind Balenciaga’s highly conceptual smell-scapes: Norwegian fragrance scientist and artist Sissel Tolaas, who has been cataloguing a library of smells in her Berlin studio for more than 25 years. The 63-year-old explorer of the world’s smells now counts over 10,000 distinctive smells in her library – a studio, dubbed Smell RE_searchLab, that’s brimming with vials, flasks and pipettes, not unlike a particularly eclectic scientist’s laboratory.

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“Without emotional reaction, there is no action,” Tolaas explains. Her raison d’être, the driving force behind everything she creates, is to demonstrate that more attention should be given to the oft-overlooked and under recognised potential of appealing to people’s rational minds by activating their sense of smell. “I finally understood this hardware called body – the software interface called senses are there for a purpose. But we live in a world that’s driven by what things look like. That’s not right. We are suffering here! We are disembodied.”

This prolonged state of disconnection from our sense of smell, she claims, impacts the conversation and causes stasis. After all, smell has the power to provoke, to evoke, and to induce extreme reactions; our olfactory receptors are present in the amygdala and hippocampus, meaning smell serves as one of the most primal pathways of information to the brain.

The daughter of a Norwegian mother and a less-present Icelandic father, Tolaas has always been fascinated by the outdoors, the moods of the sea, and the lure of the vast horizon. Raised in an all-female household, Tolaas was an athletic child keen on climbing, skiing and swimming. “What else can you do in the north in the middle of winter?” she quips. “I think that being surrounded by the Norwegian weather and air had very much influenced why I decided to make that my topic. I was outdoors. I was very much into sport and, you know, breathing.” A tremendous curiosity about the world made her restless. Asking naïve but existential questions about the essence of being, as teenagers do, she decided she wanted to become an astronaut. But in the late 1980s, instead of going up, she went east - behind the Iron Curtain, to the Soviet Union.

Things get dense with details and intense experiences from this point in her biography. Speaking hardly any Russian but determined to find her way, she managed to travel across the Eastern Bloc. Finding herself in Warsaw, she enrolled in university as an exchange student. The way she describes her own journey and those formative years of exploration, it all stemmed from her conscious decision to discover the world, nose first. “I became my own guinea pig,” she says. She pushed herself in terms of tolerance to noxious smells and her own memory, experimenting with activating unpleasant memories through evocative smells. “I was very confused about why I couldn’t talk about smell,” she says. “What is this power of smell that makes me relate to a specific moment emotionally? What is the link between smell and memory?”

To find the answers to these questions, not only did she pursue a multidisciplinary scientific education, she also, in her own words, “basically became a dog for seven years, conquering the world from the perspective of the nose”. The outcome of her rather extreme approach to her own education around smells is that she has gained absolute neutrality about their qualities. “I have literally smelled the whole world, and I’m beyond the rhetoric of good and bad,” she says. “There‘s a reason why a certain smell is there.”

Tolaas has been working with Demna, Balenciaga’s creative director, since 2019, when she designed a smell around the notion of power for the fashion house’s spring /summer 2020 power dressing-themed collection. Tolaas captured the dominant smells in places of influence and power, such as banks and the off ices of European lobbying groups, ultimately concocting four smells – antiseptic, blood, money, and petrol – which were released from vents in the ceiling and behind curtains throughout the runway show.

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For the 2022 show, which took place inside the New York Stock Exchange, Tolaas distilled the smell of US dollars and, in Balenciaga’s 2023 ‘Mud Show’, staged this past October atop Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s heaps of dank earth, it was Tolaas’s custom-made smell of redolent decomposition that completed the post-apocalyptic mood.

In addition to taking her around the globe a few times, Tolaas’s process of understanding smell has also led her down different avenues of study. She is an Oxford-educated scientist with a background in maths, chemistry, art, and linguistics, and she thinks of smells, which are the sum of the myriad particles of various substances circulating in the air, as keys to grasping the world around us and our place in it. “It’s like a message in a bottle. But for generations, that message had been deemed unimportant,” she says. “What has been important instead was the bottle.”

Tolaas’ exhibitions, which have been staged at art institutions across the world, take viewers on an unexpected journey led by their nose. Take, for instance, her 2021 exhibition at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet, which presented a deep dive into the relationship between smell and culture. Distributed across multiple spaces in and around the museum, the show provided an olfactory theatre of the world by capturing, unearthing, restoring, and categorising smells from nearly all continents, a range of social contexts, and a wide variety of materials and chemical reactions, including human skin, money, metals, fear, sweat, the ocean, seeds, and melting ice. “Understanding neuroscience, psychology and anthropology is essential in the process of being able to show pure smell and decontextualise from the reality where I found it,” she says. “Having access to multiple technologies has enabled me to collect molecules in the air, take them out of context, and have people talk about it.”

Over the years, Tolaas has been approached by a slew of companies seeking to commission a signature smell. However, in order to enter into a collaboration, like she did with Balenciaga, she expects an understanding of what it is that she’s actually doing, and why. “I’m not a perfumer. I’m not making commercial smells for perfume purposes, or any other kind of purposes. That’s not my interest,” she says. “I’m a chemist, so I don’t even compete with what perfumers do.”

It’s a twisted side effect of the global shock and devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic that people have, at long last, come to better understand what Tolaas’s work is all about. The rhetoric around aerosols, air particles, and even the degree to which sensory deprivation could affect humans’ wellbeing, suddenly all became fodder for thought, news items, and mainstream conversation. “We‘ve all had an experience together. And that’s quite amazing,” Tolaas points out. “It would be amissed opportunity if we don’t take that experience and place it into whatever we do from now on.”

Last year, Tolaas unveiled a signature candle for Balenciaga’s couture stores. It is a remarkable blend encapsulating the fashion house’s couture history, from its opening in 1937 to its closure in 1968 and then reopening in 2021 under current creative director Demna. By no means unpleasant smelling, it is nevertheless derived from a wild mix of notes. Equipped with a special molecule-extracting device, Tolaas collected particles from the walls of Balenciaga’s historic couture house at 10 Avenue George V in Paris, along with the dust found on pieces from the Balenciaga archive and objects that belonged to Cristóbal Balenciaga himself. There are elements of burnt incense, tobacco smoke, warmskin, old paper, tanned leather, aged wool, delicate silk, exotic fur, oak, and the oiled metal of sewing machines.

As a scientist, she is capable of not only uncovering the reasons a smell is present but also understanding the processes behind its materialisation. Tolaas seeks to help us understand what is going on – in our bodies, our homes, our surroundings – before we just decide to cover it up. “I learned from animals. Bloodhound dogs have 900 receptors. Humans only 400. But elephants are my favourite, with 1,500 receptors in their trunks,” she says. “I wish I were an elephant.”