Published in Nose Magazine
Issue 02: PRIMED
210 x 296 mm, 148 pages
Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
Editors-in-chief: Saskia Dodds-Painter and Olivia Rattray-Wood
Design: Jenny Fang and Marissa Hor
Nose is a new open bound magazine bringing some long overdue attention to our sense of smell, inviting readers to smell both avidly and intentionally through a series of essays, interviews and editorials.
This sophomore edition—themed ‘Primed’ and printed on a blend of thick matte and glossy paper stock—hones in on the potent yet ineffable nature of scent to conjure thoughts or feelings inaccessible through any other medium, and recognises that despite scent often being conflated with truth, in reality what we smell is dependent on past experience and anticipation. As the team asserts in their editorial: ‘Rather than treating scent’s elasticity as a weakness, we see it as a ground for meaning, where priming becomes a source of richness.’
Inside, Lauryn Wylde—an expert in the common ground between scent and psychology—explores smell as our most intuitive and ancient language, a candid experiment takes place with the aim of uncovering the influence of what we see on what we smell, and an interview with the founders of ‘Scent of Connection’ delves into their new smell led dating project. Elsewhere, a whole host of contributors offer their ‘two scents’ on all things olfactory and Allegra Samsen pens a poem titled ‘I Stink’.
— Magculture (magculture.com)
BEFORE LANGUAGE, THERE WAS SCENT
Scent is the body’s first language. It is the last surviving prehistoric communication system. It is older than speech, older than narrative, older than us, and interpreted by the brain’s most primal structures. It is a language we never stopped understanding, only stopped prioritizing. Its language struggles not because scent is vague, but because it operates in a part of the mind that predates language altogether. It speaks from a time when bodies interpreted the world directly, when survival depended on what the air carried, when meaning and sensation were the same thing.
Nonetheless, the nose keeps its own archive. It remembers what we have forgotten, what came before us, and what we never learned to name. It remembers the moist crevices of a beaver’s mossy lodge, the oven where soft dough forms its tough exterior crust, the dew drops formed between bristling blades of grass, the curled smoke of burning sages and cedars, the sweaty underarms of a human hard at work, the salty tears that stream down the cheeks of a goodbye. It remembers the metallic tang of blood, the green bitterness of crushed leaves, the wet stone scent of rain-struck pavement, the ghost of smoke that threads itself through hair after a fire. These are not passive memories. They are physical imprints. Certain smells hold the shape of a loss so precisely it’s startling, if only for a moment. Some cut straight into the unspoken. They touch the grief, the guilt, the shame that dwells deeper than memory. Others summon a nauseating nostalgia, a once sickly-sweet moment now growing sour at the edges. And some release a quiet euphoria, blanketing the body in a warmth that asks nothing in return.
What is remarkable is how these contradictions coexist. How one breath can hold sweetness and sorrow, desire and dread, memory and forgetting. How scent can fracture time, collapsing past and present into a single inhalation. How the body, without consent, reacts first: a flinch, a softening, a tightening in the stomach, an inexplicable
Scent is a language we speak with the world. This sense is a very meaningful and useful tool for survival, but it is also a form of invisible knowing, a beauty, a presence that exists often without its own vessel to carry it through life. Long before words, scent warned of rot, of smoke, of danger; it signaled safety in the familiar musk of kin. It shaped rituals, guided migrations, marked territories, sanctified grief, purified the living and the dead. Scent is carried from the earth to our moving bodies through every one of the elements with a resonating resilience, a survivor of both creation and destruction, signaling birth and decay in a perpetual dance between life and death. Scent moves through rooms and across thresholds, attaching itself to skin, hair, wood, stone. It refuses containment. It slips past every boundary we build for it, trespassing with quiet insistence.
Scent communicates through bodily sensation, through resurfaced memories, through truth. The reason it is often hard to describe is not because of human deficiency; it’s because it never relied on words to begin with. Smell is our pre-linguistic consciousness: prehistoric, mammalian, animal, ancestral. It bypasses logic entirely, entering the limbic system without detour. It speaks in pulse changes, emotional shifts, flashbacks. It speaks in the body before the mind has time to translate. So with this, a truth is revealed: scent does not lack language, but it is a language all of its own. This is why scent feels like intuition, divination, déjà vu, omen. Its grammar is made of intuition, not syntax. It offers insight in flashes rather than sentences, in sensations rather than explanations.
To embrace scent is not to control its story or flatten it into shared descriptors, but to let it remain what it has always been: a world we interpret, a memory we inherit, a sensation that speaks long before the word for it arrives. Scent invites us to listen with the body instead of the mind. It asks us to trust what stirs, what tightens, what loosens, what expands, what lifts. It reminds us that meaning does not always need verbal articulation to be real. Scent will always invite language, but it will never depend on it. Somewhere in the space between perception and naming, between instinct and interpretation, we find the freedom to smell our own stories, even while breathing the same air. In that liminal space, scent becomes not just memory but possibility: a way of understanding the world that resists erasure, resists containment, resists forgetting.
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