Scent sculptor Michael Moisseeff simulates all manner of aromas from the everyday and historical to the extraterrestrial
Most animals use odours to locate food, find mates, maintain social bonds and avoid enemies. Humans are relatively poorly equipped to do any of this, because we have a lot fewer olfactory receptors than dogs or elephants, for example. Many people fail to appreciate how important smells are for the enhancement of their lives.
This photograph shows me at work as an ‘aroma sculptor’ in the laboratory at my house in a village near Toulouse, in southern France. Here, I’m working on creating the smell of the Moon for an exhibition at Space City, a museum in Toulouse. I based the odour I manufactured – like that of spent gunpowder — on Buzz Aldrin’s description of what he smelt when he took off his helmet in the lunar module on the Moon in 1969.
I recreate smells using an alembic — or distillation apparatus — to extract substances, a rotary evaporator to remove solvents, very precise measuring scales for the chemicals and an archive of 3,000–4,000 reference odours. I maintain these chemicals in liquid form in a separate room at about 14 °C. Some are essential oils and other natural extracts; others I’ve made from scratch by extracting them from plants and other natural sources.
I have created many odours for exhibitions, such as those of the rainforests of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. I have worked on scents used to train wine-industry experts, including of grape varieties, soils, minerals, and vegetable and floral notes. I also run the Explorarôme museum at my home. Visitors can smell aromatic plant species in the fragrance garden and exotic plants in the greenhouse, learn how scents are captured in the lab and try to guess what they are smelling in our interactive exhibition. There are no wrong answers — our relationship with smell is unique and personal.
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