Good Smell, Bad Smell: Who Set the Standard?

A friend who runs an acupuncture clinic in the United States tells me one question comes up almost every week. Moxa is burning in one room, the smoke reaches the next, and a patient asks whether that is a cigarette. The second guess comes out slower, and it is marijuana. Nobody who asks has a broken nose. They have a standard, and they did not choose it.

Is smell preference something we are born with?

No. Hold a shirt that smells of sweat near a baby and it will not turn away. Hold the same shirt in front of an adult and watch the face. The adult learned that reaction from someone. No baby comes with it.

Coffee is bitter and beer is sour. Most people do not like the first sip of either. Drink coffee for two weeks and it becomes part of the morning. English has a plain name for that: an acquired taste. Nobody uses that name for a smell.

There is a catch. Keep meeting the same smell and you will like it more than you did on day one, as long as you did not dislike it at the start. A smell that turned your stomach stays where it was, however many times you meet it.

Moxa comes from mugwort. A patient education page from the University of Minnesota notes that most Chinese medicine practitioners in the United States put small signs up to explain the smell before anyone asks. A nose with no file for a burning herb grabs the nearest thing on the shelf, and the nearest thing to a burning plant is another burning plant.

The other mistake costs people like me more. A dry, quiet stick gets read as weak, or as nothing worth buying, and the buyer walks off with the loud one. Nothing in the stick changed. The nose in front of it was trained somewhere else. Why two people smell the same stick differently is a separate question, and I wrote about it here.

Where did "stronger is better" come from?

The standard was set before you ever smelled a stick. Laundry and home fragrance companies spent years teaching shoppers that clean clothes should smell like something. In their own consumer research, more than three quarters of the people asked said they decide a load of laundry is clean by the smell.

You know the aisle. Dryer sheets, plug-ins, a candle for every season, and a number on every package. Same batch of towels, different fragrance, and suddenly some of them felt softer. A scent bead is sold on a promise of hours of fragrance. The package says forty-eight. Nobody checks, and the number sells the jar.

Your own nose helps it along. Put on a fragrance and you stop smelling it within about half an hour, while the person next to you still does. Most people reach for more, and the more you use, the more you need the next time. The loop needs nothing but your nose to keep going.

Strength of fragrance has a ceiling. A smell gets more pleasant as it gets stronger, up to a point, and then it flips. The same oil that pleases you in small amounts will drive you out of the room in large ones.

A nose shaped in that aisle arrives at a Chinese stick with an expectation the stick never agreed to. Faint reads as cheap, and dry reads as stale. For how a stick is actually built, and what separates a plant blend from a perfume oil, I keep that in a separate guide.

How did Chinese incense makers judge a good stick?

They wrote the other standard down, and they wrote it down early. Ding Wei, an official of the tenth century, wrote the first Chinese work that sorted incense into grades, and the grades follow how the material formed. A later summary of his standards comes down to three marks: clean, moist, and long in the air.

Huang Tingjian came a century later. He blended incense himself. One of his own recipes came with a line that gives away the whole problem. This incense is quiet and plain, he wrote, and not what the world goes in for. The best scent he could make was one the market of his day did not want. Song writers reached deliberately for materials most noses would call unpleasant, including the fermented, beany note of spikenard (Gan Song) and the bitter edge of figwort (Xuan Shen). They treated the result as a mark of taste.

Fan Chengda, a Southern Song official who served in the south, kept notes on the fragrant woods of the south. His record of them, the Gui Hai Yu Heng Zhi 桂海虞衡志, is the clearest statement of the case. Good Hainan agarwood, he wrote, burns all the way down with the last of the smoke still sweet. A scorched note at the end is the giveaway.

His account of the poor grades is blunt. Imported incense, he wrote, is often harsh. Incense from north of the sea is worse, harsh to the point that the flavor is gone and fit for little but medicine, and the people of the south held it in contempt. Harshness was not a virtue in this system. It was the mark of the cheap stuff, and being loud was the reason to look down on it.

Much later, in the Ming, Wen Zhenheng wrote down what belonged in a study. One incense he praised for smelling clean and far off, and of another he asked only that the scent come out slowly, with no smoke pushed at the room.

The same instinct shows up further east. In the Japanese incense ceremony, the top-rated wood, kyara, is described as gentle and elegant, and the act itself is called monko, listening to incense. The grade just below it, manaka, gets the same words again, light and delicate.

How do you re-learn a nose?

Slow the test down. Smell one stick on three separate evenings, and do not run through a box in one sitting. A second stick on the same night is not a second opinion.

Describe before you judge. Say wood, resin, sweet, dry, sharp, and hold the verdict until after. Naming what is there is a skill, and it is the one that improves fastest. "I do not like it" closes the file, while "this one is dry and a little bitter" leaves it open.

Do not hold the first test in your own house. You cannot smell your own room. Take the stick somewhere else, or take it outside and walk back in.

Treat a bad first meeting as information. A verdict after one try is usually premature, and sometimes it is final. If a smell turns your stomach, leave it alone. Moving over from strong scented products is easier with a single-material stick than with a blend, and I wrote about picking one in this guide.

FAQ

Does a stronger incense mean a better one?

No. Strength tells you how loud a stick is and nothing about how good it is. 

Why does my incense smell like smoke and nothing else? 

Two different things get called this. A cheap stick does exactly that, and no amount of air will change it. The burn is all smoke, and the scent is thin and short, sometimes gone within minutes. If the stick itself is fine, nothing is missing. The scent is quiet and sits close to the tip, so most of what reaches you across the room is smoke. Hold it further away and let the room air out between sticks. The burn itself tells you which one you have. Stay with the stick to the last inch. A good one is still giving off scent at the end.

Why can I not smell my own incense after a few minutes?

Step outside for five minutes and walk back in. If the smell meets you at the door, that is the normal case. If the room is just as flat when you come back, your nose was never the problem.

Can you learn to like a smell you dislike?

Sometimes. The ones you were unsure about are worth a second and third evening. The ones you hated on the first night are not, and that is not a failure of willpower.

What a nose calls good, and what it calls cheap, arrived long before the incense did.