My important, ridiculous nose

We actually have four nostrils, the two external and two internal right at the back of the nasal cavity by the entrance to the throat. The nostrils oscillate their action to help make sense of complicated scents and their location. The external nostrils are equipped with something like a thousand hairs apiece.

These are vibrissae – they’re what used to be our whiskers. They help us cleanse each inhalation, as does mucus. Propelled by microscopic cilia on the surface of the cells lining the nose, our mucus contains chemicals to fight disease and resist pollen. And, all day, every day our noses humidify up to 14,000 litres of air so we can breathe it more efficiently and comfortably. Kovalyov was right to fear that leaving home without a nose would be risky.

Out in the world I rely on my nose to prevent social disaster. I have pathetic facial recognition, but even a brief encounter with someone’s scent will fix them in my memory for years. But repeatedly explaining my disability has revealed to me that any reference to smell can be socially disastrous in itself.

Smell is personal, animal, basic. Simply mentioning it can provoke uneasy laughter, if not hysteria. And it’s not unusual to find our complex, helpful, wonderful noses reduced to a punch line.

The nose joke

We laugh at noses. The red nose is the only part of a clown that isn’t scary. Even without the rest of the outfit it can add instant jollity. This may be a formalised way of mocking the noses, purplish with broken capillaries that we associate with habitual drunkenness, homeless tramping, or hard outdoor labour. When clowns seem threatening, perhaps it’s because they’re effectively the unruly poor coming to get us.

The Marx brothers were immensely talented comedians, but their imposing noses gave them a head start. Joke shops still sell Groucho glasses – or beaglepusses – with the plastic nose attached. An iconic nose has outlived its owner.

Einstein was a genius and a great communicator – but is his lasting reputation all down to the enthralling attractions of theoretical physics? Don’t we, just a little, find his mankind-dwarfing, imagination-bending concepts warm and memorable because of his amiable, noticeable nose?

Cyrano de Bergerac, obscure author of the world’s first science fiction novels, had, as far as we know, an above-average nose, forging ahead through duels, debates and flights of fancy.

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Edmond Rostand’s eponymous drama enlarges Cyrano’s nose and creates an unforgettable hero. Cyrano’s drama is unspeakably tragic, in part to stop us laughing too much at that nose – laughing as we do when we see Jimmy Durante sing a tender love song, or Woody Allen holding a gun to all that’s left of a dictator – the nose – in his futuristic comedy ‘Sleeper’.

And we don’t just mock noses – we can seem to hate them. Their prominence apparently offends us. Inappropriate curiosity pokes them into things. Steamy TV medical dramas capitalise on actors’ alluring eyes by covering their unromantic noses with surgical masks. The cliché of enticingly veiled female beauty operates in similar territory.

The nose is what we look down, or turn up. Or else we simply, dumbly follow it.

Bad odours

While our first and simplest words for smell are linked with animal intimacies (our mother’s skin, her hair), they’re more often for smells that are viscerally unpleasant – and quite possibly our fault. Sigmund Freud thought that smell was primitive, inextricably linked with the anal stage of development.

Even neutral words for the quality of having scent – smelling – aren’t that neutral. As you’ll discover if you tell your beloved “Darling, you smell …” even if the end of that sentence is “of sweetshops and paradise”, its start may have already shattered a budding relationship. Humans are animals but don’t want to smell like them.

Billion-dollar industries exist to save us from body odour, foot odour, bad breath, sweat. Before we knew about microbes, we even blamed infections on bad smells – ‘miasmas’. And if neutral words for smell are severely limited, words for bad smells are apparently unlimited: stink, stench, reek, pong, honk, howff, hum, ming – das stinkt, eso apesta, ça pue, это воняет.

There’s a neurological reason for our bias. Smells associated with disgust take a shortcut through the amygdala – part of the brain’s very emotional, unnuanced limbic system. They reach us at a basic, animal level.

More pleasant or neutral smells are processed in our cortex – the clever, fancily evolved layer that lets us invent string cheese and deodorant and rise above emotional involvement with aromas.

Evolutionarily speaking, bad smells are about danger, decomposition, fear, pain, fleeing, fighting – it’s important to be able to detect them and react swiftly. When we talk about something morally disgusting we may say it has a bad smell, it stinks, and that’s a clue that our brains process metaphorical disgust the same way they process the real kind.

The language of scent

So disturbing smells get VIP attention in case they’re going to kill us – but everything else? Smell is so important to survival that it has many connections to parts of the brain that evolved early, like the limbic system and the brain stem. Perhaps we treat it like an unwelcome intruder because it operates deep within us, beneath our control over our thinking. And smell has relatively few connections to the left neocortex, where we keep our words. This means our power to describe smells that aren’t potentially fatal is pretty stunted.

The orchestral blending of complex scents in a forest at dawn is … nice? Countryish? Foresty? Chocolate smells – of chocolate. Smells don’t have a separate vocabulary, even for scent sophisticates; noses who make a living out of categorising wines or perfumes will describe scents and flavours in terms of other things: hints of sandalwood and eggshell, an aftertaste of tarmac and so forth. We can pick out sharpness, sweetness, acridity and not that much beyond.

Only a few smell-sensitive cultures – often developed in light-deprived environments – have a range of other smell words. Tribes in the Andaman Islands, Papua New Guinea and the Amazon have terms for subtly connected smell groups. For them a scent can clearly resemble others in a scent group, the way that blue sky, a blue police box and baby blue are all different, but still identifiably blue.

Some researchers think smell-centredness may be an early trait from our Denisovan ancestors, still carried in some humans’ DNA. I myself long for a world where smells are allowed to form palettes, families, proud dictionaries of aroma.

Many languages do have one word for a complex smell so universal and useful it has stayed with us, perhaps from our days as hunter-gatherers. In English the term is petrichor – the smell that lets us know when it’s going to rain.

It has been suggested by some academics, of course, that peoples prioritising a ‘primitive’ sense may be especially primitive, but that could be our anti-smell bias talking. Sniffing, scenting, allowing an inrush of information that speaks to us without words – it’s not appealing to everyone. It can seem more suited to dogs or at least hairier primates than Homo sapiens. Throughout the ages those with money and power have made sure not to smell like the poor and not to build houses downwind of them.

The nose brain

Civilisation has consistently been associated with not smelling, or certainly not smelling natural. The doggedly cerebral and moderate Plato even thought the use of perfumes led to effeminacy and depravity. Even Kant took against smell. The nose has been associated with all that’s indecorous, dirty – even helplessly sexy – and we’ve laughed at it in revenge.

We should, of course, have thanked it. When early twentieth-century neuroscientists were trying to understand brain structures, they dissected rats and noted the massive olfactory bulbs with which the rats had, until recently, been trying to understand the neuroscientists. Intimately linked to these bulbs was an area of the rat brain initially christened the rhinencephalon – the nose brain, what we now call the limbic system in rats and humans.

It’s not just associated with tripping alarms, states of arousal and processing emotion; it helps create our memories. That’s why certain scents aren’t just animal invaders: they’re time travel, they’re joy, they’re home, they’re heartbreak.

I’ll never forget, years after his death, being passed on the street by a man wearing my grandfather’s aftershave. For one deep moment I could summon that voice, that face, being folded in those arms again. A gift of the nose.

Although, yes, I’ll admit some of the gifts can seem unsettling. It’s okay that Mrs Rat can know by scent that now is the time to make rat babies with that male rat over there, or can recognise her relatives, including those rat babies. Mrs Rat may even coordinate her reproductive cycle with her close lady rat neighbours, because they’ve inhaled each other’s pheromones.

We humans (even me) rely most on vision – the cool, sophisticated fashion photographer among the senses. But humans recognise relatives and choose mates by scent. They can detect fertility and even specific genes. We may find a face more attractive depending on how it smells, and we tend to choose perfumes that enhance our own natural blend of scents. We spend a fortune trying to obliterate our natural smells, but pheromones still change our moods, our focus levels and how we perceive each other, and can synchronise women’s menstrual cycles.

For centuries phallic masks and racy nose-related humour helped us deal with that weirdly sexy something about the nose. We now know scent prepares us for intimacy and maintains it – the nose even contains erectile tissue… And the people with whom we mate, form relationships? We love their scents, up close; our bodies continue each other in each breath. No wonder the artfully wild and passionate Romantic Movement embraced scent.

Our noses give us breath, life: the perfume of our children’s skin, or of our lover’s tenderness, the hallway scent of being home, the pleasure in every bite, the power to turn back time. So no more jokes, or shaming, let us carry our noses ahead of us with pride.