How Museums Are Incorporating Scent Into Exhibits

Does dark matter smell like pepper? Just how stinky was the breath of Tyrannosaurus rex? What was the fragrance of an extinct flower? And what scents might greet us on the moon or Mars?

As museums break with static displays of the past by embracing interactive audio and visual and tactile displays, some have added scent to the sensory onslaught. The human sense of smell, which has powerful connections to memory and emotion, has been deployed in art and historical displays and museums around the world. A recent exhibit highlights the use of scent for science communication by enlivening subjects that might otherwise seem heady and abstract.

The Corning Museum of Glass’s “Sensorium: Stories of Glass and Fragrance” lets visitors experience some displays through the nose as much as the eyes.

Smell is “something that museums can use in a very intentional way to paint a picture that is a little bit more visceral and immediate,” said Julie Bellemare, curator of early modern glass at the museum, which is in Corning, N.Y.

“Sensorium,” running through Feb. 1, 2025, includes about 70 objects that embody the role of glass as a vessel for concocting and containing fragrances. The exhibit traces the use of glass in antiquity and chronicles scientific advances along the way, including the invention of alembics used for distillation.

Before visitors peruse the exhibition’s ancient perfume bottles and gilded atomizers, they are greeted at the entrance by a smelling station. People can lift flaps to sniff four scents — cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and mace — that correspond to spiced oils that were held in ornate flasks used in the 1700s as diplomatic gifts by Dutch merchants.

“These box sets would have been extremely expensive,” Dr. Bellemare said. “Hence, the prompt and the introduction to the scent experience is: ‘What does money smell like in the 1700s?’”

In this way, “Sensorium” provides an olfactory on-ramp into the subject by activating a visitor’s sense of smell.

The Corning Museum, an institution that blends art, history and science, is far from the first to use scent-infused experiences that aim to transport visitors to a time, place or head space through their nostrils.

Olfactory museology has roots in the avant-garde art movement more than a century ago, according to Caro Verbeek, a researcher of olfactory heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a curator at Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands. In 1938, for instance, surrealists wafted the scent of Brazilian coffee through an exhibit in Paris.

A goal of these artists was “to rebel against the western ‘scopic regime’ in which the sense of sight was (and is) deemed the most important,” Dr. Verbeek said in an email.

She added that scent was now being used “to make exhibitions more inclusive and accessible.”

“This started about a decade ago and exploded over the past five years,” she said.

Sissel Tolaas, an artist who uses the techniques of forensic chemistry, has been contributing smells to dozens of museum exhibits and other environments since the 1990s, including “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which was recently closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Because we live in parts of the world with deodorization, sanitation and shiny surfaces, we are completely out of order in understanding the complexity of information that smell provides,” said Ms. Tolaas, the founder of SMELL Re_searchLab Berlin, an odor archive and laboratory.

Ms. Tolaas travels the world to capture and catalog smells. With techniques like gas chromatography, she has amassed an archive of 20,000 smell molecules. In addition to formulating scents, she pays close attention to their potencies, concentrations and circulation through an environment.

“For me, a smell molecule is the alphabet of the air,” Ms. Tolaas said. “Smell is very personal, and there’s a very individual perception of it.”

Some museums have made smells their main attraction, among them the Fragrance Museum in Cologne, Germany, and the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents in Berkeley, Calif.

Scent is also a tool that helps museums promote exhibits that can be experienced only in person.

“Multisensory experiences are one of the most important go-tos that a museum can present that isn’t available through any virtual experience,” said Andrew Saluti, an associate professor and program coordinator of the graduate program in museum studies at Syracuse University. He noted that many institutions were still recovering from the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic.

With that context in mind, curated spaces including smells are inspiring research.

Dr. Verbeek has collected questionnaires from participants about their experiences on scent-infused guided tours, which her team analyzed in a 2022 study. One such tour involved a “scentscape” designed to evoke the studios used by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian a century ago.

Working with Jules J. Claus, a neurologist at the University of Amsterdam, Dr. Verbeek said they showed in the Mondrian exhibit that “people feel more immersed while looking at his model studios and smelling these scents as if they are standing next to him while he works.”

Roberto Trotta, a theoretical physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, has likewise experimented with smell, organizing a multisensory “journey through dark matter” at the Science Museum in London. The smell of black pepper oils served as the olfactory stand-in for this elusive form of cosmic mass.

“Given its relationship with the more primordial part of the brain, smell could then be used to elicit a more emotional (rather than purely intellectual) response to the topic being addressed,” Dr. Trotta said in an email.

The impacts of smell stem in part from the neural pathways odors activate in our brains. While other senses get routed to the cortex from the thalamus, smell is received directly by the limbic system, which stores memories and regulates emotions. This beeline through the brain might explain why a certain smell can transport you to a distant memory or inspire a strong emotional response.

Smells can also provoke physical responses, such as allergic reactions, a reason museums tend to deploy scents with a light touch. Many exhibits, including “Sensorium,” keep odors localized to covered containers so that the experience remains voluntary.

On the other end of the spectrum, in Bristol, England, there is Brunel’s S.S. Great Britain, a museum that has laid claim to the title of “world’s smelliest museum.” Visitors can board its eponymous restored steamship, which is suffused with scents that simulate the vessel’s monthslong passages to and from Australia. As you might imagine, the aroma of a busy 19th century passenger ship was not always pleasant.

The odors include carbolic soap, crusty bread, rum, urine, vomit and horse manure, said Lucinda Comport and Natalie Fey, who are on the museum’s interpretation team, in an email.

“Each smell has been carefully selected to create an authentic sense of how pungent the ship would have been,” they added.

The museum also offers regular “calm” sessions where the multisensory elements are switched off to accommodate visitors with sensory disabilities. But the odoriferous verisimilitude of the ship is a big draw, revealing a demand for complex smellscapes in museums, even with disagreeable undertones.

“There’s always a danger when you’re dealing with multisensory experience, especially with smells,” Mr. Saluti said. “Whether it’s adverse or if it’s positive, there are some really strong reactions with smells.”

“But that really can happen with any curatorial narrative,” including visual displays, he added.

Though museums are mindful of detrimental encounters with odors, curators also hope that smells could open up new dimensions to people with sensory disabilities, including visual impairments.

“As we start thinking more about smell, olfactory and multisensory components in our exhibitions, that’s really a great way to think about our mission of accessibility as well,” Dr. Bellemare said. “Maybe these components in future exhibitions can make the content and art more accessible to everyone.”

To that point, Dr. Verbeek believes that olfactory elements not only can deepen the experience of an exhibit or space but also can influence the impressions of our other senses.

“Let’s not forget that the senses are never separated,” she said. “My motto is ‘you see more when you smell,’ so smelling will alter what you see.”