MARCH 25th - Messing Around With Smell



On this day in 1937, The Washington Daily News became the 1st newspaper in the United States to run an ad with a perfumed scent. Unfortunately, it was an ad for the importance of natural fertilizer and readers got a tad bit angry at the horseshit scratch and sniff. Kidding. I’m sure it was a perfume ad, but I’ve often thought this technology was grossly underutilized. If you’re flipping through a magazine and come to a picture of delicious cookies and then that smell of warm baking chocolate chip wafts up to your nostrils, tell me you’re not going to go Cookie Monster on that page immediately. It would work with almost any type of food. Probably not asparagus. Or brussel sprouts. Because they kind of smell like sweaty feet. But other than that you’d be golden. Granted the days of print magazines may be numbered, so the boat may have been missed as I have yet to see or hear of the olfactory sense seeping through a computer screen. I’m sure they have the technology for it. I mean cellphones can basically do everything but teleport these days. But maybe they don’t. They would need to get it right. You don’t want to go messing with people’s sense of smell. It’s a very underrated sense. Can make you recall things or feel things that would otherwise lie dormant. Plus, I’d pissed if crossed my wires somehow, and every time I saw a cookie it smelled like sweaty feet. So I guess I’m fine with keeping the scented ads for perfume in magazines.

This day has been Marked.

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