SPEAKER_00: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and T-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I.
SPEAKER_08: So what do you wear?
SPEAKER_02: Oh my God, I'm a slut. I wear a bunch of different stuff. I've never worn the same perfume two days in a row.
SPEAKER_09: This is Rachel Seim. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and one of the most genuinely glamorous people I have ever met. So she always smells like some perfume or another. I love like Dior Poison and N.I.E.C.E. and I love wearing number five in the highest concentration as the oil.
SPEAKER_02: And I like Tuberose and I love Gardenia and I love it to be like a cloud of that around you. I just love it. I was the opposite of Rachel. I didn't really get perfume. I would spritz some on at the airport sometimes, but mostly I just found it all smelled perfume-y.
SPEAKER_09: I don't think I can smell. On paper everything just smells like chemicals to me. Yeah, well it needs a moment to dry down.
SPEAKER_02: I wanted to figure out what I was missing. So I asked Rachel to take me perfume shopping at Sephora.
SPEAKER_09: Hence the annoying pop music you hear in the background. I'm like, I love this scent.
SPEAKER_02: Mmm, it's so delicious.
SPEAKER_11: Oh, it's kind of, I'm such a, I can't describe it.
SPEAKER_09: It's Tuberose. That's Tuberose. That's what you're smelling. That flower.
SPEAKER_02: And then there's a little ginger on the top. Whatever Rachel was experiencing, I wasn't getting it.
SPEAKER_09: It was like I was trying to fudge my way through a wine tasting by being like, oh yeah, this one has overtones of grape. Too sweet?
SPEAKER_09: I guess it just smells chemically to me. Like it smells like clean, so you shouldn't be, you know? Yeah. I thought perfume was a kind of snake oil. That basically the only thing separating one perfume from another was the design of the bottle and the name of the brand. I thought perfume was just a way for big fashion labels to make money, which it absolutely is. Like Chanel makes a ton of money from fragrance. Dior.
SPEAKER_02: The places where basically like people can't always afford the thing, but they can afford the perfume. It's like people's gateway drug to get into the branding.
SPEAKER_09: And so I was ready to make a story that would be like, wake up people, perfume is a ruse. You're getting fleeced for a name and the packaging. You know, I really admire and think a lot about the artistry behind perfumes when they're made.
SPEAKER_02: Even, you know, any of these designer perfumes.
SPEAKER_09: This is what Rachel knew that I had yet to find out. Perfume is a key to a whole other dimension that we've all collectively denied and forgotten. Articles of interest. A show about what we wear. Season two. People don't realize it's fantasy.
SPEAKER_12: There's always this thing that you have to work extra hard to get.
SPEAKER_01: Mmm. That's so good.
SPEAKER_10: No one dresses like a king anymore. How do you make money? That's how I make money, love.
SPEAKER_08: There are lots of things that we take for granted that would once have been considered luxuries.
SPEAKER_09: If someone forced you to surrender one of your five senses, you'd probably handily give up your sense of smell. I mean, I would. We talk about how foods are umami or spicy or how music can be soothing or energizing or cacophonous. But with scent, we don't really analyze it with a lot of nuance. The question is usually black or white. Do you like the scent or not? This smells good. This smells bad. We just don't have a lot of tools to analyze smells linguistically or scientifically. In fact, there is no way to assess the volume of a scent. There are no instruments that can measure odor levels. We have instruments that can measure the chemicals that are in an odor plume,
SPEAKER_12: but that doesn't translate into, at least not at the present time, into what the odor experience is for any individual.
SPEAKER_09: Hamila Dalton is a senior scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But when I talked to her, she was not in Philly. She was talking to me from a conference room in Chicago. I'm here for a deposition. I do expert witness work from time to time, and this is an odor case involving people's complaints around a landfill.
SPEAKER_09: In legal cases involving smells, they have to hire professional noses to make very subjective calls. And it's not like Hamila is a superhuman. Generally, people are pretty good at smelling. Much better than we think we are. We can smell things when there's one or two parts of a fragrant material in a billion parts of air, which is really, really tiny.
SPEAKER_12: So we're more sensitive than we believe. You know, dogs may be sensitive to a range of compounds, but humans have much more sensitivity to a much more diverse set of chemicals in the environment.
SPEAKER_09: But we don't use scent the way dogs and other animals do. And in part, it's because we're bipedal. Our noses quite simply evolved to be farther away from the earth. We're now at four to five, six feet above the ground. So we're smelling different things, right?
SPEAKER_12: We're not smelling things as we were when we were floating around on all fours.
SPEAKER_09: Yet still, on occasion, we'll lift our noses to the air and take a sniff. It's just that more often than not, we pay attention to smells that present a threat. Spoiled foods, rot, death, mold. If there's a fire or a gas leak, farts.
SPEAKER_12: And so we learned that, you know, we want to stay away from those kinds of odors.
SPEAKER_09: We've come to associate scent with something primal and unpleasant. If you ask, hey, do I smell? The collective assumption is that that's a bad thing. We want to avoid smells and smelling. And this mentality goes back to a number of philosophers in the West, from Plato to Aristotle to Kant, who derided our sense of smell as base and secondary, or really like quinary. Historically, it has been the least respected of our senses. And so a lot of folks just try to ignore it.
SPEAKER_12: But I think as a species, we have discounted that we really can smell a lot of chemicals at vanishingly trivial concentrations. So we have the capacity to smell things in the parts per billions, but we lack the capacity to talk about them.
SPEAKER_09: So much of learning to smell comes from learning how to describe smells. So I was at a party. A woman came in who was hugging everybody, and she smelled really good,
SPEAKER_04: and a number of people told her that she smelled good. And I said, okay, I can tell you that she's wearing this particular brand, and it's from this many years ago, and the reason that she smells cozy and snug is because it's got a lot of ionones in it, and she smells sort of like orris, which is the aged root of the Florentine iris flower, and it's got sort of a powdery feeling, so she smells like a hug. And everyone's looking at me, and I was like, I'm not smelling any more than you are. I just have the words to tell you what the brand is, when it came out, and what's in it. Miranda Gordon is the vice president of marketing at MAN.
SPEAKER_09: MAN is a fragrance company. Because the lion's share of the hundreds and hundreds of designer perfumes that come out each year are made by the same dozen or so companies. MAN has made perfumes for Banana Republic and Armani, and a ton of scents for really widespread popular brands you definitely know, like **** and the **** that we're not allowed to talk about, so don't mention those. For some brands, it's a dirty secret that they contract out their scents to other companies. But I don't think there should be any shame in it. Because sure, most of us have the potential to get really good at smelling, but actually designing a perfume is something entirely different. It's like composing a piece of music or choreographing a dance. It is an art. And the professionals make it look easy.
SPEAKER_09: Let's start simply. Some perfume ingredients can be very straightforward. Like if you're trying to use a citrus scent, that's pretty easy to get. That scent is extracted from the peel of the fruit with cold pressing. The same way we make olive oil, we can make grapefruit oil or lemon oil or lime oil or mandarin oil.
SPEAKER_04: But there are a lot of scents that you can't just get.
SPEAKER_09: You can't just press the oil of a mango or a strawberry or a pear or an apple. Like if you pressed an apple peel, you wouldn't get apple oil, you would get apple juice, which is not very fragrant and you wouldn't want to dab that on yourself. So there are many, many scents that perfumers have to build, molecule by molecule, in a laboratory.
SPEAKER_10: There are chemicals that have an apple odor to them. Gino Percantino is one of the perfumers at MUN.
SPEAKER_09: If he wants to make an apple scent, he will gather a bunch of smells together, what some perfumers call notes.
SPEAKER_10: Combining and mixing those notes to get an authentic apple smell.
SPEAKER_09: And a group of notes makes an accord.
SPEAKER_10: An accord is a group of ingredients that's usually less than 10 ingredients to try to emulate a specific thing.
SPEAKER_09: And there's no one set apple accord. Every perfumer has their own way to make it. Think of it like Gino is painting a picture of an apple. It could be realistic, it could be impressionistic, it could be cartoonish. The apple could be slightly fermented, it could be a yellow apple or a green apple. It could be in a tree, it could be in a pie. Listen to how Gino renders a fig, which is another one of those scents you have to build note by note. Fig is always fun for me because I often work from some of my best coconut, just coconut.
SPEAKER_10: So I'm not talking about like pina colada with pineapple and all that. Just the creamy kind of coconut. If you dial it back and put more pulp into it, a little more juiciness into it, a little more green with some extra woods. Because you want that stemmy element of it and then you've turned a coconut into a fig.
SPEAKER_09: And that's the part that's technically impressive. But making a perfume is not just about rendering a good believable fig. It's then using that fig in a way that's interesting and new. So Gino could situate the fig in a scent that's smoky and leathery or something powdery and floral or something lush and green. Or include an ingredient that I would have never considered.
SPEAKER_10: My favorite ingredient is Szechuan pepper. Really? Yeah. Szechuan pepper, it's kind of citrusy. It has a citrusy element. It has an aromatic element. It has a little spicy element. There's a virtuosity in professional perfume.
SPEAKER_09: That's the difference between, say, an essential oil from a health food store and a perfume. It's the difference between the pleasure of a single ripe peach and the pleasure of an exquisitely executed risotto. Professional perfume is artistry and intuition and a lot of hard science. Because some combinations just don't work on a molecular level. If you don't know what you're doing and you take the smell of blackcurrant and the smell of rhubarb and you put it together in a test tube,
SPEAKER_04: things are going to interact at the molecular level and it's going to smell like the cat pissed on your weed. In Mann's laboratory in midtown Manhattan, perfumers and technicians were busily mixing drops from a selection of hundreds and hundreds of notes.
SPEAKER_09: The smell of the laboratory was incredible. It wasn't like a perfume counter in a department store. That smells like 50 top 40 radio stations blasting at once. Mann's laboratory smells like an orchestra of raw possibilities composed of both natural and synthetic ingredients. And without derailing this whole story, let me just say there are some controversies in there. Perfume ingredients are considered trade secrets, so they aren't listed on the bottle. And this opacity has caused some worry because there are ingredients, natural and synthetic alike, that can trigger allergic reactions. And some animal studies have found fragrance chemicals that are probable carcinogens or have been linked to liver, kidney and lung damage. The perfume industry says that all the ingredients they use are at such low concentration that they aren't dangerous to human health. But there have been calls to set more limits on the materials perfumers can use. And sure enough, every now and then an ingredient gets pulled off the market.
SPEAKER_10: I look at it as if they're doing some kind of testing with ingredients and they're being a little restrictive. I think there's some value to that if it's going to help humanity in some way. It ties my hands a little bit on trying to be creative. Gino is operating within a set of constantly shifting constraints.
SPEAKER_09: Instruments are being removed from Mann's orchestra all the time. By the different regulatory laws of every country, yes, but also by an ingredient's availability. When a certain scent becomes trendy, it becomes harder to procure. Take Indian sandalwood. It's a delicious natural scent, super popular. There's a drop of Indian sandalwood in pretty much everything on the market.
SPEAKER_04: And the challenge with Indian sandalwood is that the trees have to be at least 30 years old before you can harvest them. You can't just go plant more trees and have more oil tomorrow. You've got to wait 30 years. So Indian sandalwood had to be replaced with Australian sandalwood, which doesn't smell the same, or with synthetic sandalwood, which doesn't smell the same.
SPEAKER_09: So making a new perfume isn't just unbridled creativity. It's limited by a lot of factors. And at the end of the day, the scent has to sell. Mann's brilliant perfumers probably aren't going to make something that smells like fig and szechuan peppers. They manufacture pop music. They're trying to make something interesting within the parameters of mainstream taste. Something you'd buy in a Sephora, or something you'd buy in your grocery store. Because Mann, and the dozen or so major fragrance companies, don't just make perfume. They work on every product that has a smell. Home care, cleaning laundry, personal care.
SPEAKER_09: Suzanne McCormick is the head of fragrance for Method Products. They make soap and detergent and body wash. And they work with two of the major fragrance houses. Because I kid you not, it is just the same small handful of companies that are crafting all the scents all around us. And this overlap means that trends in high-end perfume affect your dish soap. There is a trickle down. It's just like how high-end fashion designers will create a look that eventually ends up at H&M. If a fragrance company develops an accord that sells really well, that scent might eventually end up in your face cream or your laundry detergent. Rose had been considered the older fragrance note, and then all the fine fragrances, many fine fragrance brands were bringing it to life in a modern way.
SPEAKER_05: And then as you trickle down to our body wash, we have peony, rosewater. And a while back there was sea salt in everything. So we did lime and sea salt was one of our fragrances that we did that continued to do very well.
SPEAKER_09: And so, these scent companies are everywhere. Making you, your kitchen, and your bathroom smell like citrus and lavender and rose. But this idea of our bodies smelling somewhat interchangeably with our fabric softener and our dishes is relatively recent. We used to have a wildly different concept of what it meant to smell good. I guess I could start with the perfumes that shocked me the most, and they were the perfumes of the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
SPEAKER_03: Barbara Herman is the creative director of Heiress Parfum and the author of the book Scent and Subversion.
SPEAKER_09: I like to describe what I did in this book was sniff my way through the 20th century.
SPEAKER_03: What we think people should smell like is completely cultural, and it's changed over time.
SPEAKER_09: In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, women were marketed perfumes that were more funky.
SPEAKER_03: Women smelled like tobacco and leather, and you know, as Jacques Guerlain said about his perfumes, perfumes should smell like the underside of my mistress. There was this idea that perfume was supposed to smell funky.
SPEAKER_09: Perfumes had ingredients like ambergris, which is oxidized whale vomit, and musk, which is deer sex gland secretion. Now these kinds of smells are made synthetically, but in the early 20th century, people wore the real stuff. Which sounds off-putting, but actually, these smells are fascinating. Barbara happened to have some real ambergris in her refrigerator. I mean, it's a very, very hard scent to describe.
SPEAKER_03: Some people say there's tobacco note, there's obviously a very animalic kind of fecal quality to it, but also slightly metallic and coumarin or like hay-like, slightly sweet. It's more of a feeling than it is a smell for me. It's just like being enveloped in warmth.
SPEAKER_09: I loved this smell. I'm like looking at a landscape through a pinhole. Oh, can I see more of it? I can't, you know? That's a good way to describe it. I wish I could stick my head in a box full of it and be like, this is this. It's very evocative.
SPEAKER_09: For all those weird and gross descriptors, ambergris smells incredible. Most scents, especially naturally occurring ones, are way more nuanced and strange than we'd like to believe. There's a sweetness in sweat, a fruitiness in blood. I know, I sound like a psychopath, but there's a really fuzzy line between delicious and off-putting if you pay attention to your nose and forget the fact that this may be well barf.
SPEAKER_03: Because it's sensual and cozy and a lot of, you know, subliminal, unconscious effects. I can't put them all into words, but if you've experienced them and if you're open to them, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_09: And it's interesting that people in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s were more willing to wear these strong, animalic smells. It's particularly interesting that they were marketed to women. On the one hand, it's kind of empowering and bold and sensuous, but it also meant these women weren't exactly dousing themselves to go to board meetings. They were scents for the bedroom. And our idea of what femininity should smell like evolved in the 1950s, when a lot of bright and powdery scents came out. Very, like, Doris Day peppy.
SPEAKER_03: Florals, huge ass, white florals, screaming.
SPEAKER_09: And then, like everything else in culture, scent was subverted by the time you get to the 70s, when there was this natural wave of oak moss and patchouli. And then the 1980s were about big, bold fragrances, the kind that, as Rachel Sime puts it, could clear an elevator. And then, there was a very important pendulum swing in the 1990s, a sea change that mainstream sensibilities have still not recovered from.
SPEAKER_03: The 90s was generally the clean decade.
SPEAKER_09: This is when perfumes like CK1 came out for men and for women. There was this wave of clean smells that were light and fresh and inoffensive. They made you smell like you just showered.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, there's some great clean perfumes. Like, don't get me wrong, I love to rag on them, but I just think that what perfume meant in the past and what it means now is very different. Clean scents took off in a major way.
SPEAKER_09: Exceedingly popular. A lot of money in them. And when perfume just became kind of generally pleasant and non-threatening, more and more companies felt comfortable yoking their prized brand name to it. Industrial perfume creation world, which happened after the 90s,
SPEAKER_03: or starting in the 90s when perfumes just got mass-produced. The celebrity scent thing.
SPEAKER_09: And so, broadly speaking, we are still stuck there in the fresh and clean era, particularly the United States. Oh, we're Puritans.
SPEAKER_04: Really? Yeah, to smell is to be sensual or to be erotic or dirty. That's why fresh and clean is such a big deal in this country.
SPEAKER_09: Miranda Gordon at Monaghan.
SPEAKER_04: In France, you're sexy if you're a little funky. Here, you've got to be freshly showered and smell like nothing.
SPEAKER_09: And in fact, if you do want to smell like nothing at all, that also involves fragrance. Because even when you're buying a product labeled fragrance-free, that is often not true. A product that's labeled fragrance-free in all likelihood remained a customer of ours,
SPEAKER_04: and we had to fragrance it in order to cover up the malodors of the functional things in your products. There's probably something in there, it's what we call a masking odor, or a masking aroma that's canceling out whatever fishy smell or funky smell or oily smell the ingredients in your face cream might have. Because most things on this earth have a smell.
SPEAKER_09: It's just that an industry has developed around avoiding the weird ones. We want to smell fresh and clean and nothing else. And so, yeah, the mainstream perfume market's been stuck in the clean boom for some decades now. But there's been a quiet revolution in the last 15-ish years. On the fringes of perfume, an indie scene has blossomed.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so now we're going to smell tomato leather. This is meant to be literally a combination of those two smells. At her San Francisco perfume store, Tiger Lily, Antonia Cole sells scents that are deeply, deeply odd.
SPEAKER_08: This fragrance is inspired by the Printmaker's Studio and by India Ink. Inspired by the god of the afterlife in Egypt. And the smell, she imagined, would be inside the tombs. This is what it smells like when you're waiting for the ferry to take you to Seattle. There's so many more unusual scents in this store. We've got stuff that smells like campfires and...
SPEAKER_09: Ooh! Thousands of independent perfumers have started popping up. Many of them taking artistic risks that a designer brand wouldn't dare attempt. There are hardcore boutiques like Tiger Lily scattered around the world. And they almost act like oddball record shops for the underground music nerds. Who want to sniff the strange stuff.
SPEAKER_08: It literally smells like a bat's cave. It's like a strong petrichor where you feel the water on the dirt and the stone in the cave. And then it also represents a day in the life of a fruit bat. So you also get the fallen fruit like rotting banana. And you get a leather that represents the bat's wing.
SPEAKER_09: In this relatively new movement, there are a lot of perfumers who make scent on the side. As a passion project. That's the case for the perfumer who made the bat scent. She has a day job. She's also a bat behavioral scientist.
SPEAKER_08: And an orchid farmer. So yes, she teaches at the University of Washington in the behavioral sciences. And she specializes in bats. And she does perfume on the side. Wow.
SPEAKER_09: And wins awards for it. As Antonia and I sniffed around Tiger Lily's cabinet of curiosities. A customer rushed in breathlessly. Hi!
SPEAKER_08: Hi, how are you doing? I know what you're here for. I know, I call them the crazy lady. And Mauricio I think has it for you in the back.
SPEAKER_09: This customer was looking for a niche scent that had been put on hiatus. Because... The perfumer also is a cyber security expert.
SPEAKER_08: And he has a new job just got promoted. And so he's so busy he can't make any more of it. So she called today and was like, do you have any left?
SPEAKER_09: People have really strong reactions to perfume. It's an emotional thing. And it's not just for that customer at Tiger Lily. We're all wired for it. You sniff these molecules in, they bind to a receptor.
SPEAKER_12: Pamela Dalton from the Monell Chemical Senses Center again.
SPEAKER_09: That signal is passing through a portion of the brain called the limbic system.
SPEAKER_12: Which is responsible for emotional responses. So it's that emotional response that becomes so tightly associated with something that we're smelling. When I went to my college reunion I was struck that my old dorm hallway still smelled the same.
SPEAKER_09: A waft of bergamot always reminds me of an ex. Eucalyptus brings me back to childhood trips to visit my grandma in San Francisco. We all have this superpower. To use scent as a gateway to the past. But in learning to smell, and learning to talk about smell, we can experience a vivid present. To stop and smell the roses, sure. But also stop and smell the garbage. Really. And the couch and the hallway and the shampoo and the skin of a mandarin. The sweat and the rain and the pleather and the brick. To smell where you are right now.
SPEAKER_07: I think a lot of people are like, I don't like perfume. I have no interest in it.
SPEAKER_09: The first time I met Rachel Sime in that Sephora in Union Square, I was one of those people. And for me, I'm like, wow, I think it's an art form and I'm fascinated by it endlessly.
SPEAKER_02: And I love what people make. And even here, I just love exploring all different creations. And that's why I buy something in a bottle. Because it's something somebody made. It's like buying art.
SPEAKER_09: The second time I saw Rachel, she gave me a little bottle of perfume. She warned me it was the kind of thing you couldn't get her to Sephora. The bottle was plain. I had never heard of the brand. At first sniff, it was cozy cedar and leather. It was riding on the back of a motorcycle through the woods. Another sniff and it smelled like gasoline and it was actually sickening. It nearly gave me a headache. I abandoned the scent for months. But recently came back and smelled again. And this time something malted came out of it. Almost gourmand. I can't pin it down. It changes with my mood. It changes with my skin. It changes with my day, with my surroundings and the weather and the cacophony of smells all around me that I, by and large, used to ignore.
SPEAKER_01: There's a portrait painted on the things we love.
SPEAKER_09: Our opening and closing songs are by Sasami. Special thanks this episode to Master Perfumer Mandy Aftel, Perfume Critic Chandler Burr, Perfume Bottle Designer Chad Levine, Dana Bruno at MAN and especially Bibi Preval at MAN. Insights, support and edits from the whole 99PI team, including Vivien Leigh, Sean Real, Abby Madon, Kirk Colestead, Delaney Hall and Katie Mingle. And Roman Mars is the fresh and clean scent of this whole series.
SPEAKER_01: There's a portrait painted on the things we love.
SPEAKER_00: If thinking about salsa and a variety of delicious flavors and heat levels makes your mouth water, you need to check out Green Mountain Gringo and make sure you turn the jar around to see its all natural ingredients. With a medium salsa, you get hearty chunks of tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers and onions in every scoop. Some like it hot and for those people like me, Green Mountain Gringo does not disappoint. My favorite is the hot salsa, which brings flavorful heat to every meal with each bite containing jalapenos, serrano peppers and other savory herbs. Green Mountain Gringo even has their own tortilla strips made with stone ground all natural yellow corn flour. As far as I'm concerned, the secret to life is to have the ingredients to make nachos in your home at all times. Plus, they have a hot sauce with tangy spicy flavor that enhances the simplest of meals. It's perfect for eggs. I like hot sauce on eggs. Visit GreenMountainGringo.com and start shopping. Use the store locator to find Green Mountain Gringo products, get inspiration for recipes and purchase products using promo code PODCAST23 for 23% off. That's promo code PODCAST23. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
SPEAKER_11: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
SPEAKER_00: Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp dot com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible.
SPEAKER_04: Gender in fragrance is as artificial a social construct as gender in society. Amen, Miranda Gordon, VP of marketing at MUN.
SPEAKER_09: Nobody ever said that flowers were only for girls or actually we did say the industry said but I don't know that the globe agrees that flowers are for girls and woods are for boys.
SPEAKER_04: There's no way a given gender is supposed to smell because we all just kind of smell like our skin and sweat.
SPEAKER_09: The distinction between cologne and perfume is just about the concentration of oil. It's not that cologne is any more masculine than perfume. It's just the way it's marketed. Men and women both used to wear a lot of perfume, usually to mask the fact that they didn't bathe. Until one man decided that perfume was for women. But in the course of that he also would bathe every day which was taken at the time the late 18th century as a rather ridiculous vanity and indeed something that might be even dangerous for your health to wash that often.
SPEAKER_06: That's author Ian Kelly and he says there was this one historic gentleman who decreed that men should smell as plain as possible.
SPEAKER_09: In fact he also thought men should dress as plain as possible. That to be manly was to look boring. He yes happened to be the right person at the right time to be the center of this shift in fashion.
SPEAKER_06: Your next articles of interest are suits.
SPEAKER_09: I am new here. Nothing to fear. I am strong. Body and mind. I'll get through it. I can do it to myself. I will be kind.
SPEAKER_11: Introducing a new line of vitamins for moms from Centrum. The number one doctor recommended multivitamin brand. Because for every bit of love you give your new baby, make sure you give yourself love too. Visit Centrum.com to learn how Centrum is collaborating with Postpartum Support International to help put moms first.
SPEAKER_07: Is there any trip more delightfully unpredictable than a road trip? After all, who knows where the road will take you? Who knows where you'll stay? Will it be that no-name hotel that says no to every request?
SPEAKER_01: No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself. Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast.
SPEAKER_07: I think I broke a tooth. When you want a place you can always rely on wherever the road takes you, it matters where you stay. Welcome to Hampton by Hilton. Don't forget about our free hot breakfast.
SPEAKER_07: Hilton. For the stay.
SPEAKER_01: When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says McDelivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. I participate in McDonald's. Delivery prices might be higher than in restaurants. Delivery fees may apply.
