There’s nothing unusual about Hasmig Royan’s nose. It fits her face well. There’s also nothing unusual about her sense of smell: whiffs of jasmine, Bounce dryer sheets and Sharpie markers all bring her olfactory joy. But it’s how she uses both that sets her apart.
Royan is an odour assessor. It’s a quirky gig, for sure, but one in which having a perfectly ordinary ability to detect scent is exactly what makes her so valuable.
“My job is to be the average person,” the Burlington mom of one explains, “because we’re trying to determine when the average person can smell what’s in the air.”
Over the past two years, Royan has sniffed hundreds of samples in a laboratory west of Toronto, registering everything from wastewater to dairy.
She’s one of 25 humans that St. Croix Sensory Canada relies on to help build odour profiles for clients who need the data for environmental assessments, quality assurance work or product testing.
While machines can be trained to “detect” some specific chemical compounds and recognize patterns, Thomas Vallarino, director of the independent, third-party lab, says “the only real way to measure an odour is with a human nose.”
Smell is an undervalued sense
This dependence on human perception underscores just how vital smell is in our daily lives — from the food we eat and sprays we use to clean our homes, to the fragrances and lotions we bathe ourselves in. Smells can be intoxicating or repulsive, can evoke nostalgic memories or trigger allergic reactions. And as urban expansion brings residents in ever closer proximity to industry, farms and waste facilities, understanding and managing the scents we encounter daily is more pressing than ever.
Despite this, our profoundly sensitive olfactory ability is often undervalued: In fact, a survey found that most respondents would give it up if it meant keeping their cellphone.
It’s why anatomy Prof. Johannes Frasnelli headlines his academic webpage with the words, “Smell, the underrated sense …”
“When we think of smell, we often think of flowers,” says Frasnelli, whose research at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières includes olfactory dysfunctions related to diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
“But smell is much more than that,” he says, noting it can alert us to dangers, like gas or spoiled foods, it can enhance our enjoyment of food and drink, and even play a role in how we perceive others. “If we lose the sense of smell, we lose all this, and this induces an impairment of quality of life.”
About 20 per cent of the population has a reduced or distorted sense of smell, with about five per cent not able to smell at all. Aging, anatomy, illness and pregnancy can affect one’s capacity.
Vallarino says the ideal odour assessor has a typical and reliable sense of smell. Those with heightened sensibility need not apply.
‘This can’t be a real job’
When an online posting for the contract position first caught Royan’s eye, her initial thought was, “this can’t be a real job.”
At the time, St. Croix Sensory, a 45-year-old, family-owned American company, had recently expanded into Canada, and the lab was only a short drive from home.
Royan says she grilled Vallarino until she was satisfied it wasn’t a scam. St. Croix Sensory Canada also had to ensure Royan met its benchmarks, based on protocols set by the European Committee for Standardization, which include testing a candidate’s level of detection sensitivity to n-butanol, a neutral compound.
“Most people can pick up n-butanol within the criteria,” says Vallarino. Those who can’t are turned away. “We’re looking for folks with a normal sense of smell … the panel has to be representative of the general population.”
What’s it like to smell for a living
St. Croix Sensory Canada does about 200 odour panels a year. Air samples are captured by customers and quickly dispatched to the laboratory in Burlington. (Standards specify testing must be done within 30 hours of collection.) Panels usually include five to eight assessors who must avoid wearing scented products and refrain from caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, spicy foods and medications ahead of testing. Feeling unwell or congested gets you sidelined.
Once in the lab, assessors, using customized nose pieces (sanitized and stored on site), take turns sniffing blind samples through an olfactometer, an instrument used to detect and measure odour dilution.
Depending on a client’s needs, assessors might be asked to detect concentration or intensity or even if they recognize the scent.
“A lot of it is farms or outdoor smells, like manure or chemical smells from factories,” says Royan. “Every once in a while, we’ll get something that smells pretty good, like dairy — and not rotting dairy,” she adds, with a laugh.
Some customers want more qualitative data, so assessors may be asked to select predefined features — like earthy, sweet or fruity — from a character wheel, or to rate the aroma on a hedonic scale, from 10 indicating it’s “most pleasant; you could smell it all the time,” down to zero if neutral, and all the way to minus 10 where the smell would be the type that would “make you want to run away,” says Vallarino.
Such responses are highly personal. As researcher Frasnelli notes, “smell is highly subjective.” Memory, culture and emotion all shape how we perceive an odour. The scent of gasoline might smell sweet and evoke fond memories of family road trips for one person but be nauseating to another. Intensity plays a role, too, says Frasnelli: the aroma of a nearby bakery making cinnamon buns may seem pleasant in theory, but if it’s constantly strong, it can quickly become overwhelming.
A typical olfactory shift
During a typical two-hour testing session at the St. Croix Sensory office, assessors may spend only seven to 14 minutes actively sniffing at the olfactometer; the rest of the time is spent in a waiting room, giving their noses a break.
“They’re not supposed to talk amongst each other about what they are smelling in the lab, not to bias everybody else,” says Vallarino. “But they are a group of people, so they socialize about other things; they talk about their lives or the news.”
The camaraderie is partially what draws Royan, who also runs her own small part-time business, Green Garden Interiors. Her fellow odour assessors include students, stay-at-home parents and retirees. She finds the work interesting, but it’s also about being paid — well above minimum wage — for doing something she does simply and naturally.
And until technology can crack the complexity of olfaction, which unlike vision or sound has yet to be digitally coded due to the vast number of possible compound combinations, a human nose will likely have do the work a machine yet fully can’t.
“It’s an odd job that no would even think is a job,” says Royan, who says the reaction from friends is usually one of confusion. “They’re like, ‘What? You sniff things?’
“But for those companies, those factories, they need to know at what point the odour they are putting in the air is going to be offensive to the general public.”
