Design

Now You Can Experience the Nasty Stench of Cities Throughout History

Sniffing around a new Bay Area exhibit devoted to the smells of places from the modern day to the Middle Ages.
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What did Paris smell like in the mid-18th century? Try skunked red wine, wet cats, and gingivitis-tinged sputum, all bubbling in an open sewer on a record-setting summer's day.

I can say this with some authority as I recently jammed my schnoz into "Paris 1738," a scent that recreates the fetid odors of the olden city. France's Christophe Laudamiel made the unusual odor as a tribute to the novel Perfume, whose murderous antihero was born in a fish market amid the stench of overflowing gutters and unwashed bodies. Now, thanks to a nose-tingling exhibit in downtown San Francisco, anybody can smell how the City of Love may have once reeked – and thank their lucky nostrils they live in an era with hot showers and shampoo.