Scent curator, researcher and “professional provocateur” Sissel Tolaas is currently exploring the aromatic potential of bacteria in her ongoing investigation into the most mysterious and evocative of our senses. Raised between Iceland and Norway, for a decade Tolaas has called Berlin home, where she has been building an extensive and ever-growing library cataloguing different smells—now over 7000. Tolaas first stepped into the world of scent in the late 80s after studying for degrees in mathematics, chemistry and visual arts in Scandinavia, Poland and Russia. She has worked at institutions such as MIT and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, shown at museums including MoMA New York, Britain’s Tate Liverpool and the National Museum of Beijing and counts among her clients Cartier, Comme des Garçons and DaimlerChrysler. The cross-disciplinary sensory connoisseur discusses the future of her field and our personal perfumes.

Which ingredients do you feel will embody the smell of the future?
I think bacteria on the body is a big issue. Recently products have utlized bacteria for the purpose of producing food, so we made teas from human body sweat, and it got a lot of attention. The body in general is a big subject—what the body can do beyond what we think it can do. Science is so much further along than the commercial world, and our notions of "bad" and "good" have to be re-discussed and re-valued. 

How do you imagine our relationship to scent will evolve?
I think schools should have new disciplines dealing with the amazing software we have on our bodies: our senses. We’re learning how to see and how to hear, but we don’t learn how to taste, how to smell or how to touch. I’ve been doing a lot of workshops with kindergartens and primary schools and I think that kind of experience has a very big future. 

Are we going to start to smell different in the future?
Yes. Today we all smell the same; we communicate through perfume ads and I think that’s a shame. We each have a body smell as unique as our fingerprints and I think we will start to rediscover and appreciate that. I have nothing against cleaning up, it’s just that we do these things without thinking. 

Will we start to find different ways to enhance and personalize our own odors?
Yes!  I think that instead of saying that Chanel No. 5 is a solution, we will start to think, "I need one molecule for leisure, another for business, another for sleep, another for healthcare," and so on. Maybe we should start to be a little bit more honest about each other’s smells, too—otherwise nothing’s going to change.