Now wash your hands

(Image borrowed from Motto)

Mono.kultur is one of my favourite small magazines – it’s interesting, it’s tightly focussed, it changes its format to reflect its subject matter, it doesn’t overstretch its content, and it’s affordable.

Its latest issue, which has already been spoken of in other quarters, is about the smell scientist Sissel Tolaas, and instead of images to illustrate the text, it presents blank pages embedded with replications of some odours that she’s been collecting recently, which are the smells of different men in a state of anxiety.

The result is intriguing and interactive, though also creates a combined odour that this particular correspondent doesn’t enjoy having in his nasal passages. It also lingers on your fingertips, meaning that you might suffer unexpected sensory flashbacks if you don’t wash your hands carefully after reading.

However, it’s not the first time that smell has been used in print, beyond the perfumed scent strips inside fashion magazines. Sixteen years ago, Sam Adams beer placed hoppy scents inside American magazines, while an ad for the TV show Weeds did the same with the smell of marijuana, causing parental problems in teenage bedrooms across the nation. A couple of years ago, Romanian Esquire placed an actual plastic perfume bottle inside the magazine, while in 2003, Visionaire reflected on scent in its own, luxurious manner. Recently photographers have also been using smell as a way of making their promos stand out, and there may be more applications to come: David P Sada has a patent for a novelty scent strip that combines scent with pheromones to influence our behaviour.

Smell, along with heft, touch and organically generated sound, is one of the sensual distinctions between print and digital, whether deliberately manipulated or not. There’s nothing quite like that new ink smell – which by the way is apparently harmless – when you flick through a freshly printed matt publication.

Perhaps the closest to Mono.Kultur‘s smellustrations of different men was People magazine’s “sexiest man alive scratch n’ sniff section”. As unpleasant as that seems, it certainly isn’t the most undesirable-sounding use of the technology.

*Shudders*

Visitors to Sofia Design Week will be able to sniff the latest Mono.Kultur for themselves in my exhibition ‘Objects as Magazines’ at the Sofia Art Gallery, 1 June – 20 June.