By chipping away at barriers, the institute is helping reshape the practice of perfumery, often characterized by elitism and a Eurocentric perspective. To encourage outsider scent culture, Ms. Wilson-Brown’s definition of perfume is intentionally loose, as in not constricted to what one buys in a bottle. It’s “a conscious combination of aromatics for a predetermined result,” she said. “A chef could be in some way a perfumer if she combines materials for their aroma, or a florist. The advantage of this definition is that it’s inclusive.”

— Saskia Wilson-Brown's Institute for Art and Olfaction will celebrate their 10th anniversary this year. Read more in Can Scent Be Democratized? The Institute for Art and Olfaction celebrates a decade of exploring our sense of smell at The New York Times.

Sweaty T-shirt experiments conducted in medical labs eventually gave way to the pheromone party craze of the 2000s, in which singles pick dates based solely on smelling each other's worn shirts. But the way [Susan] Barbour sees it, pheromone parties are lacking "the most interesting part of the whole experiment, which is, what goes through people's minds when they smell and do we have a vocabulary and associations to adequately describe what people smell like?" she says. "That to me is the interesting thing that nobody was talking about. And that's the taboo."

— Jennifer Swan at Bustle, in I Went to an Armpit Sniffing Class. The class was at the Institute for Art and Olfaction.