Artist creates the world’s first scent-lending library

The artist Donna Lipowitz says she had the thought for her scent library whereas within the forest subsequent to her home. “It’s type of loopy, however I simply get concepts on a regular basis,” the Australia-born multisensory artist stated one afternoon at her house in West Seattle, handmade curtains shading her huge assortment of fragrance bottles in opposition to the solar. “I genuinely thought: wouldn’t or not it’s cool if you happen to may borrow scents like books? And would that work? Would individuals do it? Would they only assume it was silly?”

To this point, nobody appears to assume it’s silly. Lipowitz debuted the primary incarnation of her Scent Lending Library in a transformed provide closet in New York in April 2025, on the Olfactory Artwork Keller in Chinatown, drawing a crowd and a line regardless of wet climate. In November 2025, the exhibition opened within the entrance home windows of Fogue Gallery in Seattle’s Georgetown neighbourhood. It has been so well-liked there that in April, it’ll transfer upstairs right into a everlasting set up area.

What’s within the library? Chanel No. 5, but in addition Bermuda Triangle. Bounce model “Out of doors Contemporary” dryer sheets. Eau Sauvage, created in 1966 by the perfumer Edmond Roudnitska as a masculine scent for Dior. Important oils like frankincense and eucalyptus. The scent of area (developed in 2008 by the chemist Steve Pearce for the Nationwide Aeronautics and House Administration to assist practice astronauts) and of Cheerios (that includes precise cereal).

Some objects are idea scents that Lipowitz herself created, just like the aforementioned Bermuda Triangle and It’ll Be OK, blended in 2020 utilizing aromas usually regarded as uplifting. Her Inexperienced Cicada was created for Olfactory Artwork Keller’s 2022 Portraits in Scent present and is supposed as a self-portrait of the artist, age 5, barefoot within the Australian rainforest.

There are two components to the library: a reference part (greater than 140 scents) and a lending part (84 scents and counting). The scents are available small amber bottles with only a hint of perfume on cotton or blotter paper—sufficient to scent, to not put on—and every borrowed scent contains an old school check-out slip stamped with its return date. (One bottle, labelled “Nothing”, is totally empty.)

A part of the thought behind the library, Lipowitz says, is creating our scent literacy—coaching our noses as we practice our muscular tissues, brains or style buds. However it isn’t a lot about having the ability to detect particular odours, bloodhound-like, as it’s creating a capability to note and recognize scent in a world dominated by sight and sound. Lipowitz says one customer to the library, a boy about seven years previous, smelled a bundle of tennis balls close to the scent vials (there are choose scent props round) and stated, astonished: “So does the whole lot have a scent?” She may nearly see the gears turning and the home windows opening in his thoughts.

Lipowitz additionally appreciates how the scent library has functioned (each in New York and Seattle) as a 3rd area. Folks convey pals or make new ones there, and generally they’ve emotional experiences introduced on by scent’s potential to conjure reminiscences. One lady, who smelled the entire library, stated she had each laughed and cried whereas doing so. “It’s like a miniseries,” Lipowitz says. A Scottish man who smelled House Storage—a scent Lipowitz created with help from Fogue’s proprietor Kerry Gates—was additionally dropped at tears, having made contact with the ghosts of woodworking initiatives previous.

Scent reminiscence

For my very own library expertise, I borrowed two objects, Clearwood and Iso E Tremendous. Each are perfumery molecules: constructing blocks of scent which might be usually artificial. Clearwood jogged my memory of patchouli, and Lipowitz stated it had been synthesised in a Swiss lab to seize the extra interesting elements of patchouli whereas avoiding the funkier components that flip some individuals off. Iso E Tremendous, in the meantime, is likely one of the most well-known perfumery molecules and was created by Worldwide Flavors & Fragrances in 1973. I used to be fascinated by its potential to scent just like the entirety of a males’s cologne in only one molecule.

I requested Lipowitz how you can get to know my new scents, and he or she suggested me to scent them at completely different occasions of day whereas taking notes. As I did so, I used to be shocked at how the aromas modified. I had at all times discovered the interplay of pores and skin and scent fascinating, however this confirmed me how mercurial scent could possibly be even when pores and skin is taken out of the equation.

Generally, Iso E Tremendous smelled magnetic and scrumptious; generally, it smelled solely like a person who wished to scent costly (and thus it smelled type of low-cost). At first, I discovered Clearwood nicer to scent, though I missed the earthier undertow of actual patchouli, or imagined I did. Noon, on a chilly and cloudy Monday, Clearwood opened up into heat, whereas at different occasions it appeared sharper and extra chemical. Lipowitz advised me that our sense of scent works greatest within the morning, and whereas my very own idea of “morning” is erratic, each scents smelled greatest to me round 1:30am—fuller, extra nice, much less hole than earlier within the day.

After visiting each the library and Lipowitz’s house, I requested the artist what makes scent artwork. She talked about a guide she had been studying by the thinker Larry Shiner, Artwork Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Odor and the Olfactory Arts (2020), which describes how olfactory artwork deliberately makes use of odours to create aesthetic experiences. However in contrast to fragrances bought in a retailer, these needn’t be nice. As an alternative, they’re meant, in keeping with Lipowitz, to “problem our perceptions, specific complicated ideas and interact the viewers each bodily and intellectually”.

It’s simple to consider scent, no less than in US tradition, largely as one thing to keep away from (contemplate the detrimental connotation of the phrase “smelly”) or as one thing colonised by luxurious manufacturers. However the expertise needn’t be confined to these two extremes. As I believed in regards to the library’s enchantment, I thought-about how this cultural neglect additionally means there may be room left for the adventurous to play and create delicate manoeuvres. The ephemerality of scent, its unpredictability (as my very own borrowings confirmed me), can really feel thrilling. It additionally appears like a approach of reinforcing the embodied human, of carving out area for deeply personal and subjective worlds—ones that we then do our greatest to attempt to talk about and share, whether or not the immediate is the scent of area, Cheerios or strolling across the Australian rainforest at age 5.

“Actually, it’s been fairly overwhelming how well-liked the library has been. It appears like most of the people wants this,” Lipowitz says. As soon as the library has moved upstairs at Fogue, she hopes to increase into collaborative occasions with different artists, and maybe ultimately into different cities. “I get excited when individuals are available who aren’t perfumers,” she says. “Or who aren’t scent individuals. I need everybody to have the ability to have a go.”

Donna Lipowitz: Scent Lending Library, Fogue Studios and Gallery, Seattle