My Beautiful Dark Twisted Carcinogenic Fantasy

This is part of Scent Access Memory, a collaboration between Dirt and Are.na. Get caught up on the series:

• Mall memories

• Metaphorically speaking

• Notes on Notes

• Death’s signature scent

• Cherry chapstick

• Post-Fragrantica Manifesto

• Worldly things

• Dowsing

Today, Vivian Medithi on the prickly aroma of hydrocarbons.

The sky sinks towards lapis lazuli as I conduct an abbreviated anthropological survey of my surroundings—the customers, the cameras, the station attendant—when the pump shuts off, I gingerly bring its metal spigot up to my face, a short, sharp whiff of an inhale staring down the barrel. Later, sloshing the contents of a 2.5-gallon plastic jug the way you might aerate a full-bodied wine, the minor facets of the smell of gasoline begin to reveal themselves: beyond its chemical astringency, a belch of fetid sulfur and the overripe sweetness of benzene.

The prickly aroma of hydrocarbons ranks among the world’s most popular fragrances, at least by economic activity, refined into fuel or else chain-grown into the polyester weave of contemporary life. And although their lineage stretches back millennia, modern perfumery and gasoline are rather young inventions, 19th century breakthroughs in chemical processing permutated by technological efficiencies and local regulation.

The two industries made agreeable bedfellows from the outset—the first synthetic perfume, nitrobenzene, smelling of almonds, was produced from coal tar derivatives in the early 19th century. Its heyday was short lived due to an undesirable penchant for leaving its wearers with rashes or dead of methemoglobinemia, since supplanted by the less-toxic benzaldehyde. But nitrobenzene’s legacy lingers in our bathrooms today, marking the advent of cheaply scented soaps and shampoos.

White musks in laundry detergent, citrus scents in dish soap, the smell of your Clorox wipes and your Glade plugins—approximately half of all industrially synthesized fragrance ends up in those places we notice it the least. Even unscented, none of this would be possible without petroleum. Detergents, surfactants, aspirin, asphalt, toothbrushes, bandages, deodorant, linoleum, candles, condoms, waxes, lubricants, fertilizers—leaving aside how gasoline underpins the energy infrastructure of our lives, all of these products are downstream of the oil refining process.