Experience: I create smells that scare people

I can tell you exactly what fear smells like: poo, vomit, urine and sweat. I know because it’s my job to bottle it as a scent. I’m a professional “themed smell consultant”, which means it’s my job to create scents for theme parks and scare attractions. My role is to evoke fear in people, using smells. If I do it right, people will want to gag, cry or run away.

For the past 50 years, the company I work for, AromaPrime, has created hundreds of smells for theme parks, museums, and other businesses. We’ve made historical smells such as a Victorian street for a museum, and fantastical ones like zombies for scare attractions. One of my favourite projects involved creating dinosaur smells for an exhibition. We’ve also worked with Alzheimer’s patients in care homes, and created “scent boxes” that evoke happy memories, such as pear drops.

Whenever I get a brief, I’ll start going through our existing formulae to get ideas. I think about scent combinations that might work. When I had to make a vampire breath smell, I mixed chemicals that smelled like blood with metallic scents, before adding a whiff of rotting meat on top.

I don’t have a background in perfumery. I began my career in design for theme parks and escape rooms. I was a designer for my AromaPrime before growing fascinated by how these smells are made.

We often do test runs to see what scents get the most screams. It doesn’t always go to plan. Once we did a test for a rotting flesh smell for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre attraction in the US. Instead of leaving the ride feeling afraid, everyone emerged feeling hungry for burgers. Our scent smelled too much like cooked meat.

It’s really important to know the blueprint of the attraction or ride, as where you position the smell is vital. Towards the beginning, we’ll often pump a comforting smell through the vents, such as baby powder or freshly cut grass, to give people a false sense of security. Then, as they turn the corner and something horrifying pops up, like a clown with a chainsaw, an awful smell will follow. It confuses the brain, which makes people scare more easily.

We figure what fictional things could smell like by taking from items in the real-world; a swamp monster might smell like a mix of mud and pollution. If we need to make something historical, like T rex breath for an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, we’ll do research. The museum told us that meat would have been commonly stuck between their teeth, for example. That gave us a starting point.

I recently made a woolly mammoth smell for a company that specialises in historical events. The client wanted it to smell sweaty, but my research suggested that woolly mammoths didn’t have body odour. So I went to a farm to sniff sheep and llamas, and picked up on the smell of dirty wool and grassy poo. Familiar smells are very quick to make, but custom smells can sometimes take months of going back and forth to get right. The longest it’s taken us to finalise a scent is six months.

Our stockroom in Manchester is possibly the stinkiest place in Britain. It’s just shelves of hundreds of bottles in alphabetical order, from “apples” to “zebra urine”. My favourite smells are of musty libraries or atmospheric wood smoke – I like their timelessness and the nostalgia factor.

I’m often asked whether I wear a mask or get sick of being around awful smells all day. I actually have the opposite issue. I’ve grown immune to them. That’s why we have to do test runs to get others’ opinions. The smells that get people gagging the most are usually bin juice or rotting fish; ones that are so bad you can smell them as soon as you open the lid.

We’ve only made the mistake of spilling a bottle a couple of times. The fragrances are made using oils, and it can be almost impossible to get the smells out of soft surfaces if they are spilt. Once I walked into our stockroom right before Halloween, with all our scare smells on display. It was so repulsive that it made my nose tingle and my eyes water. I would happily have put my nose in a vial of vomit just to get the smell out. That might give you a sense of how stinky it can get.

As told to Elizabeth McCafferty

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