“That Heavenly New Car Smell: The Business of Artificial Odorants in Post-War America”
Styrene, toluene, ethyl hexane, and formaldehyde: just a few of the volatile chemical compounds that contributed to what popular publications in the 1950s liked to describe as “that heavenly new car smell.” More than just the lingering odor of manufacturing, new car smell took a powerful cultural valence in the post-war era. This acrid, ephemeral perfume signified worldly success and the satisfactions of male consumption. No wonder chemists found ways to reproduce the alluring smell of out-gassing vinyl and industrial adhesives. Conveniently available in aerosol form, bottled new car smell enabled car owners to reproduce the olfactory thrill of a new purchase and gave dishonest car dealers an additional tool to market slightly used jalopies as fresh off the assembly line.
The smellscape of the industrialized world fundamentally changed in the postwar era as capitalists recognized that new chemical tools and techniques, new means of packaging and disseminating odorants, guided by an emerging psychology of the senses, created business opportunities. While previous generations had focused on selectively removing organic scents from human environments—sorting out the “foul” and the “fragrant” in Alain Corbin’s influential description, in the postwar era re-odorizing the everyday smellscape, often with artificial scents created in chemical laboratories. Manufactured petrochemical volatiles, journalist Harold McGee tells us, “now pervade our lives to the extent that they’re responsible for about half of the harmful air pollution in urban areas.” (McGee, 2020, p. 433) This paper uses the story of how new car smell was created and marketed as an example of this much larger process.
