Art and Culture, Experience Design

San Francisco-based designer, Mitchell Heinrich has created a new form of street art using scent.

Since early human cave wall painting, graffiti has remained largely unchanged as a medium.  The style, tools and purpose have evolved over the centuries, but still nobody has successfully broken free of its visual nature. From this line of thinking “smell graffiti” has emerged.  Harnessing modern chemistry and appropriating technology invented for industrial purposes, Heinrich is pursuing new ways to make a statement in a public space that delivers a graffiti experience for the nose rather than the eyes.

Scent is a very evocative medium—it is interpreted by the human limbic system which is very closely tied to emotion and memory. This fact has led Heinrich to believe that interacting with people using scent can potentially be a much more powerful medium than paint since people experiencing it can’t help but react to it. The goal of his scented street art project is to realize the potential of smell as art and to explore different ways of using it to interact with people.

For the scent compounds,  Heinrich uses essential oils, mass-produced esters, isopropyl alcohol as a thinner, and refillable atomizing spray cans, which can be pressurized with a standard Schrader valve and an air compressor or bicycle tire pump.

Heinrich introduces incongruous smells such as dirt and grass into urban spaces. With the aim of uplifting and embellishing repellent spaces, he believes scent can be an artistic, if only temporal force—the aroma usually dissipates in 20 minutes to an hour.

Bakeries have long used scent to coax customers into their stores, but an intriguing possibility that could be used by other marketers would be to combine  “smell graffiti” scents with paint in the same cans, so that ink and scent were simultaneously sprayed.

Scented markers have been around for a long time. What about scented spray paint?

What if Krylon’s “Cherry Red” spray paint really smelled like cherries? Would that be a more attractive innovation for Safeway? For Sherwin-Williams? For graffiti artist Banksy?