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“I Smelled a Little Girl and I Liked It?”: The Story Behind the Headline

A 2015 scent-enabled Goldilocks demonstration explains the provocative headline: citrus left reporter Mona Lalwani queasy and linked the smell with a fictional character.
Opened Runtime3 min Written byDocumentaryTube Team
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The headline refers to a scent-enabled telling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, not to an encounter with a real child. In a 2015 account for Engadget, reporter Mona Lalwani described how citrus scent from an interactive story left her nauseous and linked the smell in her mind with the story’s little golden-haired girl. The provocative wording makes sense only in that context: it is about an uneasy sensory association.

What happened in the Goldilocks demonstration?

Lalwani visited Sensory Stories, an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. She followed an iPad presentation called Goldilocks and the Three Bears: The Smelly Version. Tapping elements of the story triggered an oPhone device to emit scents. The 2015 feature describes the device as a silver unit with scent-emitting cylinders that used disposable oChip cartridges.

The scents did not affect Lalwani alike. She found the pine faint and fresh, bringing a mossy forest to mind. Lemon taffy was overpowering and made her nauseous; the coffee scent seemed artificial and left her queasy. Those are her reactions during one demonstration, not evidence of how other visitors would respond.

Why does the headline say “I liked it”?

The headline compresses an unsettling reaction into a deliberately startling phrase. Lalwani’s account does not say she liked a child or encountered one in a troubling situation. It describes smelling citrus while seeing a character in a children’s story, feeling sick, and then forming an association between that smell and the girl in the story.

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Her closing line explains the connection: “Now every time I think of a strong citrus smell, the sight of a little, golden-haired girl follows a pang of uneasiness.” The “liked it” phrasing should be read against that account of a smell, a fictional image and discomfort—not as a literal statement about a real child.

What scent added to the story—and what it complicated

The exhibition’s premise was that smell could work as another storytelling signal: a cue to a setting or a way to intensify a moment. Charlie Melcher, founder of Future of StoryTelling and curator of the exhibition, compared scent’s role to music in film: “It touches on things we’re not even conscious of. It’s like a soundtrack with dramatic music.” David Edwards, a Harvard professor and Vapor Communications co-founder, described the ambition this way: “We want to create a basis of communication through scent.” Those comments express the creators’ aims; they do not establish that scent-based storytelling became widely adopted.

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The same feature points to practical difficulties. People can respond differently to a smell, scents may linger, and one scent can influence how a person experiences the next. Making recognizable smells and controlling how they arrive in sequence is difficult. These observations describe the technology and discussion as reported in 2015, not a complete account of current scent technology.

Smell, emotion and memory

Perfumer Christopher Brosius, founder of Brooklyn scent studio CB I Hate Perfume, cautioned against a simple account of smell triggering a fixed memory. “Many people have the misconception that encountering smell generates a particular memory,” he said. “That’s not entirely accurate. What it does is, [it] registers a particular emotional experience and the power and profundity of that experience causes the memory to be generated.” This is Brosius’s explanation, not a claim that every person remembers smells in the same way.

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Has scent been used in storytelling before?

Engadget’s 2015 feature places the oPhone in a longer history of attempts to add smell to film. It describes Hans Laube’s Smell-O-Vision, devised for the 1960 film Scent of Mystery, as a system that pumped scents to individual theater seats. It also mentions John Waters’ Polyester, which used scratch-and-sniff cards called Odorama. The feature says the older cinema experiment was overwhelmed by synthetic smells and overlapping scent; that history is presented here as the article reported it.

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Is an oPhone the same as a scratch-and-sniff book?

No. Scratch-and-sniff books are a physical format: readers release a scent from a treated page or patch. The oPhone demonstration instead paired a digital story with a device that emitted scents when a reader tapped story elements. An academic publication on books related to olfaction identifies scratch-and-sniff titles and describes an oBook as a digital picturebook paired with an aroma dispenser, but that does not make ordinary scratch-and-sniff books equivalent to the exhibition prototype.

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The 2015 feature documents the oPhone demonstration, but current availability of the oPhone or oChip cartridges is not established. The demonstration is best understood as an experiment in interactive storytelling, rather than a currently verified product a reader can buy.

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