This subject has come up on the list before, so we don’t need to do a full-fledged revisiting, but I’m investigating incorporating smells into an exhibition. We are a small museum with a very tiny exhibition budget, so I can’t go the route of a company like Scentair or Intercontinental that sells machines and custom scents.

 

If anyone has come up with practical, low-budget ways of working with smells, please contact me. I’ve been talking to the Boston Children’s Museum, which is doing some work in this area. I’ve also seen the Exploratorium’s squeeze bottle method for Garden of Smells, and an exhibition designer diagramed a sippy-cup method for me. I’d like to know what other methods are out there, particularly how you control the smell so it comes out when visitors want to smell it but stays contained the rest of the time and--most importantly--is tamper-proof.

 

Also, I’ve been investigating cheap ($15-25/bottle) sources for buying atypical stock scents (smoke, body odor, wig powder, etc.). I found Demeter Fragrances, but I’m wondering if there are others out there. And if you have used this simple method of spraying cotton balls with scented oil or perfume and placing the cotton balls inside a container with a hole in the top, I’d to know how long I can expect the scent to last. I want to find ways to keep maintenance to a minimum.

 

Any advice, either on- or off-list, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.