Maybe you’ve heard of the famous armpit sniffers of the Helene Curtis cosmetics testing facility in Rolling Meadows. And while we admit the image of a long-suffering lab technician, nose to a stranger’s dank armpit, does excite, what about all those who must rely heavily on one of their external senses in their life’s work?
What is life like for the wine tasters and piano tuners of the world? Are they more talented in certain sensory activities than the normal person, or have they simply trained themselves to be that way?
Using Aristotle’s five senses as a guide, we put eyes, ears, taste buds, hands and noses to the test. We visited the Helene Curtis New Dimensions testing center for smell, a piano tuner for hearing, a jeweler for sight, a potter for touch and a wine maker for taste.
As a whole, the subjects with overused senses were rather mundane about the impact such employment had on their overall lives but nonetheless admitted they were affected by their heightened awareness. The cosmetics center consultants, used to judging deodorants and shampoos at work, found that at home they were rating on a scale of 1 to 10 the viscosity of everything, from pancake syrup to motor oil to body lotion. The jeweler gets heartsick over a diamond that doesn’t sparkle as it should.
Their responses seemed very much in keeping with what experts say: that, for the most part, heightened sensory awareness is a question of training and focus rather than native skill.
“It’s like listening to a symphony orchestra,” explains Albert Farbman, a professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern University in Evanston. “You can train your mind to listen to the drums or the horns the same way a wine taster can focus his attention on smell and the taste of wine. It’s about filtering everything else out in the environment.”
One final note: We’re limiting our discussion to the five classic senses, although scientists believe there may be as many as 15 other senses, like the sense of balance. Additionally, of course, there will be no examination of the sixth sense in this report, no palm readers or paranormals. Aren’t armpit sniffers enough?
Taste
“This is really a hobby that got out of control,” retired country club executive Fred Koehler says as he pauses in the cool hallway of the basement of his Roselle winery. Working mostly with California grapes, Koehler has been making–and tasting–award-winning wine since 1978 at the Lynfred Winery he founded with his late wife, Lynn.
His dad used to make wine during the Depression in the back yard of their Des Plaines home. Koehler says that as country club executives, he and his wife had always been appreciative of good wine and good food, and he had always made wine as a hobby. But it wasn’t until he and Lynn were scouting around for post-retirement options that they happened on a run-down but still grand 19th Century home in Roselle, with stained glass windows adorned with grapes, and started to realize their winery dream.
Training his taste buds for a nearly daily routine of testing and (sometimes) blending barrels of wine took a lifetime, however, said Koehler, a mild-mannered man with an easygoing, unpretentious demeanor.
“It takes shutting yourself off in a room with a wine bottle wrapped in a paper bag so you can’t see the label, and then writing down everything you taste,” says Koehler, who lives next to the winery. “Is this fruity or woodsy? Is this sweet or dry?”
To keep in tip-top tasting shape, Koehler travels to wine shows and conferences throughout this country and Europe, doesn’t smoke and, on the morning he’s going to taste his own wine, doesn’t brush his teeth or eat, just rinsing out his mouth a little with water. (He also has an extensive collection of bottled aromas from France to practice with.)
Asked to demonstrate his tasting ritual, he takes a wine thief–a long glass tube for extracting wine from the oak barrels–and pulls some dark Cabernet out and pipes it into a wine glass. For Koehler, tasting is a lengthy process that involves looking at the wine and smelling it as well as the use of the taste buds (rolling the liquid over different parts of the tongue and then perhaps tasting again, to be sure of the aftertaste). Most of the time, if there is an imperfection in a barrel, it can be detected by Koehler’s equally well-trained nose–any off-scent like asparagus, mushrooms or geraniums might signal a bacteria of some sort, he says.
He drinks. He frowns in concentration.
The verdict?
“It’s a very dry wine, with vanilla on the palate and a little bit of toastiness,” he says, launching into one of those wine-tasting kind of trances that are so incomprehensible to the layman.
He tastes again. “On the aftertaste, you get a nice kind of cassis, a black currant flavor.”
One thing’s for sure, though. This wine’s not ready: “It needs to age a bit,” he says. This wine maker knows his tastes.
Touch
“Of all the art forms, pottery is the most tactile,” says David Trumbel, who owns and operates Trumbel Pottery in Richmond. The converted barn with a gallery loft and art space has a clay-firing kiln, where visitors can see Trumbel and others creating their art.
“Clay is a wonderful medium,” Trumbel says. “It invites touching, squeezing and manipulation.” He holds out a long string of the clay–wet, gray and malleable–and then takes it back, molds a little figure and places it on the shelf. Bird? “No, creature,” he says.
Trumbel, who lives next door, has been at this since 1972, when he quit his day job as an English teacher to devote himself to pottery full time. A round, bearded man, he is clearly devoted to his art and can–and does–talk about the craft with visitors.
Throwing some clay on the electrically spinning potter’s wheel, Trumbel demonstrates, with careful hands, how to make a vase: centering the clay on the wheel, forming a well and “drawing up the wall” (essentially, smoothing and thinning out the sides as the vase turns). Any imperfections he can detect just by touch: “I can feel that bump come around and refuse to let it push my fingers out, correcting it,” he explains.
The gallery, which shows the work of a dozen or so local potters and ceramic artists, invites touching in its informal atmosphere. It makes sense, Trumbel says. People relate to his art–like a coffee cup, for example–mainly by touch.
“You might want to touch Rodin’s (bronze) `Gates of Hell,’ but you can’t,” he says. “With pottery, it’s direct.”
As direct as a sign that says “Give ’em a shake” hanging above some ceramic rattles made to look like beach-washed shells and stones.
Other interesting objects abound–deliberately cracked bowl-shaped wall hangings, crusty vases that look as elemental as the Earth itself, blue redware piggy banks, and Trumbel’s pottery, which has a cracked white glaze derived from the traditional Raku method of firing.
Trumbel hovers expectantly, always ready to explain or enlighten.
“I could have put up a sign that says, `Lovely to look at, delightful to hold/But if you break it, we’ll mark it sold,’ ” he says, a little wickedly. “But instead I say, `Please touch!’ “
Smell
There are those among the eight or so professional sensory “consultants” at Helene Curtis’ deodorant testing team at the New Dimensions testing facility in Rolling Meadows who were ashamed to even tell their husbands what they did all day. Part-time odor judge and sensory consultant Lori Schalke, 43, of Elmhurst is not among them. Schalke finds her part-time job all very interesting, in a clinical sort of way.
“I try to keep a professional perspective while I’m doing this,” she explains as the anonymous arm appears before her, sticking out from behind a burlap-colored curtain. She puts her nose to it and sniffs–three times!
“You go through three shallow sniffs,” she explains. She is measuring on a scale of 0 to 10 the presence of fragrance from the deodorant product and the presence of–ahem–malodor.
Helene Curtis has conducted more than 1,000 studies at the Rolling Meadows testing facility since it opened in January 1995 and plans to keep up the pace. Researchers study a variety of new products in development as well as modifications on the cosmetic giant’s existing lines, including Finesse, Salon Selectives, Degree, Quantum and Suave.
Other studies are fragrance testing; the Half-Head Test, where two different hair-care products are applied to each side of a head and then evaluated; and the Dry Leg Test, where different moisturizers are applied to each leg.
Guinea pigs come on a volunteer basis from the surrounding area–some 3,000 at last count–and can earn up to $140 per test for their trouble. A deodorant study can last from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for a string of days.
“Every two hours (the sensory consultants) need to sniff 60 pits,” explains Grace Yang of Naperville, the center’s group leader for sensory evaluation.
“It’s very draining, physically,” Schalke says. Sensory consultants have to go through six to nine months of training to learn the ingredients and ssstudy the chemistry.
Being involved in smelling for a living has made Schalke aware of all kinds of different things. Sometimes, for example, she and her other consultants might be squirting some dish soap at home and rate it on a scale from 0 to 10, just out of habit. She has also noticed that some people–mostly the case studies–have an inherent body odor all their own, maybe floral, maybe (if they eat a lot of Italian food) garlicky.
Sight
Jeweler Doug Mitchell, 40, has seen it all. The family-owned and eponymous jewelry store he helps run–along with father Al, mother Esther and brother Jim–has been around Arlington Heights since 1968.
Mitchell has been working in the business since he was 13 but also has his diamond grading certificate from the Gemological Institute of America Inc. and is on his way to becoming a certified gemologist.
When appraising a diamond, he uses a high-powered microscope that magnifies the stone from 10 to 60 times. He appraises its cut, clarity (the number of inclusions, a jeweler’s $10 dollar word for a flaw) and color, from a colorless (the best) to yellow scale.
He’s a great salesman, but the stones interest him, too. Although some flaws and color gradations are perceptible to the untrained eye, most are not. “If I lost my sense of sight, I’d be a goner,” says Mitchell, a Wauconda resident.
There’s a lot to see under the microscope. He shows off a 1-carat diamond that looks beautiful to the naked eye but under magnification reveals a number of flaws, including a snowy line, a crack that looks like the side view of a road-runner bird.
Flawless diamonds are extremely rare. “They’re like people. No diamond is perfect,” he says.
Hearing
Just a few years ago, Arlington Heights resident Dave Lennard, 33, was a frustrated musician playing supper clubs and weddings and was generally unhappy with where his life was headed. Then, on Feb. 1, 1991, as he was driving through Elgin and listening to an evangelist on the tape player, he had a breakthrough.
“I pulled the car over to the side of the road and got honest with God,” says Lennard, an unassuming young man. Soon after, he stopped playing the pop-music weddings-and-cocktail party circuit for good to concentrate on piano tuning. If you believe him, he is peaceful about it, too.
“A piano tuner is listening to variations in rhythm of overtones,” he says mysteriously, wending his tuning hammer (really more like a wrench) over 230 strings of the vintage Steinway at Larkin High School in Elgin. The striking of a single piano key can entail as many as three strings vibrating at once, each containing a series of notes. All must ring true, with no errant vibrations, as well as fit in relationship to other notes and musical intervals.
“It’s like a piece of a puzzle. When everything’s right, it fits,” says Lennard, who began learning to tune pianos in high school.
To keep his head pure, he listens to the right music, he says, spiritual, Christian and classical. He has tuned pianos for musicians he wouldn’t even listen to, like Donna Summer. When he first started tuning pianos, he says, he’d get a ringing in his ears and headaches.
Not so since he found Jesus. “I attribute that to the Lord,” he says, in his quiet, unassuming way.
His work is never done. A piano can get out of tune in a day, given the right humidity conditions.
His ear has gotten to the point he can tell an out-of-tune piano a mile away. That used to bother him when he was out and about, at schools and in shopping malls and the like. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t let that set his teeth on edge any more.
“I can’t tune all the pianos in the world,” he says. “I could let these things bother me, but I’m not going to let an out-of-tune piano interfere with my joy.”
And, with a flourish, he launches into a Christian hymn, “Oh How He Loves You and Me.”
