The Fascinating, Smelly History of Scratch and Sniff

Scratch and Sniff Grew Up, and It Smells Like Chianti

Scratch and sniff is having a moment. In the last two years it has turned up on French postage, on Manhattan billboards, on horror movie scratch cards, on the walls of the Met and in a DC comic we will describe only as gassy. A trick from the back pages of 1980s sticker albums has grown into one of the strangest, most delightful corners of design.

So we went digging: how a sticker holds a smell in the first place, where the idea came from, and the wildest things people are doing with it now. There is also a new book of famous paintings you can smell, which arrived at the studio this week and made a stir within minutes. We will get to that.

A sticker that holds its breath

Scratch and sniff began as a side effect of office paperwork. In the 1950s, NCR worked out how to wrap ink in tiny gelatin capsules, so pressing a pen into the top sheet of a form printed onto the sheet below. That was carbonless copy paper. At 3M, chemist Gale Matson was working on the same kind of capsule when the company noticed that the droplet inside did not have to be ink. It could be perfume. The patent was filed in 1969 and granted the following year.

The recipe has barely changed. Fragrance oil is whipped into droplets, each droplet gets a hard shell, and millions of them are mixed into a clear varnish printed over the picture. Your fingernail breaks a few thousand. The oil hits the air and your nose does the rest. The capsules you missed wait for next time, which is why a good sticker can be scratched a couple of hundred times before it gives out.

A short history of sniffing paper

Children’s books got there first. In 1970, Golden Books published The Sweet Smell of Christmas by Patricia Scarry, with pictures by J. P. Miller, and a page where you could scratch Baby’s apple pie. Little Bunny Follows His Nose followed in 1971, and each has been called the first ever since. The Sweet Smell of Christmas is still in print, which means some families are now on their third generation of sniffing that pie.

Then came the stickers. Trend Enterprises released its first Stinky Stickers in 1980: round cartoons that said things like “Way to Motor!” and “Wow!”, with scents from strawberry to popcorn to dill pickle. Teachers stuck them on spelling tests, kids traded them in albums, and by Trend’s count more than a billion had sold by 1983. If you grew up in that decade, you can probably still smell the dill pickle one.

Hollywood wanted in. For Polyester in 1981, John Waters handed every ticket holder an Odorama card with ten numbered circles, to be scratched when the matching number flashed on screen. Some of them smelled of flowers. Others smelled of what you would expect from a John Waters film. Eight years later Madonna released Like a Prayer in a sleeve scented with patchouli.

It has always had a mischievous streak, too. In 1987, Baltimore Gas and Electric mailed 300,000 brochures with a scratch patch that smelled of mercaptan, the additive that gives natural gas its rotten egg warning. The idea was to teach customers what a leak smells like. It worked a little too well. People scratched, smelled gas, and called it in. One of those calls brought out 27 firefighters.

After the sticker craze faded, scratch and sniff never quite left. It wandered onto wine bottles, where one Vouvray producer invited you to scratch the label and smell the terroir, and onto wallpaper. And the nostalgia is now part of the revival: Trend has brought back its original ’80s designs, printed on matte paper like the first run, with a small star so collectors can tell the new ones from the old.

Where the smell went next

Then, sometime in the last couple of years, the grown-ups took it back. These are the ones that made us laugh, gasp, or go looking for the nearest sticker.

1. France mailed a baguette

In May 2024, La Poste put a baguette on a stamp and made it smell like one, timed to the feast of Saint Honoré, patron saint of bakers. They printed 594,000 of them. In January 2025 pastry chef Pierre Hermé designed heart-shaped Valentine’s stamps scented like his Ispahan pastry (rose, lychee and raspberry), and last October a butter croissant followed.

France is assembling a scented breakfast one stamp at a time! In fairness, the United States got there first with ten Frozen Treats stamps in 2018, and Switzerland mailed chocolate-scented stamps back in 2001.

2. Armpits on the avenue

In April 2025, body-care brand Billie hung giant photographs of women’s armpits around Penn Station and invited New Yorkers to scratch them. They smelled of coconut, vanilla and sandalwood, the notes of a new deodorant.

Pearl Media, the outdoor company behind the install, told Signs of the Times that crews swapped the stickers every five or six days, because rain and fingernails wear them out. That is our favorite detail of the entire revival: somebody’s job was refreshing the smell of a billboard. NYX and Rare Beauty ran scratchable billboards in the city that same summer, and Rare Beauty’s came with a QR code for a mailed sample.

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3. London’s scented underwear

A month later, Lynx (Axe, if you are American) went further. Its “Balls to the Wall” billboards and magazine ads in London printed scented ink onto a model’s briefs. We will leave it there.

4. Odorama is back at the movies

Waters would approve. For A24’s Heretic in 2024, some advance screenings came with numbered scratch cards cued to the screen, and one Alamo Drafthouse night filled the room with the smell of blueberry pie. In March 2026 the Sundance horror comedy Dead Lover opened in what it billed as “Stink-O-Vision,” with ten numbered moments to scratch, and in July MUBI screened The Substance in Chicago with scent cards of its own. It turns out nothing makes a theater squirm quite like being told to smell number six.

5. The Met let people rub the wall

The loveliest example is also the least like a sticker. For Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion at the Met in 2024, the Norwegian smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas lifted scent molecules off historic garments, rebuilt them with the fragrance house Symrise, and worked some into the paint on the gallery walls. Visitors rubbed the wall and smelled the dress behind the glass. It is scratch and sniff at the scale of a room, and it is catching on. San Francisco’s Color Factory built a whole wall of scratchable color.

Other museums have been sniffing along. The Mauritshuis in The Hague set canal stench, linen cupboards and ambergris beside its Dutch masters in 2021, and yes, a whiff of corpse next to Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. The Prado built ten scents out of Brueghel and Rubens’ The Sense of Smell in 2022, Watts Gallery in Surrey ran Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850 to 1915 last year, and in Amsterdam, Mediamatic hosts a running series of scent evenings under the name Odorama.

6. A perfume lost since 1960

Smell-O-Vision, the 1960 system that piped scents into theaters, debuted with a film called Scent of Mystery, and its perfume vanished with it. In 2025, New York’s Olfactory Art Keller gallery had perfumer Marissa Zappas rebuild it from Raoul Pantaleoni’s original 60-ingredient formula and showed it in a hand-blown bottle. A smell nobody had smelled in 65 years!

7. Records you can smell

In 2025 the Australian punk band Private Function sold a scratch and sniff edition of their album that recreated the scent of Gwyneth Paltrow’s most notorious candle. It sold out. Of course it did.

8. A comic with a warning label

In March 2025, DC published Harley Quinn Fartacular: Silent Butt Deadly #1, a “rub-and-smell” one-shot promising the most gas per page ever printed. We have not smelled it and we are at peace with that. It belongs on a shelf next to MSCHF’s WD-40 cologne.

9. Wrapping paper you lick

The next frontier is apparently your tongue. KFC in 2024 and Aldi in 2025 sold holiday wrapping paper in the UK flavored like a burger and like pigs in blankets, with food powder sealed under a peel-off film.

A museum you can smell

Which brings us to the book on our table. Scratch and Sniff Art History is Elizabeth Lunday’s tour of twelve famous paintings, published by Workman on September 1, and it greets you as “the world’s first Museum of Smellable Art!” Each painting gets a gold frame, a wall label, a few paragraphs of real history and a clear sticker hiding somewhere on the canvas.

Bacchus’s goblet smells of chianti (look closer and his fruit is rotting). Hokusai’s Great Wave smells of fishy sea air. Hopper’s Nighthawks smells of stale diner coffee. Munch’s The Scream is, we regret to report, bad breath. Arcimboldo’s vegetable emperor gives up cherry and gardenia, and yes, the dogs playing poker are in here too, with a St. Bernard Lunday describes as eau de pooch.

The captions are why it works. They take the art history seriously and the smells not at all. It is a board book with thick card pages built to take a fingernail, but it is written for grown-ups. A while back we fell hard for a line of scratch and sniff literary classics that turned out to be an April Fools’ joke. This one is real! It lives in the Reading Room now.

New ways to bottle a smell

Behind the jokes, the chemistry is getting better. The classic capsule has a plastic shell, and since the EU restricted intentionally added microplastics in October 2023, encapsulation makers like Germany’s Follmann have been developing shells from bio-based polymers and minerals instead. Researchers at LG Household & Health Care published a silica capsule in late 2024 that lets fragrance out slowly over a full day. Silica is the stuff of glass, so that is, more or less, a perfume kept in the tiniest bottle ever made.

The printing has sharpened too. H&H Graphics in Chicago keeps a library of hundreds of stock scents, and its CEO told C&EN she has a Christmas card that still smells of pine after 15 years. The same shop once made a moose poop scent for a reality TV promo. Somebody asked for that.

Then there is the far end. In 2024, Osmo, a startup spun out of Google, announced it had “teleported” the smell of a fresh plum: a machine read the fruit’s molecules, software mapped them, and a robot mixed a copy with no human in between. Wearable scent collars for VR headsets are on their way, too. We have also watched scientists resurrect the scents of flowers that went extinct. Most of this is still lab work. The sticker is here now, costs almost nothing, and runs on a fingernail.

Why a sticker, and why now

Our guess is that the revival is about the one sense a phone cannot reach. You can stream a painting in perfect detail and hear a concert in spatial audio, but you still cannot send someone a smell. Smell is also the sense most tangled up with memory. A 2025 study from the University of Barcelona found that even a brief whiff shifts how the brain holds on to what we see in the seconds after. Which might be why so many of us can still smell a sticker from the third grade.

And it is funny. A billboard of armpits, a stamp that smells like breakfast, a Munch that needs a mint. People scratch, laugh and hand it to the next person, which is exactly what happened at our table.

Paintings are public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Other photos are credited in their captions and used under Creative Commons licenses. Scratch and Sniff Art History and the scent picks above are sold in the Moss & Fog Shop, which is ours.

Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog