Item

Smelly Hands Are Clean Hands

Title (Dublin Core)

Smelly Hands Are Clean Hands

Description (Dublin Core)

I welcomed my first child into the world at the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, leaving my fiancé and me isolated at home with a newborn. After three months, we desperately needed a night away from our precious bundle of joy. The only restaurant open was a sketchy looking German beer garden blasting accordion music, but we were just thrilled to be spending some adult time together while our son was with my mother for the evening. Upon walking into the restaurant, I readily pumped some off-brand hand sanitizer into my hand, and nudged my fiancé to do the same. I rubbed my hands together as we were seated, and breathed a sigh of relief that we were free from the colicky cries of our beloved child for the night. Suddenly my nostrils filled with the stench of bottom shelf tequila. The hand sanitizer wasn’t simply off-brand, it had been homemade by the restaurant. It was as if whomever had concocted the sanitizer was convinced that the best way to ward off the COVID-19 virus (and the fear attributed to it), was to completely bombard the olfactory system with the smell of alcohol. My fiancé remarked that because the sanitizer smelled so horribly, it must be killing all of the germs; unknowingly, he became a perfect example of how individuals have come to associate certain scents, like alcohol, with the illusion of cleanliness. Thinking back on that experience, I find myself pondering just how effective their homemade hand sanitizer really was. Or, more than likely, was it a last ditch effort (forced into action by society’s panic buying of cleansers), to provide their customers a sense of security through unconscious sensory associations.

Date (Dublin Core)

May 2021

Creator (Dublin Core)

Malloy Sells

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Mallory Sells

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

text story
photograph

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Public Health & Hospitals
English Food & Drink

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

fiancé
Beer garden
restaurant
sensory history
hand sanitizer
homemade
tequila
smell

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

sensory history
hand sanitizer
homemade

Collection (Dublin Core)

English Foodways
English Children

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Sensory history submissions and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

1/11/2021

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

1/20/2021
3/4/2021

Item sets

Covid 19
Arizona State University

This item was submitted on January 11, 2021 by Malloy Sells using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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