Meabh Mc Curtin is bringing to life 14 scents from Joyce’s novel, from Molly Bloom’s perfume to the ointments of Sweny’s PharmacyIrish perfumer Meabh McCurtin at the Irish Embassy in Paris Tue Jun 16 2026 - 05:12 • 4 MIN READJames Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel unusually rich in smells: the waft of fresh bread from Rourke’s city bakery, “men’s beery piss”, Molly Bloom’s perfume, incense escaping through the window of a church.The Irish perfumer Meabh Mc Curtin, working with the Joyce scholar Christine O’Neill, has attempted to bring the olfactory world of Ulysses to life by creating 14 of the scents that are described in the book.The series of fragrances begin with Ulysses’ famous opening passage: the shaving ritual of stately, plump Buck Mulligan on top of the Martello tower at Sandycove, in Dublin. It was a work of partly historical, partly artistic reconstruction.“I looked into what shaving lathers at the time would have contained. They contained a lot of geranium, lavender, oak moss, so it gives that very aromatic soapy feeling,” Mc Curtin says.Alongside that are suggestions of the sea and “elements which I thought would smell like fresh air”.Originally from Ennis, Co Clare, Mc Curtin is a fine-fragrance perfumer who works for International Flavors & Fragrances in Paris.She initially studied science at NUI Galway, chancing on an alternative career path when she read an article about a perfumer in a magazine while doing a master’s degree in molecular biology in Lyons.“I didn’t know that being a perfumer was a job,” she says, laughing. She worked her way into the industry by persuading a perfume company in Geneva to take her on as an intern while working in a spice merchant on the side, a “sensory” immersion that helped her land her first role at International Flavors & Fragrances.Ulysses scent Mild Morning Air by Meabh Mc Curtin The Ulysses project is unusual for a perfumer, as it has involved creating some fragrances that are unpleasant and challenging, as well as re-creating perfumes that were actually worn on June 16th, 1904, the day on which the novel is set.Mc Curtin re-created Opoponax and Peau d’Espagne, real perfumes mentioned in the text, as well as the sensual and daring “Shefiend”.This is a scent imagined as the perfume of Molly Bloom, whom Joyce describes as wearing a mix of Opoponax and jasmine that lingers on clothes she has worn.“Scent can be a trigger for a memory, it can be a link to a place, it can have an emotional dimension, it can relate to grief,” Mc Curtin says. “In Joyce there’s a fetish element to it too.”An interesting challenge was creating the “papery” scent of a flower with “almost no smell” enclosed in a love letter in the book.To create the “herbs, ointments, disinfectants… smell to almost cure you” of Sweny’s Pharmacy, Mc Curtin went to smell the still-existing shop on Lincoln Place before working in historical details from the time.One of the most poetically evocative in the series is the scent of the ghost of Stephen Bloom’s mother, as described by Joyce when she visits her son “in a dream, silently”, her “wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood”, Joyce writes, “her breath... a faint odour of wetted ashes”.Mc Curtin combined beeswax, wet ashes and cedarwood, trying out multiple versions on colleagues to see was she achieving the right “emotional effect”.“I didn’t want it to be repulsive but to have this tension, being slightly creepy or disturbing,” she says. “I felt there was something with the wax and rosewood that gave the idea of an old house or a coffin.”An even less pleasant smell that is described particularly vividly in Ulysses is that of the Burton restaurant (better known as The Bailey pub, off Grafton Street).“Smells of men. His gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men’s beery piss, the stale of ferment,” Joyce wrote.To capture this scent, Beery Men, Mc Curtin combined tobacco and hops with scents of animal origin – “animalic”, as they are called in the industry – that suggest urine and sweat.Ulysses scent Beery Men by Meabh Mc Curtin “When you use them in tiny amounts you can bring a lot of sensuality and appeal to a fragrance,” Mc Curtin says. “When you ramp them up like in Beery Men it can quickly become something more troubling.”Significant historical research went into ensuring accuracy wherever possible. Mc Curtin initially created the smell of James Rourke’s city bakery – “the very palatable odour indeed”, as Joyce writes – to smell like traditional Irish soda bread.O’Neill then informed her that soda bread at the time was usually made in farmhouses and that bakeries would have had a much yeastier smell, as they were making loaves similar to sourdough. She started over.The scents were exhibited at an event called Perfumances – a word Joyce coined – at the Irish Embassy in Paris last week.The idea for the project initially grew out of a discussion with the outgoing Irish Ambassador to France, Niall Burgess, in which Mc Curtin observed that Ulysses struck her as particularly “full of references to scent”.The Embassy put her in touch with O’Neill, who combed the text for any references to smells.“Joyce, both as a private individual and as an author, was uncommonly sensible to smells, and he created characters who are likewise in tune with their bodies,” O’Neill said at the event. “This characteristic can be found across Joyce’s works, as well as in his own erotic letters of 1909 to Nora.”The exhibition, in which visitors could take a sample of each scent on a paper strip, featured as its crowning touch a sod of turf that had been brought over in a suitcase from Sligo by Mc Curtin’s family to display with the scent Peatsmoke.IN THIS SECTION