I arrived at Fogue Studios & Gallery the day before Georgetown's Art Attack. The two-story storefront is packed with art—really good art—not unlike other galleries across this city. The difference is: Every artist at Fogue is over 50. That’s the baseline. From there, gallerist Kerry Gates Nunn curates people who care about community, and about making sure art is part of it.

Inside the gallery’s Airport Way–facing windows is something I had never encountered: a scent library. Created by Australian artist and perfumer Donna Lipowitz, the library operates exactly the way a book library does, except you are borrowing a smell. About a hundred scents sit on shelves in small bottles, some resident and others to lend. A reference section holds things you can smell but not take home—actual Cheerios, crayons from the 1970s and ’80s that, upon one whiff, send you back to your first-grade classroom, whether you want to go there or not. There are concept scents like Home Garage and God Sweat. There is also the lending section, where you can check out up to three scents out at a time for two weeks.

Lipowitz handed me a library card, and I signed my name in a handwritten ledger that has traveled with the library since it first opened last year. No email is collected, no data is harvested. Just a human record, Nunn told me. Just humans and their handwriting. Member number 182. I checked out Daisy and stamped the card myself. It’s due back on February 27th.

The library opened in April 2025 inside a converted storage room at Olfactory Art Keller, a gallery on Henry Street in Lower Manhattan that’s dedicated entirely to smell as art. Run by neuroscientist Andreas Keller, the space championed the idea that scent could stand as art on its own terms. Lipowitz's library was scheduled for a two-month show but proved so popular that it stayed through September. When the gallery closed that fall at the end of its lease, the library needed a new home. Nunn offered Lipowitz a permanent spot at Fogue, and it reopened in Georgetown in November 2025. After March, it moves upstairs into its own space.

What strikes me most is how the library breaks with the commodification of scent. We think of fragrance as something we buy and wear to project an idealized image of ourselves. The lending library flips that. These scents are not for sale: They are for smelling, for remembering, for being surprised or delighted by something you cannot see and cannot hold.

Woven through the collection are pieces of Lipowitz's own scent memoir. Mangroves, from her childhood in Brisbane, where her German immigrant father built a boat in the backyard with no boating experience. Green Cicada, made with lemon myrtle, from five acres of rainforest in far North Queensland, where her family lived next. Even a bottle labeled Menopausal Sweat, placed there not for shock but for honesty. These are Easter eggs of her life, but they work as prompts for yours. Smell the crayons, and you are back somewhere that is specific to you. Smell the mangroves, and you might be somewhere you’ve never been until now. The limbic system, which is activated by scent and is responsible for those involuntary memories, does not ask permission.

In New York, about half the borrowed scents came back. Here in Seattle, the return rate is closer to 100 percent.

Fogue Studios & Gallery at 5519 Airport Way South is open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to five. The Scent Lending Library keeps hours from Thursday through Sunday, 1 to 5. It would be a perfect date, a little adventure, and a bit of wonder we might all need to clear the mind. Go smell something. Sign the ledger. Take a bottle home. Just don’t forget to bring it back.