A woman who completed a doctorate in olfactory ethics – the study of how scents influence people’s behavior – shared photos celebrating her achievement. However, her post quickly became the subject of backlash on social media. Ally Louks, known as the “Doctor of Smell” online, received her PhD in “the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose”.
To mark the milestone in November 2024, she posted a photo that quickly went viral and attracted a wide range of reactions.
Speaking to People, Dr Louks said the attention “happened by accident”.
“I was generally a pretty offline person until the end of 2024. I didn’t really spend much time on social media,” the 28-year-old shares. “I had this Twitter account because I started my PhD during the pandemic when no one could socialize or network. It was my way of talking to people in my discipline and in my field.”
“I haven’t used it very often, but I decided to post about finishing my PhD because I knew a lot of my colleagues were still out there and might be interested to know that I finished my PhD in case they had any postdoc opportunities,” she continued.
“The post office has become a site of culture wars”
The photo, which showed him holding a bound copy of his work, “inexplicably went viral” and received more than 130 million views on X.
Dr. Louks said the post “has become a site of culture wars.”
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“A lot of people were really positive and just said, ‘Congratulations on your success,'” she told People. But then there weren’t that many people, but definitely a strong contingent of very vocal people, specifically American men, who were unhappy with me,” she says, noting that “one of them called me ‘the face of tyranny.'”
For more than a week, she said, people “directed their grievances with women and academia and women in academia at this post.”
“It’s really not something I could have ever expected or predicted, but I’m really proud of how I handled the situation,” she says. “It was a very intense week of my life. I didn’t sleep much. I was still teaching and I had this part-time job, I was teaching at the gym in the evenings doing exercise classes and it was very hectic to deal with everything.”
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Despite the backlash, Dr Louks said she understood why many people found her subject unusual.
“It’s not something we think about often, and it’s not clear to the average person who’s never thought about how it could happen. I get it,” he says. “But then there was also a contingent of people who were angry about everything in a way that was not productive at all.
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She explained that her work deals with “the social significance of scent and how scent shapes our identity and how it is represented in literature.” She added that people are often “taught to relate to smell” rather than it being completely natural.
‘My whole algorithm was posts about fragrance’
Since it went viral, users on X have often tagged her in odor-related posts.
“Since I didn’t really use Twitter much, the algorithm quickly figured out that I was interested in fragrance,” she says. “My whole algorithm was posts about scent. I just opened Twitter and I could look at my notifications where people were tagging me in things and just pointing at things, basically saying, ‘This is an example of this particular phenomenon that I was trying to describe in my thesis.'”
“I really enjoyed being able to connect with so many different people who all bring their own individual and cultural experiences with fragrance to the table,” she adds. “It’s been a really positive part of my life, despite how it started.”
Looking back, she said she is grateful for the experience.
“It’s led to a lot of amazing opportunities and it’s given me a platform to talk about things that I’m really passionate about and in some ways be a voice of reason on a platform that’s descending into chaos day by day.”
Dr. Louks said her goal is to encourage people to think differently about smell and its role in everyday life.
“There are people who are really hard to get along with, and you can tell who they are by the way they talk to you,” he says. “There were definitely times when naive Ally went into it thinking we could have a productive conversation and realized it wasn’t possible.
She added that many people are still open to understanding her work.
“I think I’ve earned a certain basic level of respect on the platform by continuing to engage in good faith. Even if people don’t really care about my work, most people are relatively nice to me now because they know I’m not going to attack anyone,” she says. “I’m really just here to educate people and have conversations with people. I’m really not interested in arguing online. I have much better things to do with my life than argue with strangers on the internet.”
