London’s public transit workers have seen (and smelled) almost everything, and they have a system. Code one is blood. Two is urine. Three is vomit.
“All kinds of smells,” one employee at the King’s Cross stop on the London Underground said. “A lot happens in this station.”
But there is no code for the unidentified, overpowering scent that has taken over King’s Cross Station, one of the city’s busiest transit hubs. Every few seconds, for the past week, spritzes of sweet chocolate aroma are pumped into one of the pedestrian tunnels in the station, part of a two-week marketing campaign for Magnum Ice Cream. A crackling noise, meant to emulate the sound of biting into a coated ice cream bar, plays on repeat.
“I hate it,” said Melvyn Yap, a scientist who commutes through the station twice a day and noticed the smell as soon as the campaign launched on March 9.
“The first time I passed through, I thought, ‘What is that? Is there a big urine spill?’”
So many people complained that the situation was escalated to the station manager, who came down to investigate, said the Underground employee, a customer service assistant who asked not to be named for privacy reasons.
On Friday, Magnum said it had toned down the aroma.
“Turns out Londoners have opinions, and we respect that,” Magnum said on Instagram. “We reckon it still beats Eau de Tube.”
London St. Pancras Highspeed, which owns and operates the tunnel, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Keren Beaumont, a personal stylist passing through the station on Tuesday, said the smell reminded her of dried resin and that she had not realized it was part of a Magnum campaign. “I love Magnum, and this just doesn’t smell like Magnum,” she said.
A few commuters said they liked the smell. Humberto Mesa, a cleaning supervisor, said he enjoyed it so much that he felt compelled to buy a Magnum ice cream bar right away — though he was not sure where near the station he could buy one.
“It’s chocolate, and I like chocolate,” Mr. Mesa said.
Another commuter, who declined to give her name, said the scent was lovely and reminded her of the seaside.
Hotels, clothing stores, museums and even credit card companies have developed bespoke scents to market their brands. And there’s good reason for the strategy: Research shows that smell has a direct connection to the brain’s memory and emotional centers.
But the approach has pitfalls. Sandeep Robert Datta, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School and a smell scientist, said that while scents are increasingly used in marketing because of their ability to convey emotional information, getting them right is difficult.
He said it was especially hard to pull off this sort of marketing campaign in a public transit station, where any number of scents are emanating from the tens of thousands of people who pass through daily. Mixing a highly concentrated chocolate scent with irritated commuters and other smells, like body odors, seems like “a bad idea on the surface,” he said.
“Context is important,” Dr. Datta said. “It can be really jarring and disturbing to experience smells, especially if you don’t have volition over the smell.”
Whether a scent is appealing also depends on its concentration, and it is a technical challenge to get the balance right, he added. (Magnum declined to comment on what the fragrance was made of.)
Another reason it is tricky to pull off is because everyone experiences smells differently. “Our olfactory cortex is continuously rewiring and that shapes the way you interact with odors,” Dr. Datta said.
Gigi Shum, a Ph.D. student studying neuroscience who was at King’s Cross on Tuesday, said that the floral scents she had smelled in hotels held almost universal appeal. “People enjoy that,” she said. Her issue with the Magnum ad was not the intensity of the smell but the scent itself, which she described as “artificial.”
“I’m personally not a fan,” she said.
The people most unhappy with the smell may be those who work at King’s Cross. Emmanuela Nicolescu, an employee at a cupcake stand, described the smell as “too much” and “everywhere.”
After smelling it all day for several days, she had had enough.
“I don’t think I will eat any Magnum in the future,” she said.
Jenny Gross is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics.
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