SCENTS AND SENSIBILITIES
Best-smelling city on the planet?

HOT WIRE—It’s been known as car culture ground zero, the city of angels, tinseltown, la-la land, and the big orange. This year, you can add the best-smelling city on the planet. That’s according to GQ magazine’s Chandler Burr. Los Angeles beat out such luminaries as Rome, Bogotá, and London. It’s part of a list of the 10 best smelling cities in the world. “L.A. is one of the most bizarre places on Earth, and it has an equally singular smell, sys Burr. “The clear, alluring track of its scent is arresting. There's the ocean breeze from Santa Monica that can travel as far East as Silver Lake; a dry desert air that comes West over Downtown and South Central; the astringent balm of eucalyptus, pine, honeysuckle, and jasmine from the hills; and car exhaust from catalytic converters, which is, in its strange industrial way, beautiful.” Yes, you read that correctly—L.A. has some great smelling car fumes. Says Burr, “It's like the jolt of a drug: shifting, comforting, cool like a blanket.” Burr adds, “The lonely smell of the marine layer burns off and you get this flashy perfume of hot asphalt, engines, and sun block that you can find nowhere but in L.A.” Here’s the complete list of the 10 best-smelling cities on the planet, according to GQ: 1. Los Angeles 2. Pleasantville (NY) 3. New Orleans 4. San Francisco 5. Rome 6. Bogotá 7. Mumbai 8. Mombasa 9. London 10. Dallas And what is the worst-smelling city on the planet? According to GQ’s Chandler Burr, it’s Paris. “Thanks to their pack-or-more-a-day cigarette habits, every other person smells like smoke-cured human bacon,” says Burr. “Then there's the repulsive odor that wafts from the RER train system. If Satan farted, it would be a little like this sulfurous cocktail of burning photocopies and fried electrical wires.” You can read more about the smells of the cities here.