This Is How the World’s Favorite Scent Disappears

Once you notice vanilla, you’ll smell it everywhere. It’s in sweets, pharmaceuticals, mosquito repellents, seltzers, makeup and hair products. When real estate agents host open houses or advise clients, they suggest infusing the house with vanilla, for its particular ability to put potential buyers at ease.

Two years ago, scientists from the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden presented 225 people from nine cultures around the world with 10 different scents. All agreed that the scent of fresh vanilla was their favorite. From custard to candles, we live in a world suffused with vanilla.

And the plant that produces it is in danger.

Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a very narrow band of the earth, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation.

Most commercial production of vanilla is in Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. As the world warms, cyclones and storms in these regions are growing stronger, toppling the orchid blossoms and vanilla beans before they get a chance to fully mature. In 2017, a Category 4-equivalent cyclone