“Fill the two spoons with powder,” the instructions read.

“Smooth over. Adjust the opening between the spoons to the width of the nose. Tighten the shooter. Place the spoons under the nose. Sniff and shoot.”

It sounds like a step-by-step guide to snorting an illicit drug, but it was far from it. I was in a candy store with seafoam green walls, jars of exotic licorice on the shelves and hula-hoops hanging from the ceiling. And I was there to snort chocolate, nothing more.

The owner’s name is Mary Jean Dunsdon, but most people call her Watermelon, after the fruit she used to sell to nude sunbathers on Wreck Beach.

Watermelon has owned the Licorice Parlour on Commercial Drive in Vancouver for just over two years and learned about snorting chocolate last year.

She took a trip to Belgium, the birthplace of the phenomenon, to experience it — and to bring it back to Vancouver.

“I was just amazed when I heard it,” Watermelon said. “I get there and everybody’s eating stupid old truffles, and I’m like, ‘We’re here for the snorting chocolate!’ ”

Snorting (or sniffing) chocolate is the brainchild of chocolatier Dominique Persoone of The Chocolate Line in Bruges, Belgium.

The company’s website claims that because the nose is vital for tasting food, sniffing cocoa powder “will help enhance the pleasure of the chocolate experience.”

Members of the Rolling Stones were among the first to get satisfaction from Persoone’s invention at a birthday party for Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood five years ago.

“The chocolate sniff is a mix of ginger and mint and it was originally intended as a joke,” The Chocolate Line’s Pascal Pardo wrote in an email.

But after news of the Stones’ sniffing session emerged, Persoone was overwhelmed with questions and orders.

Now, over 25,000 “chocolate shooters” — a plastic device used to catapult the product up a person’s nostrils — have been sold worldwide.

And since November, Watermelon’s customers have been snorting The Chocolate Line’s finely ground ginger-mint or raspberry-mint cocoa powder.

“As far as I know, I’m the only person in Canada” who carries snorting chocolate, she said.

Watermelon sells chocolate shooters with both flavours for $109, but casual chocoholics can also pop by the store for a $2 snort.

“When you snort it,” she said, “you kind of experience chocolate for a couple hours very subtly — without the caloric intake. It hits all the same pleasure receptors in the brain as if you were eating it.”

Researchers have found that ingesting chocolate triggers the release of the pleasure hormone dopamine, though information wasn’t available on the effects of snorting it.

The dangers of snorting candy made headlines last year when parents of students at a Rhode Island middle school were warned their children faced risk of nasal scarring, lung irritation or infection and fatal allergic reactions after it was discovered they had been snorting Smarties wafer candies.

But Watermelon said everyone seems to be enjoying snorting chocolate — in moderation — and she hasn’t had a negative response yet.

High school students pop by to snort with their friends, one woman visits for a snort on her way to yoga and Watermelon’s own 71-year-old mother bought a chocolate shooter to bring to parties.

“I think when you first inhale it, not a lot of people are snorters, per se, and so they’re all kind of shocked. There’s kind of this initial, like, ‘Oh, what’s happened to me!’

“Then the chocolate starts to fall down the back of the throat and this very pleasant look comes over their face. They quite like it after that.”

neagland@theprovince.com

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