The Bond Between Perfume & Memories

Why are we so Scentimental?

Like a song, fragrance can transport you back to the time or place you first experienced it and holds one of the strongest connections to our emotions and memories - which is what makes fragrance so personal!

Also known as The Proust Effect, scents and senses can "act as doorways to lost memories"

Your sense of smell may be a better memory trigger than your sense of sight. Whenever I smell cotton candy, I’m sent back in time. Suddenly, I’m back at the beach walking across the sand with my father where I spent many summers growing up. If I catch even a whiff today, I’m instantly whisked away back to that time filled with a deep sense of comfort and security! 

 

The sense of smell is the first to have evolved in living things. Our eyes only have three different types of colour-sensitive receptors, which allows us to perceive the entire spectrum of colours. Human noses can detect trillions of smells thanks to over 1,000 different types of receptors. 

 

“When a perfume has the ability to trigger an emotion, it becomes part of the wearer’s life”  Claire Bingham. 

 

 

Your olfactory bulb runs from your nose to the base of your brain and has direct connections. Neuroscientists have suggested that this close physical connection between the regions of the brain linked to memory, emotion, and our sense of smell may explain why our brain learns to associate smells with certain emotional memories. So many of these scent driven memories may further be childhood memories because those years are when we experience most smells for the first time!

Whether you have vivid scent-related memories from the age of 6 years old or only recall your first fragrance memory from the age of 13, there’s no denying the strong association between our sense of smell and memory. That’s why it’s so important to choose fragrances that remind us of our happy times. For instance, Gourmand scents may bring back heart-warming memories of your wedding cake from your wedding day whilst the scent of musk might remind you of a loved one. If we have any innate response to scents it is caution. Infants and young children show wariness when exposed to unfamiliar scents regardless of whether the scents are classified as pleasant or unpleasant by the adults around them.