Smelling a fragrance that’s similar to one you wore in happier days can brighten your mood today. Learn how to Eau back in time.
Mary Rose Almasi
Glimmers of hope are maybe (finally!) poking through the economic gloom. And while a squirt of perfume won’t replace your depleted 401(k), it could dull the sting. How so? “Aromas can elicit dramatic changes in your emotional state and cause you to think back to a person, place, or time when you first experienced a particular smell,” says Pamela Dalton, Ph. D., a sensory scientist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. If the experience was a joyful one, you’ll feel happy again—almost as powerfully—with a whiff of the same notes.
Which could explain why so many fragrance designers are creating scents that evoke their own memories. For Estee Lauder’s Private Collection Jasmine White Moss, Aerin Lauder chose scents, including jasmine, orange flower, and patchouli, that remind her of spending time with her grandmother, Estee Lauder. Actress Reese Witherspoon, who helped formulate the new Avon fragrance In Bloom, says she was influenced by the aroma of the Southern flowers and fruits from her childhood in Tennessee. And Donatella Versace’s new fragrance, Versense, smells faintly of the olive trees that are abundant in her native Italy.
Consumers, too, are reaching back in time. When the NPD Group, a marketing research company in Port Washington, New York, released sales data for the top five perfumes sold in department stores earlier this year, three of the fragrances that appeared on the list (Chanel No. 5, Cashmere Mist, and Beautiful) were launched before 1995, and two were from 2001. The explanation: “People tend to move toward familiar scents during times of stress,” says Edgar Chambers IV, Ph. D., director of the Sensory Analysis Center at Kansas State University’s College of Human Ecology. “They’re a source of comfort.”
Cash-flow issues may also be influencing the recent drive to rewind: “Women are still taking fewer chances with their money,” says Susanne Langmuir, a Toronto-based perfumer and creator of Sula fragrances. “They’re picking what they know they like and makes them feel good.”
Your Brain on Fragrance
Classifying a scent is an inbred survival mechanism, Dalton says. Back in caveman days, she explains, humans learned to avoid danger through smell and experience (by noticing the unpleasant effects of eating spoiled meat, for example). Even today, our sense of smell can protect us: Maybe you won’t touch tequila because you got violently ill one night drinking it in college and now one whiff of the stuff causes your stomach to lurch.
That’s an easy scent association to make, but the scent/memory relationship is actually pretty complex. The CliffsNotes version: When odor molecules enter the nose, they’re filtered through olfactory nerve cells and go into the limbic system, the emotional center of the brain. That emotion becomes fixed to the odor memory and gets locked in your gray matter until it’s revived with a whiff. Put more simply, emotion + smell = a scent memory.
Emotional baggage is powerful—that’s why odors can elicit a physical response. If your first kiss took place in your eighth-grade boyfriend’s tree-filled backyard, you may find your heart beating a little faster when you smell a woodsy fragrance. “Scent can bring back more emotionally intense and evocative memories than other senses, like sight or touch. You feel transported to the time and the place,” says Rachel S. Herz, Ph. D., a visiting professor of psychiatry and human behavior and psychology at Brown University and the author of The Scent of Desire.
Case in point: “Looking at a bottle of Chanel No. 5, might make you think of your Aunt Jane. But when you smell the perfume, you’ll remember more emotionally, like how you felt about her, and that she was your favorite aunt,” Herz says.
Source: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/beauty-and-style/fragrance-tips?page=2
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