The Personal Connection to Scent
There truly is no accounting for taste in this world. People prefer all sorts of different things. Style, food, art, entertainment – we like what we like, and you can’t tell someone otherwise. But what about scents? There are obviously good scents and bad scents in the world, right? We all universally agree that skunk smells bad… until you meet that one person who says, “I kind of like it.” So, what is it about different scents that speak to different people? Why do some people absolutely hate the scent of cinnamon while others simply swoon for it? Are there some scents that truly everyone will love?
The biggest reasoning is that scent is emotionally tied into experience. You might have heard the phrase “scent memory” before, or maybe you’ve randomly caught a whiff of a scent that you haven’t smelled in years and felt yourself immediately transported back in your mind to specific moment or period of your life when that scent was present. This is actually because of the science of our bodies. The olfactory (smell) sense is the only one of our five senses as humans that passes through the limbic system in our brains. The limbic system is the part of our brains that supports emotion, motivation, behavior, and long-term memory – a very primal part of the human experience.
Basically, whenever you smell a scent, your brain is processing it in the same place that it’s processing how you feel at that exact moment and then utilizing those same functions to store that memory for the long haul. So, whatever you were feeling at that moment impacts how you will relate to that scent in the future. If, for instance, you were cooking a particularly fragrant meal when you got into a major fight with your significant other and broke up, the negative emotion associated with that experience could turn you off from that scent entirely.
This might sound strange to us – why would we ever need to associate smell with emotion, doesn’t it seem like a flaw in the human “design”? It’s actually an evolutionary holdover from a time long-since-passed in our history as humans when we needed scent to help us navigate the world in a more primal way. Maybe you remember being told at some point that physical attraction is affected by pheromones? Well those pheromones do much more than just dictate attraction. Approximately 16 different emotions create different pheromones that we excrete in our sweat and we, as fellow humans, can identify those emotions on others through scent. You know how sometimes you are around a person and you can somehow sense some shift in their mood? Pheromones.
The human experience with scent is unique to each of us and that’s why you can’t predict what someone will or won’t like. Some fragrances are undoubtedly generally more well-liked than others, but it’s always been incredibly accurate to say that you can’t please all the people all the time. Some biology of your DNA plays an additional factor and even some innate survival instincts. Different studies indicate that scent could be used to help manipulate mood, behavior, perception, and even health. We have been manufacturing fragrances for thousands of years trying to affect the human experience and some of that information is compiled in the collective unconscious and helps us process and handle and navigate our lives.
Essentially, the factors at play are numerous and varying, and even though you might think that there is no one in the world who doesn’t love the scent of Fresh Linen, there is certain to be someone, somewhere who simply can’t stand it. At Wax Poetic Candle Bar, we know that personal connection to scent is important and that’s why you can create your own custom fragrance that’s perfect for you. We have over 150 different scent options for you to mix and match when you create your candle or bath and body product. Stop by today and create that ideal fragrance that you can use to scent all the special moments in your life.
