Sharing Olfactory Moments

“How significant are the moments in your life? Do you take the time to live in your moments? Do you just go about aimlessly, taking your senses for granted?”

This is just one of those cool quirky ideas that deserves a whiff and a nod. Observing the definition of olfactory (”…of, relating to, or contributing to the sense of smell”) and the definition of moment (”…a particular period of importance, influence, or significance…”), the Smells Good Spa encourages readers to click over to The Olfactory Moment and share an aroma they experienced over the weekend along with the memories it recreated (a phenomenon known to Whiff-readers as Endorphin Branding™).

Whether checking out the Olfactory Moments of others (such as Harlem_Minded, who correctly identifies Compost as a memorable scent) or telling your own smell tale, it’s a fun and clever way to get in touch with that most over-emotional yet under-rated of senses.

When we Smell, we Feel

“Mama’s perfume…is a scent that is softly shocking and deeply moving. A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet, and something else - something spicy, almost biting and exotic. Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only know the smell made me cry.”
-Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Sidda Walker was not experiencing a breakdown when she burst into tears on the streets of New York, she was merely reacting normally to a phenomenon the Whiff Guys have dubbed endorphin branding™. Read more

More on Endorphin Branding™ and the Proustian Effect

Frequent visitors to this site are no strangers to the Proustian Effect, that infamous literary reference to the power of scent in retrieving memories which lies at the heart of Endorphin Branding™. Likewise, we learned conclusively from this recent German study that our ever-vigilant sense of smell does not sleep when we do. The next logical question to Whiffologists is an obvious one: Can a Proustian memory be created within an unconscious mind?

In a controlled study at Duke University Medical Center, neuroscientists Stephen Shea and Richard Read more

The Wafting Smell of Politics

With all of the recent research into how everyday scents impact and affect the human brain, advertisers and marketers have begun using scents to increase brand loyalty, gain notice, and–most of all–increase the bottom line.

Studies have found that certain scents can trigger all sorts of emotions, increase moods, help with memory and comprehension, enhance a person’s perception, and even get them excited.
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