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™. A whiff of her mother’s perfume evoked all the bittersweet emotion of her childhood with a sudden intensity that no scrapbook photo or phonograph album could begin to rival. Simply put - when we smell, we feel. And, unlike visual or audio or textile memories of important people or events in our lives, these olfactory memories do not fade with time, they are branded forever into our emotional and perceptual composition.

In Chapter 2 of Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age, we learn about the “Proustian Effect,” a term coined by scent marketers to describe the nostalgic recall triggered by odor in homage to French author Marcel Proust, whose novel Remembrance of Things Past was the first to explicitly link smell to memory. For Proust, it was the aroma of madeleine cakes which summoned up pleasant memories of his childhood. For another, it might be pipe tobacco or lavender sachet, Play-Doh or Pine-Sol, and the reaction might be a vivid mental image or a simple shift in mood. Whatever the trigger, and whatever our individual conditioned response, smell is the most direct expressway to our brains, leaving all other senses in the dust.

When the other senses (sight, sound, taste, touch) reach our receptive centers, they are first routed through the interpretive reasoning centers of the left brain, needing to be identified and assimilated before circuitously making it to the emotional centers which tell us how we feel about the information. But when the olfactory bulb detects a smell—while we are eating, drinking, making love, having an emotional experience, or simply shopping for shoes—it alerts the cerebral cortex and sends a chemical message directly into the limbic system of the right brain, before any left-brain analysis can muddy the waters.

At first glance, the profound effect of scent upon emotion, mood, desire, craving, and perception may seem merely an interesting insight into the workings of the human brain. Yet, when you consider how this discovery relates to marketing, branding, advertising, and environmental and product design, the implications are astounding.