Tag: depression

Can fragrances make you feel better?

Can you bottle the smell of happiness or use fragrance to elevate your everyday mood? It’s something fragrance fans and aromatherapists have claimed for years, but now science is directly being used to develop fragrances that go beyond simply smelling good – making you feel good, too.

The connections between wellness and scent are fully explored in our just-published magazine, The Scented Letter – click here to subscribe to this award-winning magazine for free… You’ll have it sent to your inbox on the day it publishes, and never miss a copy again!

 

 

 

 

In the issue you’ll find the article Fragrance’s Feel-Good Factor, in which we were incredibly excited to learn about the revolutionary house of Edeniste, whom you can read more about in our page dedicated to Edeniste, and who are, in their words, ‘Blending the science of emotion and the art of perfumery.’ For founder Audrey Semeraro, it’s about ‘redefining the mission of the perfume industry with the first generation of active wellbeing fine fragrances…’ Because edeniste are far more than a luxury fragrance house, more even than a company seeking to tap into that feeling we all get when wearing a scent that seems to resonate with our soul. Each edeniste fragrance has been ‘charged with active molecules clinically proven to boost our mood and elevate our emotions.’

Meanwhile, authorAlex Whiting delves into the fascinating word of ‘chemosignals’ – odourless transmissions we give off which are believed to trigger particular emotional responses – in a piece for the scientific magazine, Horizon; exploring ‘the ways smell impacts people’s social interactions.’

 

 

Says Enzo Pasquale Scilingo, a professor at the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Pisa, Italy: ‘It’s like an emotional contagion. If I feel fear, my body odour will be smelt by people around me and they may start to feel fear themselves, unconsciously.’ Similarly, the smell of happiness can inspire a positive state in other people, he explains. ‘If we had a spray of happiness … If we can find some odour which can induce a happy state – or a general positive state – I think we can help many, many people,’

 

‘We humans use our sense of smell more than we think. It’s more unconscious, and a little bit taboo – we are not very comfortable with it – but there is more and more evidence that smell is important in social behaviours.’ – Dr Lisa Roux, Interdisciplinary Institute for Neuroscience, France

 

As fascinating as the science undoubtedly is, you don’t need a degree to know that wearing your favourite fragrance – or experiencing a new scent that sparks joy – will undoubtedly lift your mood and give you an emotional ‘boost’ of comfort, confidence or strength. During lockdown sales of fragrances (unexpectedly, to some) soared, and no wonder. Now we have the science to back what we’ve always felt: fragrance can simply make you feel better.

So, why not treat yourself to some samples to try at home, today…?

Why are smell memories so strong? New research reveals startling results

We all know how transporting smell memories can be – the whiff of someone’s perfume as they pass by immediately propelling you to another time, place or person you associate it with. It has long been known our sense of smell is the strongest link to unlocking these memories, but new research has only just revealed why…

An international team of scientists, led by Christina Zelano from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, used neuroimaging and intercranial electrophysiology to discover why certain areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus, are more strongly linked with smell than any other sense. According to a report on the science news website New Atlas:

‘This new research is the first to rigorously compare functional pathways connecting different human sensory systems with the hippocampus. The striking findings reveal our olfactory pathways connect more strongly with the hippocampus than any other sense.’

‘During evolution,’ Zelano explains, ‘humans experienced a profound expansion of the neocortex that re-organised access to memory networks.’ Basically put, all other senses got re-routed as sections of our brains expanded, but smell remained intrinsically (and directly) connected to the hippocampus. Or as Zelano more scientifically puts it: ‘Vision, hearing and touch all re-routed in the brain as the neocortex expanded, connecting with the hippocampus through an intermediary-association cortex-rather than directly. Our data suggests olfaction did not undergo this re-routing, and instead retained direct access to the hippocampus.’

While this is, of course, fascinating; perhaps the more practical outcome of this, and other continuing research, is a reaffirmation of how important our sense of smell is to our wellbeing, and impacts on our every day lives even more than was previously assumed. Indeed, the discoveries of links between our sense of smell and depression (and how scent might be used in the future to treat it), has been significantly highlighted because of Covid-19 cases often suffering with anosmia (a lack of smell) and parosmia (a distorted sense of smell).

 

 

You can read more about anosmia and parosmia on our website by searching for those terms, and also in Louise Woollam’s piece about how devastating it was to lose her sense of smell as a fragrance blogger. It’s a subject Louise wrote about so movingly, again, more recently for our magazine, The Scented Letter: Perfume’s Bright Future edition. VIP Subscribers receive this magazine FREE, but you can also buy print copies, here, or purchase an International Online Subscription at only £20 for a full year of fragrant reading.

By Suzy Nightingale