Welcome to Scent Signals
Do you remember the fragrance your first serious love wore? Mine wore Aramis. For years afterward I couldn’t smell it without thinking of him. Thankfully, there were no horrible feelings associated with him or the scent. I’ve known men and women who can’t tolerate certain perfumes and colognes because of the flood of bad memories they unleash. No matter how long the relationship has been over, one whiff of the former lover’s scent and bam! - they're captives on emotional roller coaster rides back in time.
Scent molecules shoot straight up your nose and into the feeling center of your brain where they signal information. That’s why you get those powerful rushes of emotions and memories when you smell certain odors. Those molecules are saying, "Hey, wake up! You've smelled this before! It means this!"
Even if you've never smelled something before - like the odor of a dead animal - you can instantly know what it is and what it means. Fact is, your nose and brain can sort out some 10,000 odor molecules. Pretty amazing when you consider our taste buds can only taste four things - sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Think maybe your nose has something to do with your enjoyment of food and drink? You bet it does.
All of this makes odors, fragrances, and scents - the pleasant and the stinky - very powerful. Yet not everyone is fully conscious of the power of scent, and few of us seek to understand and harness it.
In fact, olfaction is often referred to as the "fifth sense" or the "forgotten sense" as if it were last on the list of importance behind seeing, touching, tasting and hearing. I'd like to change that. I believe that if we can tune in to the wonderful world of scent we can feel more present and alive and enjoy life even more.
Corporate America certainly thinks scent is important. It spends millions upon millions developing scent molecules it hopes will tickle your nose - where you live, where you work, and where you shop. So there's another reason to know about the use of scent - to better control your living environment and the choices you make.
In this blog I plan to talk about all sorts of "smellies" including the use of scent in relationships, scents in worship and ritual, scent in food and drink, scent in Nature, aromatherapy, even how we write and talk about scent. For instance, how DOES the "sweet smell of success" really smell?! Is it actually sweet? We'll see.
Welcome to Scent Signals, where together we can celebrate the amazing power of scent!
