1. We all have unique smells that we’re remembered by – Does your mum, best friend, or spouse have a favourite perfume or aftershave cologne? My father liked using Old Spice whenever he shaved in the morning. It’s the smell I most strongly associate with him. I remember that one of my mother’s favourite perfumes was Anais Anais by Cacharel. She would wear it to work or for going out with the family for a meal on Sunday. She’s also the first person I think of whenever I see people hang ferns out on their patios. These emit a sweet and woody fragrance that makes you feel like you’re walking in a cool and shady forest. I used to wear Grey Flannel by Geoffrey Beene a lot, except I’ve stopped using it as scents are a no-no in Vancouver (in general). My wife prefers my natural smell over the artificially scented me. She also likes it when I’ve just taken a shower and used a bar of Ivory soap which has a very light gentle ginger root scent that this almost 140-year-old soap product is associated with. Like hotels and restaurants, it doesn’t hurt to have a ‘signature’ scent that people strongly associate with you or your home. In your case, what’s your house’s signature smell that you want people to remember it for… baked apple pie? lavender? citrus? You decide.
2. How the trapped smell of grease impacts people’s memory of your space – If you want to associate your home with positive memories, you may want to pay attention to what your house smells like. Do you like to cook food that emits a powerful smell? Then make sure to open several windows, turn on your exhaust fan, and use a scented candle (or electronic diffuser). While you and your family might not mind the smell of grease, you don’t want it to stick to curtains, upholstery fabric, carpet or your clothes as your guests will notice them. I once had an aunt that loved to deep fry, except she often forgot to open her windows. Consequently, the smells got trapped on her clothes, furniture, and the walls of her apartment. While I fondly remember that aunt whenever I eat ‘estofado’ (which was her specialty), I wasn’t particularly keen on visiting her apartment, as the trapped food smells would stick to my hair and clothes forcing me to take a shower and put my clothes in the wash as soon as I got home. In fact, the smells were so overpowering that her daughter would come once a year just to open the windows to let out the stale air and the trapped smell of food.
3. Use natural aromatics in your car to keep your car smelling fresh and enable you to relax – Do you spend a lot of time driving during the day? Do you occasionally get stuck in traffic for an hour or longer? Do you sometimes get frustrated when your car is stuck behind a long row of vehicles that isn’t moving? That happens to me every now and then, especially with the number of cars on the road that just keeps on multiplying each day. I like to have some kind of scent in the car to make it smell fresh and help me to relax. You may want to consider putting in some kind of scent in your own car, especially if you want to be in the right frame of mind going to work and when it’s time to go home and reunite with your family. We can have very stressful days sometimes and adding traffic into the mix simply adds to our level of frustration and stress, making us grumpy at the end of a long day sometimes. Using cedarwood essential oil can help you slow down your brain and feel calmer. If you have a high-stress job, lemongrass essential oil is a great scent for reducing anxiety and stress. It will also help you stay cool whenever you’re stuck in gridlock traffic, which was one of those things that really tested my patience when I used to live in Manila, where slow-moving traffic was a daily fact of life and would make me feel really wound up. I usually had a lemon scented air freshener in the car to make the interior smell good and to help me cope with the daily ordeal of traffic.
4. Why real estate agents bake cookies whenever they try to sell at home – Whenever realtors bake cookies so that the smell permeates the entire house, they are engaging in scent marketing. Baking is one of those things that many families do at home, which is why there’s a lot of positive association with baked goods. Many have had their mothers bake muffins or cookies at home, and having those smells around not only helps to release serotonin (the pleasure hormone) in our brains, it brings fond memories that we had growing up and waiting excitedly for our mums to finish creating whatever she had in the oven. Hotels and movie theatres engage in scent marketing by infusing their spaces with certain scents to either trigger buying behavior or to simply create more positive experiences during their guest stays. After doing the necessary renovations and staging to make your home look its best, it doesn’t hurt to go the extra mile and bring out those freshly baked muffins or cookies to create a positive impression during the open house. In one retail experiment, an orange scent was used in a home furnishing store for 18 days, which resulted in an increase of 20% in sales. If you would like to make people feel good in your space, use the scent of cinammon which helps people relax and feel less irritable.
5. Smells can trigger positive/negative memories – In the same way that nice clean smells can trigger positive memories from as far back as childhood, unpleasant smells can also conjure up specific experiences or places we’ve been to during earlier parts of our lives. Whenever I visit a country that is hot and sticky, it often remind me Manila, the city I grew up in. The combination of heat and humidity causes bacteria to grow faster and smells to increase in intensity. I remember the smell of the hot and sticky asphalt, which became really strong during the summer months. Another thing that really stayed with me is the strong smell of gasoline as cars weren’t really required to put catalytic converters that helped to control tailpipe emissions. It didn’t help that there was daily gridlock traffic which only intensified the smell of car exhaust. The pollution, heat and traffic would prompt me drive to the mountain city of Baguio once a year to escape the heat, pollution and smells of the city . Not only was it cooler and drier there, but the smell of the air was infused with the fragrance of pine trees which proliferated Baguio city. I remember feeling invigorated after and creatively inspired after a few days of staying there. It’s another reason my wife and I eventually chose to move to Vancouver. It has such a clean and fresh scent of pine everywhere, similar to Baguio. Plus, the cool and dry climate makes daily living much more pleasant and perspiration almost non-existent.
