SCIENCE OF SCENT:
Fragrance sceptic Genevieve Gannon had dismissed aromatherapy – until a lavender candle changed her sleeping habits forever and sent her on a journey of discovery.
the benefits of aromatherapy
S itting in an airy warehouse among hundreds of small glass bottles, I detect a familiar scent and am transported to a time and place that no longer exists. “It’s the third bedroom in my grandmother’s house in the 1980s,” I tell perfumer Ainslie Walker, who has just handed me a card doused in fragrance. I can picture crystal jewellery boxes and doilies. “My great-grandmother lived in that room. She always wore Chanel Number 5,” I add. The scent on the card is a perfume called Two Hugs that Ainslie created for a domestic violence shelter, and she’s not surprised it has awakened memories connected to that famous French scent. Our sense of smell and our memory are intertwined, and the two perfumes both have notes of amber in the base, as well as patchouli and rose. Something in the aroma has awoken the memories that became attached to the heady floral scent when they were first stored in my brain all those years ago.
“I wanted it to smell quite expensive and sophisticated,” Ainslie says, as she takes me through her creative process. “I wanted the women to feel that they’re worth something and valued. It has bergamot in it, too, which is an antidepressant in the aromatherapy world, and lavender to help them sleep well. I liked the idea of the women spraying their bed and having this clean, uplifting, calming scent.”
I sniff the Two Hugs perfume again and agree: I feel content and comfortable. It’s not just the lovely smells and cherished memories
– there’s possibly a slight therapeutic pay-off. I’m honestly not sure, but that’s why I’ve come to talk to Ainslie about the science of scent.
“There’s a bit of chemistry, but it’s also nostalgia and memory linking,” she says of scent creation. “Even kids who don’t know what lavender is for would feel relaxed when they smell it. Then later, as an adult, if your mum always used lavender in the bath, you might find it relaxing because of the association, as well as the chemistry.” But, she adds, “some people would find lavender very not-relaxing if they’ve had a bad experience with it.”
I’ve always been ambivalent about aromatherapy’s claims. I love perfume and scented candles, but I’ve never expected them to improve my state of mind or, as some believe, influence my behaviour. But I had a surprisingly positive experience with a lavender candle while investigating sleep cycles for The Weekly, and the academic research I read at the time made me reconsider my scepticism.
People have been using the essential oils distilled from plants and flowers to calm and heal for millennia. Lavender, the plant most studied for its psychophysiological properties, is widely accepted to be an effective sleep aid. Meanwhile, most people agree that a spritz of lemon or peppermint will perk you up.
In recent years, scientists have become more interested in measuring the power of scent – and the results are surprising. Under lab conditions, lavender has been shown to enhance relaxation and drowsiness, improve sleep quality by increasing the proportion of deep, slow-wave sleep, and even reduce the stress and pain of an injection.
There’s an emerging school of thought that claims it is possible to harness the emotive power of scent to influence people – so much so that global companies like American Express and Valentino now spend big on scenting spaces where they interact with customers.
Nike hired consultants to blend a perfume that would make its shops smell like a combination of basketball rubber and sports fields. These companies are clearly convinced of the scent-memory-emotion-behaviour link, and I want to know why.
The power of memory
“Rosemary is for remembrance” is a famous quote from Hamlet.
Here’s another quote about rosemary: “Since ancient times, this aromatic herb has been believed to have properties to improve the memory.” That one comes from the Australian Army, and is the official explanation as to why we pin a sprig of the herb to our lapels on Remembrance Day.
Humans have long sensed there’s a connection between rosemary and memory, and it seems they’re onto something. In 2016, researchers at the University of Northumbria put
150 adults through a series of memory tests to measure what effect the aroma of rosemary would have on their memory. Some performed the memory tests in an unscented room, while others performed the tests in a room filled with the smell of rosemary. The test scores of those in the room with the rosemary were 15 per cent higher.
The experiment had been designed to test prospective memory – our ability to remember to do something. When Dr Mark Moss presented the findings to the British Psychological Conference, he said: “This is potentially very important because prospective memory, for example, enables you to remember to take your medication at certain times of a day.”
That same year, the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences published a review of more than 150 studies that measure how scents change brainwaves. Authors Kandhasamy Sowndhararajan and Songmun Kim wanted to understand what science had observed about smells of all kinds, from magnolia flowers to chewing gum.
All the studies they reviewed used Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure how brainwaves changed when exposed to certain smells.
One study looked at how rosemary affected 40 adults’ ability to solve simple maths problems. The EEG readings showed the aroma of rosemary decreased frontal alpha and beta power, “suggesting increased alertness”. The volunteers were more relaxed and alert and completed the task faster, but not more accurately.
Another study suggested peppermint may be a performance enhancer.
“The peppermint odour significantly increased running speed, hand grip, strength and number of push-ups, but had no effect on skill-related tasks,” the study found. It was also shown to “significantly enhance memory and alertness” and, if a peppermint oil is present in a darkened room, people were less likely to become sleepy than if there was no odour.
Chocolate was shown to be distracting, while orange aromas calmed people who were waiting to go into a dentist appointment. The researchers concluded: “The aromatic properties of these products play a major role in the psychophysiological functions of human beings.”
But those who believe in the power of scent say chemistry is just one side of what’s happening and that it’s the nose’s connection to our brain’s centres of memory and emotion that gives it its power.
More than molecules
People born before the 1940s associate the smell of wood with their childhood because all their toys were wooden. For people born after the ’40s, images of childhood are conjured by crayon wax, Play-Doh and plastic.
These are the observations of perfumer Dawn Goldworm, whose company, 12.29, has sold signature scents to clients from Lady Gaga to Bentley on the basis that the link between smell and memory means fragrance can influence emotions and, therefore, behaviour.
The olfactory bulb, which detects smell, is closely connected to the brain’s limbic system, which is known for emotion and memory formation.
As Dawn explains on the 12.29 website: “When you smell an odour, you automatically link an emotion to it. This is why some of our most powerful memories are linked to smell – the smell of freshly cut grass, our Christmas tree, our grandmother’s house. No other sense can transport us and make us feel that emotional connection like scent can. All companies should consider the emotional impact they can have simply by adding a smell.”
Gold Coast perfumer Emma Leah believes it’s possible to create “an intentional, cued pathway” between
Scent designer Emma Leah believes it’s possible to attach a positive emotion to a particular fragrance.
a specific smell and a positive emotion, so that whenever a person smells that fragrance, the positive emotion is stimulated.
While she was working on a play set in the catacombs of Rome,
Emma created a damp aroma to help transport the audience underground. She also created a scent to help actors conquer stage fright. “We created a safe environment. We had a relaxation exercise with a scent. Later, when they smelled that scent, the actors went back to that relaxation,” Emma says. “We created a scent pathway.”
Anyone who has ever smelled the perfume of an old lover, or an old enemy, will know how effective fragrance is at stirring up emotions. According to Dawn, mood manipulation can work on a large scale because so many of our scent preferences have cultural roots.
“The smells you like or don’t like are not your own, subjective opinion. They are almost entirely informed by your culture, your generation and your living environment from the first 10 years of your life,” she says.
In the ’90s, US tie store Knot Shop
“The smells you like or don’t like are informed by your culture and generation.”
started pumping the smell of leather, oak and tobacco into its retail outlets. The idea was to make the stores smell like the ideal man, so that female customers – the primary purchasers – would spend more. But, after four months, the scent experiment was abandoned. When The New York Times reported on the failure, the president of the company, Gene Silverberg, said maintaining the fragrance wasn’t worth the trouble. “Without the smell, I haven’t seen any drop in sales,” he told The Times.
“The general idea of scent affecting mood is quite accurate, but it all has to do with your experience of the scent in the first place,” Emma says. “My opinion is, yes, it can be used to motivate people and help with mood control, but you have to be careful. Fresh dirt is something everyone loves because it’s primary, but not if they’ve had a bad experience with it. It can make people feel a little bit sick.”
Charlatans of scent
Because the science around scent and emotion is still so unclear, it’s an area that is open to deception. In the early 2000s, there was a boom in scent marketing when an eccentric neurologist, Alan R. Hirsch, started touting studies he’d done that supposedly showed the power of scent. He was interested in the idea that scent could be used to suppress appetite and aid weight loss.
However, in 2014 his company was fined US$26.5 million for deceiving consumers. Alan Hirsch “gave endorsements that were not supported by scientific evidence”, the US Federal Trade Commission found.
While researching this article, I received an unsolicited email from a PR company promoting a line of essential oils with a list of promises ranging from the medically improbable (“Frankincense … enhances nerve function”) to the fantastical (a blend containing orange, ginger and clove will “enhance the frequency of the harmonic magnetic energy field”). The Utah-based company, Young Living Essential Oils, is one of the largest manufacturers of essential oils in the world. Five millilitres of its rose oil costs $418.
Despite their popularity, the company has also been caught making false claims. Last year, the US National Advertising Division told Young Living to stop saying its products were therapeutic. This followed a caution from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2014 for claims that its products
could cure Ebola – specifically, that the Ebola virus cannot survive in the presence of oregano.
Emma says there are a lot of false statements about the efficacy of oils and aromas, which damages the field’s reputation. Some companies “are peddling things that are not real and they are making huge claims about them, and it’s difficult to get any kind of guarantee because there’s so little scientific testing,” she says. “It makes us all look bad. I’m not affiliated with that. I make perfumes out of beautiful ingredients and that’s that.”
Over the past year, both Emma and Ainslie have seen how people turn to aromas that are comforting and nostalgic. Ainslie creates scents for Glasshouse and says the pandemic drove demand for scented candles. “There was this huge exponential growth. We hit all our yearly targets back in May,” she says.
The company’s Christmas range “sold out three months before it went on the shelf”. A candle called Movie Night, designed to evoke the feeling of sitting in a cinema full of people eating popcorn and choc-tops, sold high volumes in May, just as the pandemic was starting to grind us down. Ainslie says they’d normally sell 6500 candles over a six-week period. They have now sold more than 70,000 Movie Night candles.
It seems that regardless of what science says, familiar and wonderful smells entice us. Until recently, Australians could claim aromatherapy through their health insurance.
Even as the federal government cut it from the list of eligible therapies, its review team admitted there was evidence to suggest it may be effective in reducing anxiety and alleviating pain. The existing body of research simply wasn’t rigorous enough, and the government concluded the effects of scent remain “uncertain”.
But it’s an area that’s attracting interest and I’m sure that, in time, we’ll learn more about the science of scent. In the meantime, I’m conscious that I am creating scent memories every day, so I won’t forget to stop and smell the roses. AWW