Lifestyle Choices

Scent is a passion. For me it is an irresistible one. And like a beautiful painting or a well-written novel, a fine perfume is a work of art. Wearing one can be a vivid expression of a woman’s feeling and intention. For scent is not only a delight to indulge in, it also carries one of the most potent beauty messages you will ever send out. Change the scent you wear and you can change the way you feel, the image you project, the mood you want to set. If I had little money to spend on beauty products, I could do without makeup altogether and would buy only the simplest creams and lotions, but I would never stop buying scent—bottles and sprays of it, sachets to put into drawers and cupboards, oils to drop on pads laid on heated surfaces which waft their perfumes into the air. Scent has always had magic to it.

Even the multimillion-dollar perfume industry is a fascination, mysterious and paradoxical—none the less so for all the mechanization of the past twenty years. For in spite of advanced market-research techniques, manufacturing technology, and selling methods, perfumers still do not understand some of the most basic things about their raw materials and why they affect people as they do. How does the human sense of smell work, anyway? What makes it impossible to reconstruct perfectly even one essential oil from a plant or flower that goes into making a fragrance? Why does the simple act of smelling involve such a vast range of primitive emotional responses in the human being? And how can these responses be calculated? Nobody knows for sure.

Psychologists and biologists working with the sense of smell only know that they do. For we respond to perfumes unconsciously. Various odors can even bring about abreaction, in which specific events are relived, releasing pent-up psychic energy, much as Proust reacted to the madeleine. The smell of vanilla, for instance, often brings out tender memories from childhood. Other smells, such as lavender, are calming to a disturbed mind. Still others, such as carnation, mint, rose, and tobacco, act as mental stimulants. Even mass hysteria and fear are being linked with our sense of smell; the hormonal changes accompanying violent feelings of fear appear to cause the body to give off odors that are then subconsciously recognized by others. These kinds of smells may be as important to human behavior as they are in the behavior of animals, even though we are entirely unaware that we are smelling anything. In the future, scent may well be made using ingredients as much for their physical and psychological effect as for their pleasant smell.

Meanwhile scientists are looking at the far-reaching effects and implications that various odors have in human life. A German neurologist, Dr. Edinger, has experimented and found, for instance, that work rates in factories can be significantly improved simply by supplying workers who get dirty from their jobs with large quantities of strongly perfumed soap instead of the plain carbolic variety. Similarly, in France during World War II, researchers reported that people remained markedly calmer and more easily organized in air-raid shelters that were well aired and scented than their counterparts in ordinary shelters. So far, no large perfumer has explained this kind of information, but it is there just waiting for the adventurous marketing man to find a way to use it.

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