The Mystery of Scent
The Mystery of Scent ~
“… I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.”
It’s a seminal passage in literature, so famous in fact that it has its own name: the Proustian moment, a sensory experience that triggers a rush of memories often long past or even seemingly forgotten. For French author Marcel Proust, who penned the legendary lines in his 1913 novel, In Search of Lost Time, it was the hint of cake in tea that sent his mind reeling
Understanding Smell ~
The sense of smell can move us in ways that we aren’t always aware of. When the complexities of the human brain, human motivation and human variation are added to the mix, the question of what smells do to and for us becomes even more perplexing and intriguing.
Research indicates that odours serve as indelible reminders of times past, much more so than cues received from other senses such as sight and sound. This is perhaps due to the fact that sight, sound and also touch, do not pass through the same areas of the brain: namely the amygdala and hippocampus regions that handle emotion and memory respectively.
Olfaction, also known as sense of smell, is the most primal and mysterious of our six senses. Smell has the power to mentally transport all of us to sentimental periods in time, mostly back to our early lives because memory and emotions are often associated with the olfactory bulb in the brain’s limbic system.
Smell is the only fully developed sense a fetus has in the womb, and it’s the one that is the most developed in a child through the age of around ten, when sight takes over.
Childhood memories associated with a particular scent remain on the verge of recall throughout a lifetime. They are the basis for smells you will like and hate for the rest of your life. This is known as ‘odour-evoked autobiographical memory.’
Our Mission ~
As a creator of home fragrance, it is our mission to understand which combinations of scents create a positive memory and will then be most loved and appreciated in the home or other personal spaces.
Every one of us has different experiences evoking positive memories, which makes the journey to finding the best scent blends and positive experiences for the home fascinating and rewarding. Creating a scent is both magical and challenging however intuition and experience are our tools. It is said that creating fragrance is 90% intuition and 10% science.
Our Fragrance ~
Here at Living Light, we have built up a fragrance library of essential oils and parfum fragrances over many years. Many of our scents are not a single fragrance submission but a layering. Coming up with ‘the one’ is like finding a needle in a haystack as it may take 100 samples before finding a scent we all absolutely adore and simply must include in our collection.
Once the fragrance is established, an intensive testing period for each product type takes place with no effort spared to achieve the best results for our home fragrance collection of candles, reed diffusers, room sprays and body care.
Question ~
What is one of your favourite scents that reminds you of days gone by? We would love to hear your thoughts and who knows, maybe create a fragrance with you in mind!
