Sense of smell

[thesummerqueen]

Article from New Science on smell that's pretty interesting:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...128301.800

The power of smell will be no news to estate agents, who often advocate the smell of baking bread or brewing coffee to promote the sale of a house. But there are more subtle and surprising effects too. For instance, when Hendrick Schifferstein from Delft University of Technology and colleagues pumped the smell of orange, seawater or peppermint into a nightclub, the revellers partied harder - they danced more, rated their night as more enjoyable, and even thought the music was better - than when there was no added scent (Chemosensory Perception, vol 4, p 55). Rob Holland and colleagues at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, meanwhile, have found that the hint of aroma wafting out of a hidden bucket of citrus-scented cleaner was enough to persuade students to clean up after themselves - even though the vast majority of them hadn't actually registered the smell (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 689).

I've been interested in scents and perfumes since I was in 8th grade and had to do a project for French class - I chose the history of perfumery as it stood in France. National Geographic had incidentally done a nice spread on perfume and included scratch and sniffs of things Cleopatra and Napoleon might have worn.

What are some of your favorite smells?

Mine are:

Coffee (duh) There's a coffee factory just down the street from us...addicts cry when they pass it.

Honeysuckle on a warm summer night

The shavings from Prismacolor pencils

hint of bleach (I'm obsessive about bleaching my whites and some surfaces - smells very clean to me)

pumpkin

dirt - potting soil, moist and crumbling loam, thick wet clay, warm seedling mixes when I being planting seeds in Feb...the smell gives me an indescribable happiness.

roses, grown at home.

my herb garden in the rain - it smells like possibility of dishes in the future, and satisfaction of hard work

The scent that occurs right at the base of my erstwhile king's hairline


For anyone interested, I get my perfumes from here: http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/welcome.html

It's a sort of gothy site and they have the most wonderful collection of perfume oils I've ever seen. The two I get the most are "Anne Bonny," and "Bewitched" (for the record, I've not met a man yet who wasn't absolutely bewitched by that perfume), both found on the Bewitching Brews page. I'm highly impressed by BPAL: when they set out with an inspiration, they really make a scent to match it. "Burial" smelled like dry leaves and frost earth. "The Lady of Shalott" smelled like damp lilies. "Voodoo" smelled like dying flowers and incense. "Kill-devil" (another name for rum) smelled like the gingerbread and burnt sugar smell of spiced rum. They're well worth the price, for you only need a tiny bit and the bottles last a long time. They even have a section suggesting some of them for men - a guy friend of mine indulged me with samples once and ended up getting "Black Forest" in place of his cologne.