The Nose Remembers First

A client came in with no idea what he wanted.

That's not unusual. Most people don't walk in asking for "top notes of bergamot." What they have instead is a vague, slightly apologetic sense that they'll know it when they smell it.

So we did what we often do in that situation: I had him smell a handful of things and pay attention to what he reached for, rather than what he thought he should like.

He kept coming back to the citrus.

That in itself wasn't particularly surprising. Citrus is bright, uncomplicated, easy to be drawn to. What was interesting was what he said next: his favourite smells in the world were the ocean and rain.

Nothing about that says citrus.

And yet there he was, hand hovering over the orange and lemon blends, with no idea why.

It was only a minute or two later, mid-conversation, that it clicked for him.

He hadn't thought about it in years, but his gran always kept oranges in the house when he stayed with her during the school holidays, and used to add a squeeze of lemon to their maize meal porridge.

A small thing.

The kind of detail you'd never think to mention if someone asked you to describe your childhood. But the kind your body filed away regardless.

We smell before we remember

This is the part that fascinates me: he didn't reach for citrus because he remembered his gran. He remembered his gran because he'd reached for citrus.

There's a reason scent can do this. Our sense of smell has unusually close connections to the brain systems involved in memory and emotion, including the amygdala and hippocampus. A smell can stir a feeling or memory before we've consciously worked out what we're smelling, or why it feels familiar and sometimes we don't realise the connection is there until afterwards.

That's what happened with my client. It wasn't really about citrus, or oranges, or lemon. It was about a memory that had been sitting quietly somewhere in him, waiting for the right doorway.

The things we don't think to remember

I think this is part of what makes fragrance so fascinating.

Ask someone what they love, and they'll often give you something poetic: the sea, fresh rain, a forest after a storm. Ask them to describe their favourite scent, and they might struggle to find the words.

But put a dozen things under their nose without telling them what they're supposed to choose, and the response can be completely different.

They might reach for something they wouldn't have named. Something familiar without knowing why. Something that belongs to a particular person, place or time. Something older than the explanation they've given themselves.

The nose doesn't always need us to have the story ready. Sometimes it finds the story first.

Why this matters for how we work

It's part of why we don't lead with questions when someone's choosing a scent.

"What do you like?" is a perfectly reasonable question, but it puts people in the position of having to narrate their own taste, and most of us simply don't have the vocabulary for it. We know it when we smell it.

So instead, we let the nose go first, and the story catch up.

Sometimes it catches up immediately. Sometimes, like with the porridge and the oranges, it takes a minute of standing there, a little surprised at yourself.

Either way, it's rarely just about the scent. It's about where it takes you before you've decided to go there.

The next time you're choosing a fragrance, try not to think too hard about what you like.

Just smell. Notice what you reach for. See what comes to mind.

You might find your nose remembers something you didn't know you'd forgotten.