As your hand gently slides across the lids of your favorite bottles on your mirrored perfume tray, you contemplate the scent that you will adorn yourself with for the day. A spherical bottle composed of engraved crystal with a dainty, pink bow makes its way into your hand, and you inhale its sweet aroma. The scent stimulates your mind to race through its archives, bringing to the surface images of yourself sporting a cap and gown. You recall that “Amore” by Vince Camuto wafted through your nose as you glided across the high school graduation stage towards your diploma. A smile slowly sweeps across your face as you are immersed in the pleasant memory.
Smell is the Most Powerful Reminder
For some inexplicable reason, a meal that your mom always cooks will never fully bring you back to being a little kid, blissfully eating dinner at the kitchen table and sloppily coloring outside the lines of a drawing. The feeling of sand between your toes will not always remind you of the family beach trips you took in middle school. Flavor, touch and the associations between these sensations and your memories seem to fade over time. Scent, on the other hand, seems to transcend time and space. I have smelled eucalyptus leaves in the Chicago Botanic Gardens that bring me right back to my time living in Australia as a six-year-old, exploring fields of eucalyptus trees with my siblings.
Dr. Rachel Herz from the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University explains that experiments in “odor-associative learning” have led to powerful conclusions about personal health and happiness. According to Herz, nostalgic scents linked to pleasant memories have “the potential to increase positive emotions, decrease negative moods… and thereby have a generally beneficial effect on psychological and physiological wellbeing.” The power of scent should be utilized to enhance personal happiness by bringing us back to our most cherished moments.
The Value of a College Smell Scrapbook
They say that college is the best years of your life, the time that you can claim independence and find amazing experiences. So, isn’t it worth it to assign scents to moments from our college lives, fragrances that have the innate ability to bring us back to our best moments? What if a clean, crisp lavender perfume could take you back to your time sharing an apartment with your two best friends during sophomore year? Or a rich, vanilla aroma could flood your brain with reminders of that first date you went on that ended with tragic embarrassment, but you now laugh with your friends over? Even those gamedays your freshman year where you would get up at the crack of dawn and rush around to your friends’ tailgates? Moments from our youth are precious and fleeting. Creating opportunities for future nostalgia gives you the opportunity to catalog your adventures.
How Can We Create More of These Powerful Associations?
Our advice? Go to Sephora and take your time as you meander through the beautifully lit perfume displays. Smell the perfumes that grab your attention, and picture the amazing adventures that its scent entices you to partake in. When an exciting event is at hand, spritz yourself in your favorite perfume to create a smell connection that will bring you back to some of your finest memories.
Live a Year Worthy of Your Favorite Scent
Cultivating yearly aesthetics is an art form. Now that the new year is upon us, choose a perfume that you love the smell of and wear it every single day. Just think, years from now you could smell the dregs of that old bottle of “Heavenly” by Victoria’s Secret or “Daisy” by Marc Jacobs and be transported back to this miraculous year of life. What a powerful tool it is to create a bond between your nose and your precious memories. You have the ability to dictate the outcome of this year, so make sure it is worthy of your favorite scent.
What scent are you adorning yourself with as you take in every moment of 2024? Tag us, @VALLEYmag on Instagram!
