Scents, Senses, Moods and your Home | Room Refresh Edition | Clarri Hill

May 14, 2021

If you’re new here, great! Welcome, we will be exploring the nature of smell, how that stimulates our mood and how we can use this to set the tone of any space within our homes through the use of home fragrance products. For those that are stimulated by scents, here we learn how to unearth this superpower and use it to inspire sensation, nostalgia and revitalization in any and every setting.

Let’s talk about why scents affect us? We’ll need to check the science behind smell – here goes; it is recorded in studies that 70% of all emotion is generated due to smell, with it being the strongest of our five senses. Scent affects our mood, memory, concentration and emotion. Research shows that there is a 40% increase in mood when we’re exposed to pleasant aromas. Now that we’re armed with the knowledge that fragrance can greatly impact how we perceive our environment, let’s turn our attention to how we can use this to empower our personal space.

When deciding what mood you would like to create in a specific area in your home, you would want to take into consideration what the room is used for. We would also recommend you think on what level of fragrance intervention each room setting requires.

Creating a Fragrant Ambience

Determining what emotion you would like the room to stimulate is intrinsic to interior design, how you convey a room’s perceived purpose is thought of in this design process. In this same way we recommend picking a selection of available scents that will be added to the room to insight and highlight the room’s qualities.
If you would like to instil a sense of calmness for example, opting for blue and natural hues will cause this visual association, in so, choosing lavender, vanilla and other subdued florals will impart the same values.

Ambient room fragrancing can be done using slow-release mechanisms offered by scented candles, essential oil diffusers and timed release organic air fresheners. These maintain a saturated subtle room aroma that naturally become part of the greater room’s experience.

It is important to note that not all fragrances are subtle enough to remain constant within a room. This should be accounted for if your room will be constantly fragranced, like in the case of spas (massage rooms) think on who will be using the space.

Colour and Theme Matching

Some interesting studies have been conducted in relation to smell, location and aptitude to react in certain ways. Scent can add character to a themed environment, help one “escape” to another place, or promote a particular feeling. For example, a well-known night club in London doubled their sales of a particular Malibu drink by introducing a coconut scent into the atmosphere.

Opting for pre-selected scent sets that have been curated to create a specific mood would help when matching your home fragrance product to your room décor, colour and theme. For instance; if your room design is based on a destination, go for options that complement that destination.

Inspiring Nostalgia

I think we’ve all had a moment when we got a whiff of a particular smell and old memories came rushing back as if it was just yesterday! Yes, when we want to inspire nostalgia in a special room in our homes, it can be an extremely personal experience. It can be done to induce good memories of a loved one – like adding the aroma of cinnamon and vanilla to your kitchen to bring back joyous memories of cookies baking. We want to note that this process will be unique to you and how you’ve experienced in the past.

Read more on scents and how they affect your mood here. Or click through to this post to learn how to incorporate aromatherapy within your yoga practice.

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