A manifesto
Perfume is “a vacation from which you never have to come back.”
Marian Bendeth, global fragrance expert
Four things perfume offers that life rarely gives away for free.
An infatuation without the heartache that follows it. A holiday that never ends. A glass of wine for someone who has to be up early for work. A dessert for someone who cannot afford the calories.
That is what a woman who has devoted her life to scent once captured.
I write on this website about many things. Mindset. Books that moved me. The life I live in a new country, many years after a departure I thought would be temporary. But through all those themes runs one thread that has held my hand since I was nine years old: scent.
As a child in my country of birth, I tucked rose petals into my nostrils so I could carry them all day. I did not know that I was doing what people have done for thousands of years. I only knew that a scent I loved had to travel with me.
Today I have more than three hundred perfumes. Not out of a collector’s mania. Out of a curiosity that has never stopped. Every scent is a possible life I can step into for a moment. A cocktail without the hangover. A holiday without an end.
Why a scent can floor you before you can name it
Have you ever had this? You walk in somewhere, smell something, and before you even know what it is, you are already somewhere else. In a kitchen from long ago. With someone who is no longer here. You feel it first; you understand it only afterwards.
There is a reason for that, and it is a lovely one to know.
Imagine your senses as messengers running to your brain’s head office. What you see and hear reports first to a kind of central desk — the thalamus — which sorts the post and forwards it. Smell does not do this. Smell has its own side door, straight into the building, right beside the rooms where emotion and memory live: the amygdala and the hippocampus. Neuroscientists at Harvard describe it almost literally like this — as if smell evolved to wire information directly to our emotion and memory centres.
That is why a scent feels so immediate. It skips the polite stopover. And that is why, research shows, memories evoked by smell are often more emotional and older than memories we recover through image or sound. It is no coincidence that it is precisely a scent that carries you back to your earliest years.
What would happen, do you think, if today you deliberately sought out one scent from a time you thought long forgotten?
What it costs when this sense disappears
I do not write only about what scent gives. Also about what it takes away when it disappears.
A few years ago I lost my sense of smell, like so many who were working in healthcare at the time. For six months my world consisted of one smell — fried onions — and nothing else. It was no small loss. It was a garden that died before I was allowed to pick it.
Science calls this anosmia, and confirms what I felt in my own body: the loss of smell is linked to low mood, anxiety and a strange feeling of being adrift. A Harvard researcher put it aptly: without smell we suddenly feel lost, as if we no longer quite know where we are.
But there is hope too, and it is honestly grounded. There is such a thing as smell training: twice a day, deliberately inhaling a few familiar scents — often rose, clove, lemon and eucalyptus — over months. It is physiotherapy for your nose. No miracle cure: it works best if you start early, and discipline is the biggest hurdle — it is often experienced as dull and time-consuming, and in practice only about a third of people truly keep it up consistently. But meta-analyses show that in many people who persevere, it helps to train the sense of smell back. (Do you have long-lasting smell loss yourself? Discuss it with your GP — this is my story, not medical advice.)
And here it becomes almost moving. Research shows that people who fill their lives with scents — perfumers, wine connoisseurs — literally see the smell region in their brain grow. So my three hundred little bottles are not an excess. They have been, all those years, training.
Pleasure is not a luxury
Two things I have known since that half-year of silence, which I did not know before.
First: that scent is not decoration. It is one of the most direct routes we have to emotion, memory and self-knowledge.
Second: that pleasure is never trivial. In a life that can be heavy — for me, for you, for many who will one day find this page — a moment of beauty is not a luxury. It is nourishment. A perfume that lifts you, a scent that brings you back to someone you have lost, a new discovery that makes you pause: these are small holidays of consciousness to which we are entitled.
Sometimes those scent-holidays are small and practical. When I crave something sweet and know that a pastry will not help me later, I spray myself with a perfume that has vanilla or caramel notes. Often the need for sugar then softens.
But I want to be honest here, because that is the agreement on this website. Science does know this phenomenon — research showed that smelling a treat for longer (about two minutes) can partly quiet the reward system in the brain, as if you had already taken a bite. But the picture is not as clear-cut as I would like to paint it for you. In some people the smell of vanilla actually awakens the craving rather than dampening it, and researchers do not yet agree on exactly how it works — satiety, or simply distraction. So it is not a trick I promise you. It is a small, personal ritual that works for me, and that you may explore for yourself.
That is why I write about scent here
Not to review perfumes — there are other voices for that. Not to promote expensive bottles — there are marketers for that. But to explore how something as fleeting as scent can move us so deeply, what science now knows about it, who really earns from the perfumes in our cupboard, and what a life with scent teaches us about a life with ourselves.
Whether you have one perfume or three hundred. Whether you have lost your sense of smell and are recovering. Whether you wonder why a scent from your childhood can still bring you to tears — this page is for you.
And perhaps that is the question I want to leave you with, this week:
Which scent carries a whole life within it for you — and when did you last deliberately seek it out?
Related reading
Sources
- Harvard Medicine Magazine (April 2024). The Connections Between Smell, Memory, and Health. (Smell bypasses the thalamus and is “wired” to the amygdala and hippocampus; scent memories are more emotional and reach further back — featuring neuroscientists S. R. Datta and R. Herz.)
- Herz, R. S. (2016). The Role of Odor-Evoked Memory in Psychological and Physiological Health. Brain Sciences, 6(3), 22. DOI: 10.3390/brainsci6030022.
- Biswas, D., & Szocs, C. (2019). The Smell of Healthy Choices: Cross-Modal Sensory Compensation Effects of Ambient Scent on Food Purchases. Journal of Marketing Research, 56(1), 123–141. DOI: 10.1177/0022243718820585. (Smelling for longer partly quiets the reward system; brief smelling can instead heighten the craving.)
- Kemps, E., & Tiggemann, M. (2013). Olfactory stimulation curbs food cravings. Addictive Behaviors, 38(2), 1550–1554. DOI: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2012.06.001 — and: Kemps, E., Tiggemann, M., & Bettany, S. (2012). Non-food odorants reduce chocolate cravings. Appetite, 58(3), 1087–1090. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2012.03.002. (Scent can reduce craving via competition for limited brain capacity; effects are mixed and modest.)
- Sorokowska, A., Drechsler, E., & Karwowski, M. (2017). Effects of olfactory training: a meta-analysis. Rhinology, 55(1), 17–26. DOI: 10.4193/rhino16.195. (Smell training; original protocol Hummel et al., 2009.)
- Medscape (January 2026). Scientists Sniff Out Compelling New Treatments for Anosmia. (Honest nuance: smell training works best early; sommeliers and perfumers see their smell region grow.)
- Quote: Marian Bendeth, Global Fragrance Expert (Sixth Scents).
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