Olfactory Priming
Perfume as a shortcut to confidence
A scientific approach to creating positive future memories.
Every box of Roelen perfume comes with a reflective sticker that reads ‘Open yourself first.’
It is an invitation to feel good before your first interaction with your new perfume. To be your true self, to dissolve your ego. Do whatever brings you joy and calm – clean, breathe, meditate – dance, sweat, love. Open the doors of perception. Tell yourself that you are welcome, seen, heard, valued, supported, loved, and desired. Celebrate who you are at this moment. If you’re not sure, embrace change.
Now open the box, take out the bottle, and spray.
Do this ritual for the first dozen times you use your new perfume and make it a daily exercise, like journaling or meditation. Be consistent with your affirmations.
Perfumes not only recall memories but have the power to create them. This is achieved through what I call “olfactory priming”. “Olfactory” refers to your sense of smell. “Priming” refers to the “phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influences how a person responds to a subsequent stimulus.” In this case, the fragrance is the first stimulus. The second stimulus is the feeling you connect it with.
The goal here is to turn fragrance into a trigger for positive emotions so that every spray becomes a shortcut to confidence. In the words of renowned fragrance expert Marian Bendeth, “Fragrance speaks the loudest on a subliminal level.” Olfactory priming turns perfume into an invisible happy drug.
When a scent enters your nose, it is received by the olfactory bulb, which sends olfactory information to the brain. There it is processed by the limbic system, our cognitive hub. The limbic system decides which memories and emotions to associate with the scent. This creates what is called olfactory memory, or the “Proust phenomenon,” named after the French novelist Marcel Proust. In his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, Proust writes how the taste and smell of a tea-dipped pastry triggered profound memories of his youth, memories that would otherwise be lost to time.
Such is the beauty of olfactory memory: when aroma particles meet the olfactory bulb, your brain brings to life the tones, textures, and emotions of a bygone experience with a vividness not achieved through words or pictures. A plume of smoke can recall your first record, how the candlelight flickered on the walls, and the soft skin of the person you shared a bed with that night. You remember how you felt about the world, the people around you, and yourself.
There is a beautiful word in Portuguese called saudade, which the 16th-Century poet Duarte Nunes de Leão describes as “memory of something with a desire for it.” Often it is a desire for someone you love or care for. This often happens when we smell perfume, whether it is apparent or subconscious. In German, the word Sehnsucht is described by psychologists as a yearning for idealism while reckoning with imperfection. To feel it means to reflect on one’s past, present, and future life. Like its English equivalent, nostalgia, it is emotionally ambivalent.
Perfume, too, with its strong connection to memory, invites you to reflect on past, present, and future. The wonderful thing is that you have the power to create a version of yourself that, when summoned in the future, invites all the positive associations of a past self to flood the here and now.
All it takes is a spray.