From picking a perfect fragrance to spraying your radiators and getting rid of the worst stinks, here is how to make sure your life always smells sweet
From a fancy fragrance to a simple bowl of oranges, scent can transform how you feel about yourself, another person or a place. But how can you work out what suits the moment? And the best way to get rid of a stink? Perfumers reveal how to make your world smell fantastic.
1. Smell is an extreme sensation
“Scent provokes a visceral reaction,” says Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, a perfumer and artist who makes wearable fragrances under the brand name deya and creates scent installations for art exhibitions. What fascinates him about working with scent is the process of transforming “something that is grotesque or alarming into something that is familiar and comforting, or vice versa”.
2. Your reaction to a smell is linked to memory
Maya Njie makes perfumes inspired by her Swedish and Gambian heritage. She tried to capture this feeling in other artistic forms before realising that what she really wanted was to portray the way it smelled. “We know that our sense of smell is directly linked to the part of the brain where our memories are stored,” she says. “So it makes a lot of sense that fragrance and smells are connected to our memories. If you smell something that someone has worn, or you go to a house that belongs to your grandparents, smelling makes you feel way more emotional than a photo ever could.” Jackson describes this as “internal time travel. It is another form of communication that isn’t linguistic.”
3. It is possible to train your nose
“That is what perfume is all about,” says Jackson. He didn’t have a very orthodox route into perfumery: “I went straight into a laboratory and got to work, but most people will train at one of the schools in France, where the first year is all about learning 500 smells.” Brighton-based French perfumer Elodie Durande, who works for Somerset label Ffern, honed her craft at the University of Montpellier. “You start out by working on your olfactory skills, remembering smells and describing smells,” before receiving a wide-ranging education about the perfume industry, she says.
