Why We Are Attracted To The Scents We Love
I’ve always been fascinated by why we love the smells we love. Your nose usually knows what you want before you do, and half the time you don’t even realize it. It’s kind of like picking a new book — you swear you’re going to branch out, and then you’re mysteriously holding yet another twisty thriller because that’s just who you are as a person.
Scent works the same way. We all gravitate toward certain notes because they give us a feeling we’re craving.
What blows my mind is how fast scent hits the emotional part of your brain. Faster than anything else. You can breathe something in once and suddenly you are ten years old eating popsicles in the backyard, or you are walking into your grandma’s house, or you remember a moment you did not even know you still had stored somewhere. It is wild.
That is why certain scents feel comforting to some people and completely wrong to others. It is not just “preference” or being picky. Your brain is pulling up old memories and saying, “Hey, we loved this once, let’s stick with it,” or “No thank you, we have been through this before.”
Woodsy scents calm me down because they remind me of that grounded, quiet, exhale feeling I get when I wander outside in nature for a while. Fruity scents wake me up because they hit that bright, happy part of my brain. Someone else might get that same grounded feeling from florals or pine or cotton. And that is great. I love that for them.
We are all wired differently, and our scent preferences are basically our nervous systems picking what feels safe and familiar and uplifting. Your nose knows what you want before you do. Truly. So if you have ever wondered why a scent feels like a hug or feels like too much, that is just your wiring doing what it does best.
And this is also why something can smell great in a cold smell (that’s what you call smelling a fragrance before you warm it) but totally different once you warm it. Scent has layers. The top notes are your hook, the first chapter. The middle notes are the heart of it all. And the base notes are what linger hours later. They develop over time, just like a story, and sometimes that story turns into your new favorite and sometimes it is a DNF. It happens.
At the end of the day, scent is supposed to feel good. It is supposed to remind you of your life and your memories and your best moments, not someone else’s. So follow your nose. It already knows where you are going.
