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A scent can make a room feel smaller, larger, more calming
MCT illustration
Whether it’s cabin fever or a real square-footage problem, you have a couple of options when the rooms in your home start looking small.
You can add on to your house or you could follow color-related optical illusions decorators recommend to create a higher ceiling or depth to the walls.
Or you can light a cucumber-scented candle.
One with a green apple scent works just as well, says Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.
After testing hundreds of people in coffin-like tubes, Hirsch found that those scents made the space seem larger to each of the tube-bound volunteers.
Conversely, he says, for someone who is agoraphobic in a large room, the smell of meat roasting on a barbecue will make a large area seem smaller.
Hirsch delights in the fact that scents are beginning to be used as design elements, right up there with color, texture and lighting.
“Introducing a smell is the quickest way to change a person’s mood,” he says, and he points to a couple of reasons for it.
“People react to smells totally independent of thought,” he says. “It’s a purely affective response, pure emotion.”
In years past, the whole concept surrounding odors was that if it smells good, it is good, Hirsch says, so pleasant odors in a person’s home meant a good person lived inside. It has only been very recently that science has begun to explore functions for odors.
The country as a whole is receptive to anything that makes a house homier, says Terry Molnar, executive director of the Fragrance Foundation, part of the Sense of Smell Institute in New York.
Aroma-Chology, the psychology of aroma, links the sense of smell directly to the area of the brain that triggers memories and emotion, Molnar says.
Because scent, memory and emotion are so closely linked, “the brain remembers a scent up to a year longer than any of the other senses remember a stimulus,” she says.
Scents that evoke childhood memories are usually winners, but they vary from person to person.
“What relaxes me may upset you. I may love the smell of lilies, but that might remind you of a funeral,” Molnar says.
Several scents, however, were consistent throughout all the trials her organization conducted.
All over the world, she says, vanilla and lavender are universally relaxing and evoke the pleasantness of home, hearth and security. Citrus is energizing. Lemon signals fresh, and pine means clean, she says.
Molnar confirms that using scents is definitely a cutting-edge trend in decorating.
Beyond the functional uses of making a room seem bigger or smaller, Molnar says the people who do want to create a total sensory experience in a room have begun to add a “signature scent” to their homes. Either they have one made just for them — as have several hotels including the Weston and Hyatt chains — or they adopt a commercially produced scent that they use exclusively.
Signature scents are often subtly diffused scents that blend with the environment and the look of a room. One of the first public institutions to try it out, Molnar says, was the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, which piped the scent of peaches throughout the terminal to entice visitors during the 1996 summer Olympics.
“It’s called sensory branding,” she says.
Over the past few years, more and more consumers have been compelled to have fragrance in their homes, agrees Rick Ruffolo, senior vice president for branding, marketing and innovation at Yankee Candle in South Deerfield, Mass.
Again, he cites the connection between the nose and the brain as the reason for people’s emotional response to MacIntosh Apple, Lemon Lavender and Clean Cotton, three of more than 100 scents offered by Yankee.
“The olfactory sense is hard-wired directly to the brain. Scents have an immediate impact — even before you see the room,” Ruffolo says.
There’s even a new word to describe the total experience of adding smell as a design element in a room.
“Welcome to the scentmosphere,” he says.
Though Yankee Candle offers car and plug-in air fresheners, reed diffusers and potpourri, it’s no surprise that its biggest seller is candles.
“It’s the preferred fragrance-thrower. With the light and the dancing flame, a candle is a product that adds ambience,” he says.
That claim rings true throughout the home-fragrance market, says Kat Fay, a consumer analyst at Mintel International in Chicago.
Though it’s a robust industry that was worth $1.9 billion in 2006, the home fragrance market is reliant on innovation.
“More and more, the products have to be aesthetically pleasing. People won’t tolerate an aerosol looking like an old can of Lysol anymore. Since home has become a haven and not just the place we go to pay bills anymore, companies are always looking at ways to deliver fragrance in a more pleasing way. Some have even devised ways of hiding the scent completely,” Fay says.
Airwick, for example, has fashioned a working outlet cover into an air freshener so it goes completely undetected, she says.
Reed diffusers are pretty, Fay says, and offer a clear bottle on the bottom filled with essential oils. Half of a long, thick stick goes into the bottle and the other half sticks out. When a stick becomes saturated with oil, it gives off scent.
These are popular in homes with children or pets, as there is no chance of knocking a lit candle to the ground, she says.
S.C. Johnson and Son Inc., makers of Glade products such as Glass Scents, Secrets and the new Plug-Ins Scented light show, is the overall giant, analysts say.
Scentstories, another innovation by Procter & Gamble’s Febreze, uses a disc of fragrance with six versions of the same smell to a disk, and rotates them with a timer mechanism. The Scentstories player — clean-looking and flame-free — rotates the smells with a timer mechanism.
Once you have made your room seem larger or smaller or merely sweet smelling, there are specific scents you can introduce to enhance the activity in the room.
“A mixed-floral odor in a den will increase learning speed,” Hirsch says. “And in a home gymnasium, the smell of buttered popcorn or strawberries will cause you to burn calories faster.”
“In the kitchen, the smell of garlic bread creates the most friendly atmosphere, increasing positive interaction by 6 percent and reducing negativity by 22 percent,” the neurological director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation adds.
Of course in the bedroom, there are several options.
“Introduce lavender if you want to relax. If you want a more amorous environment, the smell of pumpkin pie or licorice works for a man. The smell of banana nut bread or Hershey’s Good & Plenty candy will do it for a woman,” Hirsch says.
Women can decorate their homes by making themselves look better, too, he says.
“Having the smell of bananas, green apples or peppermint in the kitchen will curb a woman’s appetite.
“If she wears a spicy scent, men will perceive her as being an average of 12 pounds lighter than she is, and if she wears the scent of pink grapefruit, he will perceive her as an average of six years younger than she really is,” he swears, cross his heart and hope to die.
Unfortunately, he laments, there is no scent that will make a man look better to a woman.
But take heart, guys, that’s why jewelry was invented.