The Scent
Series/ Making Sense · Smell
The Power of Scent in Branding
Perfume in the House
When I was a child, perfume in the house meant something was about to happen. If the house smelled like my mother's perfume, it meant we were going somewhere, or she was. We knew before anyone said a word. And it carried something else with it: I associated that scent with a world more sophisticated than an ordinary afternoon at home.
The same perfume showed up in a very different scene. When we were sick, my mother would put perfume on us. I remember asking her why. "So you'll feel better," she said. There was nothing medical about it; it was more psychological than anything, and it worked. That one scent carried two very different messages: going out, and being looked after.
Over time I came to see that perfume as a kind of seal. It set a moment apart, whether that meant getting dressed up to go out or spending the day in bed. When I design a space, scent does the same job for me: it's what seals an experience. What I want to understand is why a scent can hold so much meaning, and why it means such different things depending on who's smelling it.
Factory Settings
Part of the answer is biological. What comes in through the eyes, the ears or the skin passes first through the thalamus, a kind of switchboard that routes each signal where it needs to go. Smell takes a shortcut: signals travel from the olfactory bulb straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus, the parts of the brain that handle emotion and memory. That's why a scent can bring back an entire scene before you can even name what you're smelling. That wiring is built in.
What a smell means, though, is learned. Psychologist Rachel Herz, who spent years studying the sense of smell, argues that our preferences in smell aren't inborn: whether we like a particular smell or not depends on the emotional experiences we come to associate with it. One of her examples is wintergreen. In the United States, where it flavors candy and gum, one study ranked it the most pleasant smell on the list; in Britain, where it was used in medicine, it landed among the least pleasant. The molecule is identical. What differs is each country's history with it.
Scent-triggered memories also tend to go further back. In a study of older adults, words and pictures mostly called up memories from adolescence, while scents called up memories from before age ten, and those came with a stronger sense of being transported in time. They're as fallible as any other memory; what sets them apart is how completely they take you there.
My mother knew nothing about any of this, but she did exactly what the research describes. She linked her perfume to two emotionally charged moments, going out and taking care of us, during the very years that scents later carry us back to. And "so you'll feel better" has more to it than it might seem. At a cancer hospital in New York, patients who were given a vanilla-like scent during an MRI reported 63% less anxiety than those who received only humidified air. The effect held among patients who found the scent pleasant, and their heart rate didn't change. What changed was how they felt.
Smells Like Dinner, Smells Like Home, Smells Like Money
Just as there are clothes for every occasion, every scent has its place. First, there's the smell of food. Walk past a bakery and the scent of bread makes you hungry, even when the bread itself isn't much. It promises more than the product often delivers, and it still does its job.
Then there's the smell of home, the comforting kind, what I'd call a Cancerian feeling. In the US, there's a long-standing piece of real estate advice: bake cookies before a showing so buyers feel welcome. A researcher who has studied scent in retail since the late eighties advises against it. The smell of baking cookies is complex, so the brain gets busy decoding it and loses focus on the only thing that matters in that moment: whether they could see themselves living there. He recommends simple scents like lemon, pine, cedar or vanilla. To make someone feel at home, a scent has to support the space without stealing the spotlight.
And then there's the smell of money. Paseo Alcorta, a mall in Buenos Aires, has always smelled like a perfume counter. You'd walk in and it felt more upscale than any other mall before you'd even looked in a shop window.
For me, these worlds don't mix. Some fragrances are for getting dressed up and going out, and I don't want them anywhere near food. Places that smell like food are for eating. Still, the line can be crossed, as long as it's done on purpose. In 1992, Thierry Mugler launched Angel, a perfume with praline and vanilla over a patchouli base, and it created an entire fragrance family: the gourmands. Food entered perfumery as a provocation, in a star-shaped bottle, and Angel was still very much a going-out perfume. If what a scent evokes is learned, it can also be moved.
The Threshold
With scent, you also have to decide where it goes. Our sense of smell adapts much faster than the other senses: within about twenty minutes, the brain stops registering a constant smell. Someone who works all day at a perfume counter stops noticing it; someone walking in off the street gets hit by it. That's why scent works best at points of passage: the entrance, the move from one room to the next, the return.
That's how I used it in my installations. At the beginning, I'd use a citrusy room spray, along with sound, to energize people and signal that something new was starting. Later I found research that backs up that instinct. In a home décor store in Switzerland, a simple orange scent led shoppers to spend around 20% more, while a blend of orange, basil and green tea had no effect at all. A simple scent is easy for the brain to process and leaves your attention free for everything else.
For me, the scent you encounter on the way in attaches itself to everything that follows, and that's where the seal comes in. One experiment takes this idea to an extreme. People learned a task with a rose scent in the air, and some of them were exposed to the same scent again during deep sleep. The next morning, those who had smelled it again remembered what they'd learned better. The scent literally helped lock in the memory.
What a Brand Chooses to Announce
Hotels figured this out long ago. In Las Vegas, resorts have had signature scents since the late eighties, and several sell them as diffusers and candles. I've asked at a hotel in Las Vegas how to get theirs, and in Barcelona I bought one from another hotel. What you're really buying is a way back.
Airlines have followed a similar path. For decades, Singapore Airlines was associated with a fragrance it didn't create: it used it on the hot towels handed out during flights, and repetition did the rest. Today it has a custom scent, used in its lounges and on board and sold as diffusers and eau de toilette. Air France introduced its first signature fragrance in 2025. Increasingly, scent is treated as part of a brand's identity, alongside its logo and color palette.
A brand activation works the same way, just on a shorter timeline. Someone walks in, moves through the space and leaves, and the brand needs something from that moment to stay with them. A space that smells nice is only the starting point. The scent has to say something that belongs to that brand, in the right tone, and it has to be there at the key moments: the entrance, the centerpiece, whatever people take home. When I design an experience, that's the first question I ask about scent: what does it need to announce, and where?
My mother never thought of her perfume as design, and yet she used it with a precision many brands still lack. Always the same perfume, always at the same moments, until one whiff was enough to know what was coming. That consistency is what turns a scent into a seal, and it's what a brand needs so that, long after the activation, someone catches that scent again and knows exactly where they've been.
Sources
Brown University: liking a smell is learned (Herz, 2004)
Scientific American: Rachel Herz on scent, mood and learning
Discovery: why smells trigger such vivid memories
Willander and Larsson: odor-evoked autobiographical memories (2006)
Redd et al.: fragrance and anxiety during MRI (1994)
National Association of Realtors: cookies at the open house
Forster and Spence: olfactory habituation
Herrmann, Zidansek, Sprott and Spangenberg: The Power of Simplicity (2013)
Nature: rose scent during sleep and memory (Rasch et al., 2007)
Las Vegas Advisor: hotel scents
Runway Girl Network: Singapore Airlines and Floridian Waters