How Fragrance Sparks Nostalgia 

 Turns out Google anticipated our curiosity. We typed ‘Is nostalgia…’ and it filled in the rest: ‘an emotion.’ That’s exactly how we were feeling recently, as we developed a collection of fragrances meant to encapsulate summer. 

 Nostalgia conjures up images of a romantic past experience — that time you were younger and had an adventure; the first time you looked across the table at your lover; the summer spent hiking trails and eating wild berries. But nostalgia can also imbue memories with a bit of melancholy, reminding us of something we wish we’d done; someone we long to see again; a place we can no longer go. 

 And whether positive or with a tinge of longing, nostalgia is a powerful emotion that every human experiences. Directly related to an idea of the past, nostalgia is often linked with the idea of “home.” It takes mere minutes on social media to stumble across Taylor Swift singing “I can go anywhere I want. Anywhere I want, just not home,” played along images of people and places that no longer exist. She sings of nostalgia for another moment in time. It’s heartbreaking, it’s uplifting, and it’s deeply personal. Nostalgia is yours and yours alone. 

 Scents and fragrances are uniquely powerful to evoke nostalgia. I think of fields I ran through as a child anytime I smell the dry, earthy scent of clay baking under the summer sun. And culturally, there are common scents as well. We all love pine at Christmas, or pumpkin spice in autumn. Incense may remind us of ritual. Buy, why? How does scent play such a powerful role in our lives? Here, we dig a little deeper into the science of sense memory. 

The Science—Why Scent Triggers Memory and Emotion 

Humans can detect around a trillion scents, far exceeding the number tones we can hear, or shades of color we can see. In 2004, Linda Buck and Richard Axel won the Nobel Prize for uncovering how our sense of smell works. They uncovered 1,000 smell receptors in the human nose, and discovered that each scent activates a unique combination of odor receptors. These powerful receptors act like a code, which is how we can distinguish and remember thousands of different smells.  

Scents bypass typical brain pathways, and unlike sights or sounds, scents go directly to the limbic system, hitting both the hippocampus (crucial for storing new memories) and the amygdala (where new memories are formed).  The Proust Effect, named after Marcel Proust a famous French novelist, describes how even a faint smell (like bread baking) can bring back vivid, emotional memories from childhood or loved ones. Proust proposed that olfactory memories were even more powerful than vision or sound. 

Scent is the only sense we have that is directly connected between smelling something and the part of our brain that stores our emotions and our memories,” says Aera master perfumer & VP of Fragrance, Sandra Barvaux. Like a timestamp on our past experiences, scent helps imprint memory onto our neurological pathways. 

Scent-Evoked Nostalgia and Well-being 

While centuries ago, nostalgia was considered a psychological disorder, there can be genuinely positive psychological implications when certain triggering scents are evoked. Common nostalgic scents like fresh-baked cookies, cinnamon, vanilla, or a particular perfume or cologne can initiate feelings of warm comfort, helping the body to relax, and maybe even allowing for deeper, untroubled breath. 

 In one study out of Virginia Commonwealth University, Department of Psychology researchers found that “scent-evoked nostalgia predicted higher levels of positive affect, self-esteem, self-continuity, optimism, social connectedness and meaning in life.” 

 Our well-being having a direct relationship to what we process as a smell makes perfect sense when considering ancestral roots. For early humans, smell was a matter of survival, guiding them toward food and away from danger. Smell receptors and instincts were honed by the odors of daily life which were directly tied to the difference between life and death.