how does our nose remember?
I’ve always been amazed by how strongly scents stay with us… since forever.
Sometimes a scent hits me and suddenly I’m eating breakfast before school, drinking my morning kakaó with the light shining through the kitchen window. I even remember exactly that High by Lighthouse Family is playing on the radio in the background.
Or I smell my first-ever perfume: Lacoste Pour Homme and I’m 14 again.
It’s 2003 and we’re going to watch Matrix Revolutions, but before the cinema my parents took me to a perfume store and bought me my very first fragrance. The birthday feeling, eating at Pizza Hut, the movies, and 30 ml of millennial nostalgia in a bottle.
I think that was my accidental introduction to the perfume world. What I didn’t know back then is that there’s a biological reason behind all of this. Smell is the only sense that goes straight into the limbic system, the part of the brain that handles emotion, motivation, instinct and memory. Every other sense takes the longer, more logical route: passing first through the thalamus, where the brain processes and “filters” information before it becomes conscious.
But olfaction is when we feel first and think second.
That’s why scents shift our mood instantly, calm or disturb us without explanation, trigger physical reactions (hello instant aura migraine with nausea from Paco Rabanne - One Million and half the synthetic oudy Hombre Nomade clones out there), and influence our decisions long before we’re aware of it.
As Hungarian perfumer Zsolt Zólyomi says:
“a good perfume is a dangerous weapon: the last layer on your skin when everything else is gone, and something that quietly shapes how others see you.”
All of this happens before the brain even tries to analyse what we’re smelling. And then comes memory.
Smell connects to the hippocampus so directly that a scent doesn’t just remind you, it replays the emotional state you had the first time you encountered it. Someone’s coat in a hug, the pines around Christmas time, the smell of rain on concrete, after a super warm summer day. Even they’re simple, they stay deep inside. Not because they’re dramatic, but because your nervous system treated them like emotional events.
For me, this explains a lot about how I experience perfume. Why I read about notes and ingredients when I can’t sleep at night. Why I go back to try perfumes again and again before buying them. Why my intuition (or what feels like intuition or my limbic system) often works better than any review or marketing. And maybe why blind buys turn out right more often than they should.
When I choose a perfume, I’m not choosing a bottle or a brand. I’m choosing a potential emotional state. A small, quiet shift in atmosphere. A story or a memory I haven’t lived yet or the version of me I lived that moment and maybe I already forgot. The body seems to recognise that long before the mind does.
That’s the quiet magic of scent.
It remembers you, even when you don’t remember yourself.
