If you don’t want to see, you can avert your gaze or close the image; if you don’t want to hear, you can stuff your ears or mute the sound; but if you don’t want to smell, it’s harder to escape a scent even by pinching your nose.
Smelling the forest’s fragrances during a spring morning stroll, the rain starting to fall on the pavement in the heaviness of a late-afternoon summer, the coffee that runs each morning in the kitchen, a lovingly prepared dish simmering on the stove, or a sewer gas rising… And there come memories rising, sensations awakening, emotions expressing themselves, impulsive reactions triggering, from the mere act of this olfactory experience. And often we aren’t even aware of it!
Olfactory power indeed exists and can influence our mood and our behavior. And that is the science of aromachology, and olfactotherapy, the gentle therapy that stems from it. Decryption.
Aromachology and Aromatherapy, What’s the Difference?
The terms are close, but they do not denote the same thing. Aromatherapy can be defined as the art of healing using essential oils. It has existed since antiquity, since the Egyptians and then the Greeks and Romans used plants for healing. However, the term aromatherapy as we use it today appeared in 1937, in the work of French chemist René-Maurice Gattefossé Aromatherapy, Essential Oils, Plant Hormones.
The aromachology, for its part, is much newer. The term was used for the first time in 1982. If aromatherapy heals through plants, aromachology, it studies the influence of odors on behavior, mood, and more generally on our psyche.
Aromachology – How Odor Can Influence Behavior
The influence of odor on behavior can be explained by the fact that smell is the only one of our five senses that does not directly access our conscious mind. In other words, when we breathe in a fragrance, the olfactory message is perceived by our subconscious. It does not pass through “consciousness” first, but goes initially to the limbic system. This part of the brain is the seat of our emotions – aggression, fear, pleasure, etc. – playing a crucial role in our behavior.
It is also in this part of the brain that memory forms, which might explain why memories surface merely by breathing in a scent, as Proust so beautifully described with the madeleine that awakens tender childhood memories for him.
The information resulting from the scents we breathe is processed by our brain without us being conscious of it. The scent triggers physiological reactions and a response that can be positively pleasurable (smelling fresh-baked bread, for example) or negatively prompting flight (smelling a sewer odor).
The odor not only triggers a behavior, but it also triggers a specific reaction in our body. For example, lemon and peppermint have a stimulating effect, nutmeg, sage, and lavender calm, jasmine, rosemary and cinnamon aid concentration …
The Role of Odors in Our Pursuit of Well-Being
Fragrances play a role in our psyche, in the regulation of the body’s major vital functions, and even in our cognitive faculties.
In Japan, for instance, where people have long understood the powerful influence of a single scent, companies do not hesitate to diffuse perfume in offices, timed to the day. In the morning, employees can breathe the refreshing scent of lemon, which has stimulating properties, and in the afternoon, floral scents help them focus more easily.
Some scents also help to soothe minds and make the atmosphere more zen, such as lavender, known for its soothing properties.
Cosmetics incorporate these findings into their product formulations. Essential oils in a cream act through skin application, but the fragrance they release matters just as much. The wellness market uses what we know about the influence of odors by diffusing numerous fragrances in spas or salons.
The role of aromachology can also be preventive. Some scents indeed help restore the body’s balance by fighting fatigue, for example. Fragrances can also help eliminate nervous tensions or even release functional blockages, much like osteopathy.
Healing with Odors Through Olfactotherapy
Olfactotherapy is a psycho-energetic therapy using odors and essential oils to help the patient find and heal past traumas.
This form of therapy is based on the strong evocative power of odors that could allow us to rise to the origin of suffering: healing the present by understanding the past, in a sense. Olfactotherapy could help, for example, to overcome an addiction.
The patient is invited to fully experience the emotions tied to an odor, whether positive or negative. Once the emotions are identified, the olfactotherapist [olfactotherapist] can move on to the relaxation and breathing phase, as a hypnotherapist would.
Thus, it can determine the root cause of the addiction and pair it with the appropriate scent. The patient can leave the session with a “remedy” vial containing the scent they can breathe whenever they feel the need and until they are completely freed from their addiction.
The power of odors is drawing renewed interest in illnesses linked to changes in our lifestyle and environment, such as pollution.
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