Illustration: Lucie Langston
How to Make Your Home Smell Better—Forever
Carefully selecting a signature scent for your house will make a memorable emotional experience for yourself and your guests.
When you light a scented candle in your home, the point shouldn’t be to simply create a fragrance. It should be to conjure a feeling.
“The molecules that impart fragrance stimulate the olfactory bulb at the top of our nose,” says Dr. Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, medical doctor, and author of The Source, a bestselling book on cognitive science. “The olfactory nerve then transmits this impulse to the part of the brain where smell is located,” or the olfactory complex. The latter is part of the limbic system, located in the temporal lobe near the hippocampus, where memory and emotion are connected.