A familiar perfume on a stranger, rain on warm pavement, smoke from a fire, a flower you haven't smelled since childhood. A scent can transport us somewhere else entirely, sometimes before we have even consciously recognised what we're smelling.

Our sense of smell has an incredible relationship with memory and emotion. A scent can remind us of a person, a place or a moment we haven't thought about for years, and with that memory can come the feeling attached to it.

Sometimes we remember the feeling before the memory.

The evocative nature of smell

Smell is closely connected with the parts of our brain involved in memory and emotion, which helps explain why our response to scent can feel so immediate and instinctive.

A fragrance might make us feel comforted without knowing why. Another might bring an unexpected feeling of longing, happiness or nostalgia. The faintest trace of something familiar can bring back a memory with surprising clarity.

When we first began exploring the ideas behind SUPERNATURAL, we wrote:

The evocative nature of smell conjures imagery and memory.

It was this thinking that, in 2019, led us to explore something we called Consequential Aromachology, one of the earliest ideas behind the philosophy of SUPERNATURAL.

Consequential Aromachology

Aromachology is the study of the relationship between scent and human psychology, and how fragrance can influence things like mood, emotion, cognition and behaviour.

We were interested in what could happen beyond that initial response.

If scent can invoke a memory, and that memory can awaken an emotion, what might happen next?

A scent might remind us of a time we felt safe, loved or completely ourselves. It might reconnect us with someone, somewhere or something important to us. It might shift the way we feel in that moment, even slightly.

We called this Consequential Aromachology, the idea that the emotional response created through scent could have a consequence beyond the scent itself.

Scent invokes memory. Memory awakens emotion. Emotion has the capacity to transform.

Memory is more than remembering

Memory isn't always something we consciously go looking for. Sometimes it finds us.

It can be the smell of someone's home, a particular flower, the ocean, incense burning, the perfume someone we loved used to wear. We smell something and suddenly find ourselves somewhere we haven't been for years.

This relationship between scent, memory and emotion is part of what makes fragrance so interesting to us as a medium for ritual.

When we return to a scent with a particular intention, the scent itself can begin to become a reminder of that intention.

Something we can come back to.

Scent with intention

This idea has stayed with us and has become part of the foundation of our Ritual Oils, botanical scent blends created around an intention and infused with ancient symbolism and divine energetic intention.

The symbol gives meaning to the intention. The botanicals give it scent. The ritual is simply to pause, set your intention and inhale.

Maybe what we're remembering isn't always something to leave in our past.

It might be something we need to reignite in the present.

Our courage. Our connection to ourselves and to one another. Our capacity to begin again. The strength within us.

Memory has a scent.

And perhaps scent can help us remember.