Scents of Space: How Fragrance Instantly Uplifts Your Mood and Mindfulness at Home

Original article posted at Dwell by Anna Dorothea Ker.

In interior design, the power of smell is often overlooked. Three experts share strategies for using scent to shape and enhance your experience of home.

As the pandemic continues to keep us confined indoors, even the subtlest elements of the home environment take on a new importance. It’s vital to engage all the senses in interior design, but we tend to privilege sight (color, form) and touch (textiles, soft furnishings) while neglecting smell.

Yet, scent’s potential to reduce stress, increase focus, enhance memory, and uplift our mood—benefits we could all use right now—are powerful. A Nobel Prize-winning study found that the average person has around 1,000 olfactory genes in their body, and can recall around 10,000 different smells. Further research suggests that 75% of our daily emotions are influenced by smell, while our mood may improve by 40% after smelling a pleasant fragrance.

So how to make the most of this extraordinary sensibility? Three experts in the field share the role of scent in their lives, offering ideas for incorporating fragrance into our domestic spaces for a more relaxed and pleasurable everyday.