Seasonal Scenting

When people visit our homes we want it to smell “good”—the amount of air freshener sold during the holidays, particularly of holiday scents like cinnamon-y ones, indicates that we may actually be desperate to make sure our homes have appealing smells over the holidays.

The scents you add during the holidays can make your home a better place to live all year round.

That cinnamon smell, for example, can be particularly handy to have around if creative thinking is important to you (and for most of us, it is, whether we realize it or not—have you tried to reason with a teenager recently, for instance). Rigorous research has indicated that even the faintest whiffs of a cinnamon-vanilla smell boost our creativity—and in the Western world, no smell is probably more linked to holiday good times with family and friends.

When you’re scenting, at the end of the year or any time, subtlety is your friend.  Too much and people feel manipulated (too too much can also make any of us feel sickened).

When you’re fine-tuning how much scent there is in a room, start by adding the littlest bit—the effects noted here ensue when people don’t consciously perceive a smell and when their nose have become bored with it, gone “nose-blind” to it.  Ask a friend or more over and ask them what they think of “what you’ve done to the place.”  If people spontaneously talk about the scent you’ve added, reduce the amount present and have over another set of friends.  When no one mentions a smell, ask people if they can identify the scent in your home; when only about half of those present can, you’ve hit the scent “sweet spot.”

All the scent-thinking-behaviour links noted in this article have been derived from rigorous, scientific investigations and may or may not align with aromatherapy traditions.

Beyond cinnamon, more holiday scents to consider include:

• “Good” smells in general, however, you and your comrades define them, boost mood.
• The scent of orange fruits makes us feel less anxious. So do floral odours such as jasmine and hyacinth and vanilla.
• The odours of lemon, mango, and lavender relax humans.A bonus:  smelling lavender also boosts our trust in others nearby (well, that’s usually a good thing).
• Smelling rosemary helps our memories work well (which again, is usually a good thing, but a less positive outcome when your feuding cousins all accept your invitation to holiday brunch). The odours of common garden sage and peppermint have the same effect on us.
• Our mental performance gets a boost when we smell lemon and if we’re doing something that’s mentally boring peppermint can be good to smell (if you send out holiday cards that you address by hand, sip peppermint tea).
• We sleep more efficiently (deeply) when we smell jasmine and our mental performance gets a corresponding boost for the next day.
• If you need to get some sort of physical work done, putting up those holiday decorations, for example, smell grapefruit, tangerine, peppermint, or eucalyptus. To keep working at that decorating more effectively, and to feel less tired when you stop, it’s good to smell peppermint.
• We feel thinner when smelling lemon and heavier when smelling vanilla—set your party menu accordingly. A related effect: when we smell a scent we link to warmth (such as cedarwood) we eat fewer calories and when we smell an odour we link to coolness (such as eucalyptus) we eat more.

• Want to help people not smoke at your party: make it smell like peppermint.
• Green apple scent leads to a space seeming larger; if you have a tiny home some green apple air freshener is likely in order. So do odours that bring open spaces to mind, such as the smell of the seashore.
• When a space smells clean to people (and different cultures use varying cleaning products) they behave better there (we’re also better people, fairer and more generous, for example)—take note if your guests are likely to get unruly. We’re also tidier in places that smell clean to us.