Bottling a Feeling
Crafting the Scents of Complex Emotions
A friend recently asked me a question: “how do we make smells that go along with feelings?” specifically “more complex states like isolation or overwhelm.”
It’s perhaps a harder question to answer than it sounds.
Scent has the power to move us emotionally. Most people have experienced how quickly a smell can pull up a memory or change the way a room feels. But reliably designing a smell that produces a specific emotion is much harder than it might seem. Cultural context plays a role. The same scent can evoke entirely different moods, associations, or even colors depending on where someone grew up. Personal experience adds another layer. Our emotional responses to smell accumulate over time, through memory and environment.
There are still some patterns. Controlled studies show that pleasant odors tend to produce positive affect, while unpleasant ones heighten alertness and vigilance. Large fragrance companies like Symrise have spent years building databases that track these responses. Panels smell individual materials and record how pleasant, irritating, calming, or stimulating they find them. These hedonic databases are essentially emotional maps of smell, tools that in theory allow perfumers to design fragrances that lean toward particular moods across a broad audience.
This idea overlaps with what people think of as aromatherapy. Lavender for calm. Citrus for energy. The appeal is obvious, but the scientific evidence for reliable emotional effects is limited. The firmer ground sits in sensory psychology, hedonic perception research, and a quieter but fascinating area: human chemosignals.
When the question came up, my mind went first not to perfume but to body odor. Humans constantly release chemical signals through sweat and skin secretions, mixtures of volatile compounds that carry information about our internal state, often below conscious awareness. Researchers tend to avoid calling them pheromones, because that word implies a single molecule triggering a fixed behavior. In humans the reality is more subtle.
Fear is the most studied example. When people experience fear, their body odor changes, and experiments suggest that others who smell those signals become slightly more vigilant. I explored this in an earlier post, but I keep returning to it as I think about other emotions. If fear can spread chemically, what about stress, joy, disgust, or grief? Could certain molecules subtly encourage avoidance, relaxation, or social openness?
I think about this on the subway. Packed train cars full of commuters carrying the quiet anxieties of work, money, and relationships. Everyone breathing the same air. It’s easy to imagine how the chemistry of stress might accumulate in a space like that, feeding a shared atmosphere of tension that nobody consciously registers. Deodorant, clothing, perfume, ventilation, all of it complicates the signal. But the underlying mechanism of unease persists.
Emotion can also leave lasting imprints in scent memory. Researchers have documented cases where people recognize a friend's scent from a worn garment, the smell carrying the imprint of a shared moment of stress or excitement. Rachel Herz has written extensively on how smell binds memory and emotion together in ways that remain vivid long after other details fade. The scent of a person is never just neutral. It accumulates meaning.
Which brings me back to isolation. Or overwhelm. Or any of the states that resist easy naming.
Asking a perfumer to bottle isolation is similar to asking a painter to depict loneliness. The feeling doesn’t reside in a single material. It emerges from the relationships between them. If I think about composing isolation, I might start with space, nonplaces in the sense Marc Augé meant: airports, parking structures, corridors without destination. I might consider moments of loss and the scents attached to those memories. Another perfumer might build something based on perceptual distance, combining materials that feel very far apart from each other.
Science gives us clues about how smell interacts with the brain and body. Art shapes those clues into something that can actually be felt. The gap between those two things is where perfumers live.
I’m going to spend some time with this, drafting what isolation might actually smell like. I’m curious how other perfumers and scent artists would approach it, and which other emotions they would try to compose.
References
Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe, Verso, 1995.
Dougherty, M. “The Scent of War, Part II: The Smell of Fear.” Scent Made Digital, mxmdougherty.substack.com.
Herz, Rachel S. “The Role of Odor-Evoked Memory in Psychological and Physiological Health.” Brain Sciences, vol. 6, no. 3, 2016, p. 22, doi:10.3390/brainsci6030022. (Open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/6/3/22)