BEARDSMAN OIL CO EDITORIAL
Why Smells Bring Back the Days We Miss
By Jason Dorr | Founder of Beardsman Oil Co.
It does not arrive as a fact. You do not think, “Ah yes, I remember that kitchen.” The kitchen simply shows up. The light is right. The air feels right. People who have been gone a very long time are suddenly nearby.
Mine is Earl Grey. Sort of.
Aunt Hazel’s kitchen
What it really smells like is my Aunt Hazel’s kitchen during the summer of 1985.
Hazel E. Manzer lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts. She was born around 1909 and came from a generation that could find a second use for damn near anything. She hung used tea bags up to dry so she could use them again. I was five years old, and that was simply one of the facts of her kitchen. The cups went here. The spoons went there. The tea bags apparently went on the clothesline.
I remember the tea, but I am sure that is only part of what I am smelling. There was the house itself, whatever had been cooked recently, the summer air coming through the windows, old cabinets, clean laundry, and Hazel. The brain does not keep these things in neatly labeled jars. It gives the whole mixture back at once.
So when I say Earl Grey takes me back, I do not mean it reminds me of a cup of tea. It smells like being five years old in Aunt Hazel’s kitchen.
Why a smell can do that
Smell has an unusually close working relationship with the parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory.
Odor molecules reach receptor cells high inside the nose. Those cells send signals to the olfactory bulb at the base of the brain. From there, the information moves into a network that includes the piriform cortex and areas closely connected with the amygdala, the entorhinal cortex, and the hippocampal memory system.[1]
You will sometimes hear that smell skips the usual route and goes straight to the memory center. That is close enough for conversation and too sloppy for an article. The brain does not have one memory drawer, and the hippocampus is not a filing cabinet. Smell does, however, enter a system where odor, emotion, learning, and context are very closely wired together.
There is another difference. Try to remember the kitchen you knew when you were five. You may have to search for it. You picture the house, find the doorway, place the table, and slowly rebuild the room. A smell can retrieve the same kind of memory before you have consciously started looking. Researchers describe that distinction as generative retrieval versus direct retrieval.[2]
Deliberate recall can feel like searching an endless archive. A familiar smell sometimes seems to find the door on its own.
The research matches the strange feeling of it. In one study, ninety-three older adults were given odors, pictures, or words as memory cues. The odor-cued memories tended to come from earlier in life. They had been thought about less often and carried a stronger feeling of being brought back in time.[3] Another study found that people experienced personal memories as more emotional when an odor prompted them than when they saw a visual version of the same cue.[4]
Odor memories are not automatically more accurate. Smell is not a little film projector hidden in your nose. The details can still be wrong, and plenty of smells bring back nothing at all. What the research does support is the thing people recognize immediately: an odor can produce an old, emotional, oddly complete-feeling memory with very little warning.
Proust and everybody else
There is a respectable literary name for this. The Proust phenomenon comes from a passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. His narrator tastes a madeleine dipped in tea and a piece of childhood returns without being called for. Taste and smell work together in flavor, and the madeleine became shorthand for involuntary sensory memory.
Most of us have a less French version.
Chlorine can contain an entire childhood of public pools. Sunscreen can still belong to one particular beach, decades later.
Perfume and aftershave are almost unfair. Somebody passes you in a store and, for half a second, a person who is gone is back.
Sawdust is not one smell if you have spent enough of your life in cabinet shops. Pine, oak, walnut, plywood, and MDF all have their own character. The warm smell of a shop at the end of the day is very different from the sharp warning that somebody is leaning on a dull blade. Either one can pull up a place, a job, and the people who worked beside you.
Chlorine, cut grass, sawdust, an old car, sunscreen and wood smoke: ordinary smells with an unexpected amount of history attached.
The part I cannot stop thinking about
We usually notice all of this backward. A smell appears today and surprises us with something from twenty, thirty, or forty years ago.
A day does not have to feel important while you are living it for its smells to become attached to it. Sometimes you only learn what a period meant after it is gone.
Turn it around.
What you are smelling today may be becoming one of those smells right now.
The Tuesday morning you are living does not feel historic. Neither did an afternoon in Aunt Hazel’s kitchen in 1985. You do not know which ordinary days you are going to miss someday.
You do not know which dinner with your family you will someday wish you could sit through one more time, including the argument and the overcooked food. You do not know which summer will become that summer. The crappy first apartment you cannot wait to leave may eventually smell like the happiest beginning of your life.
Your child falling asleep against you is only Tuesday night until there are no more Tuesday nights like it. Friends around a fire are not holding a ceremony. Everybody is just there. That is how most of life looks while it is happening.
The scents surrounding ordinary life can become attached to people, places and entire periods of our lives.
Choose what accompanies you
I make beard oil. I am not going to tell you that wearing a fragrance strengthens your memory or guarantees that you will preserve a period of your life. That would be bullshit, and you should be suspicious of anybody who tells you otherwise.
The simpler idea is defensible. Scents become associated with people, places, emotions, and stretches of time because they are present while life is happening. Repetition gives those associations more opportunities to form. What survives is up to the brain, which has never taken instructions particularly well.
A grooming product is interesting because it is repetitive and close. You use it near your face. Your partner smells it. Your children may come to recognize it as part of you. You put it on and then go to work, kiss somebody goodbye, drive somewhere, fix something, raise children, start over, or waste an entirely forgettable afternoon.
Years later, an old bottle in a drawer may contain more than anyone meant to put in it.
A few drops. Work it in. Comb it through.
That is my reason for saying this: choose the scents that accompany your life. No guarantee. No claim that you can manufacture nostalgia. Just choose something you would not mind finding again someday.
The scent that started it all
I founded Beardsman Oil Co. in 2009. Earl Grey was the flagship scent that helped launch the company, and it remains one of the originals today.
At the time, I thought I was developing a fragrance. Looking back, I was also turning an old sensory memory into something I could hold in my hand. Twenty-four years after those afternoons with Hazel, some part of that kitchen ended up in a bottle.
The name Earl Grey gives people a familiar way into it. Bergamot and tea are in there. The thing underneath them is less exact. It is Hazel, the house, summer light, and a damp tea bag hanging up to dry because throwing it away after one cup would apparently have been reckless.
A childhood memory became a fragrance. That fragrance now accompanies lives I’ll never see.
What happened after the bottle left
Once I put Earl Grey into a bottle and began selling it, the scent stopped belonging only to me.
Other men wore it while their own lives happened. One may have worn it while dating the woman he eventually married. Another wore it when his children were little, while starting a business, moving into his first house, taking a trip, or sitting around a fire with friends.
Most probably wore it while getting ready for work through periods that seemed completely unremarkable. Those may be the ones that matter later. Memory has never shown much respect for what we considered important at the time.
I know what went into the bottle. I have no idea what gathered around it afterward.
Maybe twenty years from now, someone will smell something similar and suddenly find himself back in a year he never expected to miss. The room will change. People will return. Some ordinary morning he had no reason to preserve will be waiting for him.
To him, it will not really smell like Earl Grey either.
It will smell like the life he was living.
RESEARCH NOTES
Sources for factual review
1. Zhou G, Lane G, Cooper SL, Kahnt T, Zelano C. Characterizing functional pathways of the human olfactory system. eLife. 2019;8:e47177. Source
2. Larsson M, Willander J, Karlsson K, Arshamian A. Olfactory LOVER: behavioral and neural correlates of autobiographical odor memory. Frontiers in Psychology. 2014;5:312. Source
3. Willander J, Larsson M. Smell your way back to childhood: autobiographical odor memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. 2006;13(2):240–244. Source
4. Herz RS, Schooler JW. A naturalistic study of autobiographical memories evoked by olfactory and visual cues. American Journal of Psychology. 2002;115(1):21–32. Source