Move over, supplements — today’s beauty brands are trying to harness the power of scent to boost your wellbeing. Celebrities like Charlotte Tilbury and Bella Hadid are championing these fragrances that they say can boost your mood. But are these claims backed by science? While the connection between scent and emotions is well-researched, whether a perfume can cause someone to experience a specific emotion is less clear, neuroscientists tell TODAY.
com. In the fragrance market, several brands are now positioning their products as more than just pleasant scents. For example, model Bella Hadid has a fragrance line called Orebella, which she claims can “boost both mood and aura,” according to .
The collection includes three “aura-elevating scents” using essential oils, which Hadid says have helped her feel in charge of who she is and her surroundings, . Cosmetics brand Clinique has its own wellness fragrance too, “Clinique Happy,” which claims 97% of people feel happy when they smell the perfume, according to the . The product is supposed to contain an “uplifting blend of ingredients that spark joy.
” To make the perfume, Clinique "commissioned a third party neurosensory study to measure the conscious and subconscious emotional responses of women who demonstrated purchase intent," according to its website. Beauty company Charlotte Tilbury also recently started selling "The Charlotte Tilbury Fragrance Collection of Emotion," which features six perfumes, each designed to "boost your chosen mood" and "proven by user trials to make you feel specific emotions," according to . The collection includes scents that represent what the brand describes as six fundamental emotions: love, happiness, seduction, energy, empowerment and calm.
Charlotte Tilbury, Orebella and Clinique did not respond to TODAY.com's request for comment. So, how are perfume makers able to make such claims? Some — , according to its website — have relied on expertise from International Flavors & Fragrances Inc.
(IFF), which creates and supplies flavors and fragrances used across industries. As part of IFF's program studying scent and wellness, the company conducted two sets of consumer surveys, IFF scientist Céline Manetta, who helped make the Charlotte Tilbury line, tells TODAY.com.
In the first survey, people smell a fragrance and report how they feel about it. In the second, they smell a fragrance, but instead of sharing how they feel, their brain activity is recorded. This data then feeds into IFF's AI tool, which "is able to detect the best combination within the compounds tested that will help to drive and even boost specific emotions," Manetta explains.
For instance, if a fragrance aims to promote happiness, perfumers can consult the database for “single ingredients that are associated to happiness,” according to Manetta. Manetta says the database currently includes information on over 6,000 tested scents that, when analyzed by IFF's algorithm, can produce 500,000 combinations of ingredients that perfumers can use to create their products. Smell isn't just about enjoying pleasant fragrances — it's also connected to our emotions and wellbeing.
To understand why a particular scent may impact our mood, it's important to look at the science behind how we process smells, Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard University, tells TODAY.com.
When you encounter a smell, it starts with the olfactory epithelium, a sheet of neurons located at the top of your nose. These neurons have receptors that detect the chemicals released by the object you're smelling. "Smells are collections of chemicals that come off of objects in the world.
When you take a sniff, you’re inhaling all of these chemicals at once," Datta explains. "The way your brain knows what you’re smelling is because your nose contains an olfactory epithelium." Once these receptors pick up the smell, they send electrical signals to the olfactory bulb, the initial processing center for smells, located at the base of your brain.
From there, the signals are sent directly to the brain's amygdala and hippocampus, two regions involved in emotion and memory. , a neuroscientist and expert on the psychology of smell, notes that this connection is why smells can have an impact on our emotions. "The amygdala is directly responsible for processing emotion and emotional memory, while the hippocampus deals with associative learning and various forms of memory," Herz says.
Herz explains that this neural pathway is fundamental to why our experiences with scent are so intertwined with our emotions. "A smell becomes a tag for a particular experience," Herz says. "For example, if you encounter a scent while experiencing a specific emotion, that scent can later evoke the same emotional response.
" "Smell is not just about detecting odors, it’s about how these odors are linked to emotional experiences,” she adds. While scent can trigger emotions, Herz says there are limitations to how much perfume can impact your mental health. "I cannot just give you any old scent and say, smell this and it’s going to have any impact on you whatsoever," Herz says.
"The scent act like a proxy, but if that scent is connected for that individual in meaning and emotion in the right way." "It’s not at all like some magic formula," she adds. "In order for lavender to relax you, when you smell the lavender I give you, it has to have been that the scent is connected to an emotional meaning for you and emotional impact for you," Herz continues.
"If it's a case that I've never smelled lavender, it's going to have no effect on me." The placebo effect also plays a significant role in how we perceive smells, Herz says: "Even if there is no scent present, simply telling (someone) that there’s a smell can make them behave and feel as if that smell is actually there." "So, from a branding perspective, when we buy a product and it says 'a scented, relaxing, soothing body lotion,' that goes a very far way in guiding the person who's experiencing it in perceiving what they're smelling and how it's supposed to be perceived," she adds.
That said, Datta's research shows that smelling something pleasurable, regardless of the specific ingredients, can absolutely boost mental health. For example, "when you lose your sense of smell, that can be extraordinarily disjointing. You feel a little bit lost in the world and you can’t quite right yourself," he explains.
"It kind of reveals to us that a lot of our emotional tone day to day is about the smells in our environment tickling our amygdales in just the right way to offer us the reassurance that we know where we are and that we’re in a safe place." "Smell is an essential part of our lives and it doesn't just give us pleasure, but it really maintains our psychological well-being," he adds. Ella is an editorial intern at TODAY.
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