The importance of your nose!

Sense experiences have many facets.  The sense of smell impacts us profoundly on many levels.  Some smells remind us either positively or negatively of a past encounter with a person or place.  As the cooler days and nights of Autumn approach we anticipate the smell of spiced hot apple cider, pungent pies and musty leaves.  Winter brings us the smells of coniferous trees, roasted chestnuts and candles.  In Spring we experience smell overwhelm, flowers, bushes and freshly mowed grass.  And what is a typical summer smell?  Hay and grilling.  There are smells that attract us to food or tell us if something is good or not.  Smelling is an important diagnostic tool in Chinese medicine.  And sometimes the smell of someone we hold dear is an important part of who they are.  Scented oils and perfumes can intensify that smell.  And we make surprisingly many judgements based on what our nose tells us!

    Vanilla is an old time favorite of mine.  On my recent trip to Italy I found the following quote on a bottle of Vanilla perfume which captures many of the delightful aspects of Vanilla.  It also shows how a smell can open up a whole world of imagination.

“The sweet scent of Vanilla: The invisible thread of nostalgia.  Who could ever forget the fairs with the call of their roundabouts, that white vanilla cloud of candy floss, the vanilla ice-cream, the stalls where the sugar cooked, turned brown, became caramelized to stick pine-seeds and almonds together and then turned crisp, or the loose sugar that was spun into a long shiny string and then cut into “hard pieces”?  “Go on and cry, little children, Mummy will buy it for you!” the vanilla-scented sweet seller would shout.

Like a Gossamer dress it wraps round you, invisible, and yet is so real that it covers to give just a mysterious hint of things, of thoughts never entirely revealed that are held out like budding roses and that retreat like shy Acacias.  I would like to reveal who you are by entering furtively into your perfume.  I would finally know if your Vanilla is nostalgia for that lost paradise or a promise of intense love that has yet to come.  Let me find a place in your Vanilla Perfume: Invisible cloud of youth”.
(Profumo alla Vaniglia, Speziali Fiorentini, L’Essenza di Firenze)

Try for yourself to describe a smell that you love.  You will quickly find that you move into the space of imagination.  Smell is both illusive and very real.

The essential oils I use in my practice work deeply into the organism both through the nose as well as through the skin.  Imagine lying on my massage table thinking of lavender fields, roses or arnica flowers!


~Claudia