I have been thinking of the use of aromatherapy and use of essential oils for well being and healing”. ‘Therapy’ is the key word for simply nailing the colours to the mast in using essential oils for their powerful inherent properties.

And then I have thought about the word ’odour’. Odour and it’s psychological impact on the limbic system.

Odour. Nicer word than Smell. ‘He/She smells nice’. But also smell as smell in the ‘senses’ terminology. The act of ’sniffing’. You realise that the sense of smell truly matters enormously to well being. Studied the importance of smell as a nurse. And Boy! It is a generous gift to feeling actual well being because of it’s links to happier times. Also, in some patient’s cases, loss of taste and smell due to Covid impacted harshly. Loss of ability to smell odour or taste food? It changes everything.

Odour? Oh so many sources and combinations. Either from the natural beauty of, for example, a lavender bush, brushed herb leaf, mown grass or studying collective tissue rose petals. The way your Grandparents or Parents smelled. Bonfire night, Christmas, Halloween. Or. Brewing coffee or aromatic herbal teas. Or. A meal that, whilst cooking, provides salivation in anticipation. Or. A new born child. Or the days of holidays filled with contentment content. Millions of ‘Or’s’. They all infiltrate the limbic system and add perfection to our lives. Even from a bottle of manufactured perfume or eau de cologne bought because the first glance at ever present smell says ‘This is Mine!’ Bought when I was……….. Add your own stories.

Odour? It all adds in synergy to the memories of? For example. A holiday spent and the reminder of local complicated scents. A cafe or bar visited. The room you stayed at. The local air. A whiff of individual cigar or cigarette smoke, sea salty air mixed with heat and sun tan oil, new bottles of bourbon never tried but poured and aromatic, a bought out there local towel thrown onto the everyday lounger that soaks up the personal body collective odour from your own holiday self and, when opening the suitcase back home, transports you back. This brought back imagined or reality perfumery that allows us to infiltrate memories from a perfection of two weeks spent somewhere that forever lives in our memories. And a simple bottle of cologne can also spark a train of welcome comforts.

So many individual collective odours have impact over us all. Decades upon decades loving our own fave fragrances. The simplicity of an odour that shakes our core. Each unexpected visit? Like Cedarwood pencils sharpened that shufty us back to wide eyed innocence in childhood. Our first wax crayon scribblings on pure white paper. Odours? They are as complicated to our limbic system as the synergies of each mixed aroma against another aroma involved in the study of aromatherapy.

As Kipling wrote. “Smells are surer than sounds or sights to make your heart-strings crack”.

Odour? It is individualistic. Extremely personal. It is comforting. These photographic images above of bottled splendour? Each individual one has a plethora of memories attached to my specific past and current times in life. And I bet you have your own collective that are as important to yourselves.