Every year my parents would drive us to the beach house at the Jersey Shore for our summer ritual of sun and fun.  As soon as we turned off the Garden State Parkway and headed down Route 35,  I would be overwhelmed by the smell of salt and sea and how the air grew damp from the surrounding water. It is unique to the Jersey Shore which is sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay.  Even now when I take the drive, the smell evokes memories of summer romance, my parents, my siblings, my first job and the joy of unstructured time.  

Our sense of smell is the only sense that is directly linked to memory and there is a growing awareness of the power of scent.  Smell plays a large part in our lives. Pheromones, or hormone-like substances, are as individual as we are. Just as no two people are alike, no two people smell alike. Pheromones are our own private fingerprint and influence our choice in mates.  Aromatherapists have contended for years that a scent can affect people in profound ways and scientists are now trying to find the hard evidence of those connections.  For example, they say the scent of the grapefruit can take years off your age!

I started to reflect again about the power of scent when recent guests gave us a very cool house gift –a candle from Le Labo Fragrances, a London and New York based perfumery.  www.lelabofragrances.com.   At Le Labo their goal “is to help you ‘open your nostrils ” , as they state, “in the same way a good book opens their readers’ eyes to life.  Philosophers speak about “men with stitched-up eyelids’ when referring to people who are blind to the basics of existence”. They believe “most of us live with stitched-up nostrils, having grown up in a world where smells are hidden away, and our olfactory senses left to wither”.

Le Labo wants us ” to breathe in deeply and take in all that life has to offer”.  I agree.  Thank you,  Cindy and Stephen for helping us broaden our “olfactory palette” with Santal 26–the scent is phenomenal!