Pursuit of Process : CS*01
Making Sense of Scent:
A Tool For Enhancing Our Creative Process
Words: Siân Toolan
To coincide with the launch of CONCEPT(K) - our sensory-based product line - we explored the powerful history and potential of scent, delving into our first-ever product, CS*01, and the first of the five senses: smell. True to our ethos, we’re sharing what we’ve learned through the process of developing incense cones, with unique insight from Cremate London’s founder Junior Adesanya. Investigating the science, psychology and ritual of smell, we’re making sense of scent and finding its value in enhancing our creative process.
If you have ever revelled in the scent of fresh rain on concrete, savoured the smell of a new pair of shoes, or felt a sudden rush of emotion at a whiff of a loved one’s perfume, it’s likely that you’re already attune to the powerful effect of scent. In pleasure, mood and memory, smell is an unrivalled sense. Yet, in an era defined by its technological trademarks - the internet, screens and virtual reality - we have become reliant on audio, visual and tactile stimulation, often at the expense of smell and taste. Whilst history is teeming with transformative practices of scent, our deodorised Western culture rarely utilises scent to its full potential: as a tool for expansive living.
Generally speaking, we have an anosmic view of history - we rarely think of the smells of the past because we rarely consider the smells of the present. Though the ineffable quality of scent has found itself invariably linked to spirituality - maintaining a presence in many religious practices today - scent has been employed throughout history in innumerable ways. The Ancient Egyptians are credited as the first perfumers, discovering how to extract scent from natural materials into aromatic resins to be worn or burnt. Their early version of incense was seen as an “embodiment of life and an aromatic manifestation of the gods”, giving thanks to and marking the presence of the divine, but scent was too used in daily life, burnt for pleasure or applied medicinally. Scent has been documented in aiding alertness before battle, masking bodily odours before special occasions, or being employed as a tool for time measurement. In China, as early as the 6th century A.D., incense was sophistically used to demarcate periods of the day, whilst the Japanese art of incense appreciation, Kodo, came into practice in the 16th century. Considered one of the three classical arts, the “way of scent” was defined as the mindful experience of breathing in scents of fine incense, “listening” to its elusive essence, and allowing the aroma to infuse and replenish both body and spirit.
Smell, it seems, is an unfortunate paradox: it is at once our most instinctive sense and our most difficult to describe. It is often thought of as an unsharable, personal, ephemeral thing, impervious to literal and figurative language. So much so that we have to borrow from other sensory vernaculars to describe it: colour, texture and rhythm. The Egyptians had a complete coded language to define scent, much more sufficient than modern English. “Often I’m translating visual references into a scent” says Junior, who established his creative incense brand in 2019. Psychologists have shown that people tend to smell in colour - citrus flavoured scents match their counterparts of orange, yellow, and green - but Junior’s line of work goes far beyond this. Piecing together a client’s fluid or thematic ideas - of atmospheres or feelings - into scents, he’s equipped with not only a complex understanding of smell, but a unique, extensive vocabulary and a heightened awareness that’s lost on most of us. Smell is in fact so enigmatic that the mechanics of scent recognition are still up for debate within the scientific community. The architecture of our olfactory receptors - how a scent is processed from the nose to the brain - has not yet been proven. There are two theories at play, the vibrational model and the shape (or lock and key) model, which is pretty extraordinary in itself. There’s certainly no such debate when it comes to our understanding of sight, hearing, or touch.
A logical beginning for the launch of our product line, what we do know about our sense of smell is that it is the only sense that is fully developed in the womb. It’s also the sense that is the most developed until the age of around 10, and it’s around 10,000 times more sensitive than any of our other senses. It’s also long thought to be the sense that ties us closest to our animal selves as our scent-registering olfactory bulb is directly connected to the limbic system - the same structure present within the brains of primitive mammals. And so true is that for much of early human history - over 100,000 years before the Egyptians - our sense of smell played a crucial functional role in human survival: sourcing shelter, clean food and water by identifying toxins, and attracting a mate. The limbic system protects us in other ways too. It predominantly controls the appropriate social, emotional, or motivational responses to stimuli; meaning it’s the activator of the fight or flight response and the regulator of our blood pressure, heart rate, hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, and sleep cycle.
Thus, the sense of smell is strongly connected with associative and emotional learning, more so than all the other senses. Odours take a direct route to the amygdala and hippocampus of the limbic system, the essential structures in memory, mood, and behaviour. Essentially, smell and emotion are processed as one memory, meaning that much of our scent preferences are designated by childhood experiences. Often, if you dislike a smell enjoyed by others, it’s likely that you’ve attached a negative memory to it, even if you don’t remember the specific details. Regardless, scent is a potential memory portal, capable of evoking vivid and emotional memories, explicated long before neuroscientists by Marcel Proust’s madeleine-triggered sensory reverie in In Search of Lost Time (1913). That’s not to say you’ll experience a particularly visceral or involuntary reaction to every scent - especially those that we interact with daily, like coffee - but neuroscientists have now discovered that we can actively dictate our experiences through smell with daily scent routines.
This phenomenon, known as ‘scent association’, allows us to train the brain to link a specific scent to a certain cognitive state, by repeatedly employing the same aroma for specific tasks. It’s the classical conditioning paradigm of positively influencing human behaviour. “We need sleep, we need routine and scent is an incredible tool for that” explains Junior. If the limbic system sets the tone for our emotional self, appointing certain tasks to certain aromas trains your brain whilst softly guiding the limbic system throughout the day. To put it simply, “it’s habit-building”. While what we eat, when we eat it, and how we schedule our day is thought to affect our productivity and creativity, scent has been explicitly correlated to areas of the brain responsible for focus and motivation. As such, scent routines are not only successful due to familiarity but due to the ability of certain aromas to increase cognitive function, invigorate us, aid relaxation or calm anxiety.The majority of the population uses music to heighten certain emotional states, to put us in a meditative mindset, to focus - think about the mind-altering feeling of white noise or the internet’s beloved LoFi Beats To Study To - scent can be employed in this same way. This makes it a powerful strategic tool for changing our behaviour and moods, and a tool in which we believe in at CONCEPTKICKS.
For CS*01, our instinct was to mirror the materials of our studio in its clean, organised, and concrete state. CONCEPT(K) is a studio but also an experimental laboratory of sorts, and we envisioned a scent that tapped into that image, encouraging us to enter the mindset in the process. It’s fresh and balanced and faintly reminiscent of our ultimate addictive scent: new shoes. Alongside capturing the atmosphere and aesthetic of our space, we considered smells that would come together to stimulate and clear the mind. Opting for deep scents like cinnamon, cedar wood, patchouli and bay leaf, and 100% percent natural oils, CS*01 relaxes and refreshes, relieving anxiety and lowering stress hormone levels. Integrating our incense into our daily creative practice, we’ve fostered a communal environment and thinking, not improving only our mindset but our memory recall. “If you find certain blends to relax to or that give you a boost, you can build a routine to help you enter specific head spaces” and, through repetition and dedication, turn that routine into a ritual. When we’re working from home, or working on the road, we burn CS*01, metaphorically position ourselves in our concrete-clad studio and enter a creative flow state. It is an undeniably conscious act, combining the codified conduct of Kodo and the approach of its modern cousin: aromatherapy.
For us, weaving this scent into our daily rituals is all about living intentionally. By replicating how we’ve visually and ergonomically designed our environment to ensure our happiness, comfort, and relaxation, we’ve set the same intent with scent. You might already appreciate the importance of smell’s role in everyday life - perhaps you experienced the anosmia of coronavirus - and have not only discovered its role in tasting flavour, but its role in pleasure and enhancing your way of living. The digitalisation of scent is, at this point, relatively inconceivable, but scent has a role to play, and a powerful one, in both our daily and creative processes. Scent has the rare ability to rapidly transform a space, from cold to comforting, from empty to full. Scent is proven to classify habits, encourage deep, intuitive thought and provide insight into the self. Though it remains between the real and the intangible, once you start to integrate scent into your day-to-day those two poles move closer together. Before you know it, you’ll become more receptive to new scents and new experiences, fostering a richer sense of smell and a fuller, multi-sensory understanding of life as a whole.
CS*01 is just the start.