Associate a Special Occasion With a Specific Scent
Before the wedding, I read a few tips on the wedding message board: Buy a new scent and use it for the first time on your wedding day. Every time you use it in the future, the scent will transport you to a great day.
The advice made sense to me because smell can be a powerful memory trigger. A certain scent of hand soap can remind you of your grandmother’s house, or the scent of dry autumn leaves can make you feel like 7 again, running and jumping over piles in the backyard of your childhood home.
This is how it works, according to Psychology Today :
Incoming odors are first processed by the olfactory bulb, which starts inside the nose and runs along the fundus of the brain. The olfactory bulb has a direct connection to two areas of the brain that strongly affect emotion and memory: the amygdala and the hippocampus. Interestingly, visual, auditory (sound), and tactile (tactile) information does not travel through these areas of the brain. Perhaps that is why the sense of smell, more than any other sense, so successfully triggers emotions and memories.
Unfortunately, the opposite could be true; smells can also trigger bad memories. A certain floral scent can bring you back to a painful funeral, and an air freshener can bring back memories of a bad car accident. There is little you can do to avoid this, but we can actively try to connect new scents with memories we know will become favorites of a lifetime, such as your daughter’s graduation day or your first trip to Italy.
I followed the advice; I bought a new perfume a few days before the wedding. I wore it on my wedding day and for the next week while we were on our honeymoon. When we got home, I put it off for a few months. The next time I wear it – to this day, 10 years later – every time I sniff it, I stand on the balcony of our resort in Cabo, looking out over the pool, palm trees and beach and all that. path to the ocean.