Perfume is the most intense form of memory

RUIK is a company that is focusing on creating plant based perfumes. They have processed orange peel into their first perfume: VERSCHIL-EAU D’ORANGE. Every year in the month December there is a big Christmas tree placed on the Dam in Amsterdam. Normally, the three will be cut and destroyed after the month December. RUIK has found a beautiful second destination for the three. It will be processed into a perfume. The fragrance will be called appositely DEN. A great and sustainable initiative!

The term olfactory fatigue is the temporary inability to smell a specific scent because you are exposed to it for a while. You might recognize this situation. In the morning you are using your favorite perfume. Later that day, a colleague is making a complement on your perfume, but you don’t smell it yourself anymore. Unfortunately, it works the same with unpleasant odors. In case you have pets, you always need to be careful for that. Olfactory fatigue is preventing that our nerve system gets overloaded by specific odor stimuli, in order for us to be able to smell other things as well.

When I worked at Sephora, there were always small glasses filled with coffee beans placed at the fragrances wall. The idea is that you could take a sniff of those coffee beans in order to neutralize your nose in case it got saturated. Is it really true that coffee beans have the quality to neutralize scent? The answer is very simple: no. A nose can’t be saturated, your nose is always ‘on’. Scent can not be neutralized, just like you are not able to neutralize taste.