Why do I love the smell of Jasmine, while my sister thinks it stinks? I never gave much thought to how personal smell was until I started making body scrubs and oils. My sister Michelle, and I, are opposites on so many things, yet we find common ground in many others including smell. We have begun to recognize that scent is not only quite personal and stems from many life experiences, but is indeed one of the truest barometers of who people are. The stories we hear prove the theory over and over again, that smell is one of the strongest emotional senses we have.

We have begun to ask our customers why they love a certain scent and why they abhor another. Stories come out about beloved family members or friends or even a moment in a particular relationship. One woman said she hates anything lavender, because there was a bouquet of it on the table in the crowded hospital where she sat for hours waiting to have her broken arm cast in plaster. Another woman said that she always liked a particular scent, until her roommate, who smelled similar, made off with her college boyfriend. The answers are always interesting, always passionate and sometimes quite poignant, with traces of the emotion left on the face of the teller as they "smell" the smell in the far reaches of their memories.

The olfactory system in short, takes a scent from the nostrils to the brain, stopping to be recognized as a particular fragrance along the way. Throw a life experience into the mix as the brain is registering the scent, and you have just learned to like and/or dislike a particular smell based on the emotional association you just made with it.

I myself finally pinpoint the reason I love the smell of Jasmine. There was a room in my grandparents home that had a life-like 3 foot doll that I spent hours playing with. The scent in the room was a combination of my grandma's heady perfume and a bit of camphor, which has a musky sweetness all its own. My sister, being 7 years my junior, was considered "too young" and never allowed in there. Her memories are completely different and therefore the smell of Jasmine or anything similar is simply "awful" in her mind.

Michelle is a "fruity", I am a "floral" and we find our middle zone amongst the "citrus", however, as we experiment and work together and bring new scents to our fragrance line, we are allowing for new memories, thereby opening our minds as well as our nostrils.

So, what smell are you?