Sniff, Snort, Snuffle

I still remember walking into the guest bedroom's attached bathroom when I was eight, opening the mirrored door of a cabinet and forgetting why I had come to the bathroom in the first place. The scent of Johnson's Baby Powder had driven all other thoughts out of my head.

I remembered my cousin after his bath, waving his arms and legs around rather aimlessly as if he didn't quite know what to do with them. I remembered the incredibly soft powder puff, the pale yellow plastic dish filled with baby powder, the clouds that rose from it if my aunt jabbed the powder puff in too hard, making me sneeze. I remembered my cousin later, soon after he learned that he could actually grip things with his fingers, shaking a pale yellow rattle that was about as long as his arm. He shook it and shook it until it dropped from his fingers, kept shaking his tiny arm back and forth for a little while, then looked puzzled when he realized that there was silence.

My cousin was the first baby I'd really known and watched regularly. I had fallen deeply in love with the way his fingers wrapped around my thumb, the way his hair stuck out horizontally in the front, the way he behaved like a gaping fish every time we tried to feed him. He and his mother had stayed with my parents and I for the first couple of months of his life, before returning to their home in Bahrain. That had been months ago. And yet, the sweetness emanating from that cupboard brought it all back so vividly.

I tell you this to remind you of the importance of smell in evoking an emotion. Though it's one of the hardest things to describe (I can't quite articulate the perfume of Johnson's Baby Powder, though I could probably pick it out of a sampling of five other baby powders), the effort is worth it.

Smell is processed by the olfactory bulb, which begins in the nose and runs along the bottom of the brain. It has direct access to the amygdala, which processes emotion and the hippocampus, which processes associative learning (by the way, visual, auditory and tactile information does not pass through the amygdala or the hippocampus). Each time you smell something new, you link it to a person, place or event. So, each time you smell that scent again, your brain conjures up the mood associated with that particular person, place or event. A perfectly innocuous scent–diesel, for example–can trigger extreme guilt and sadness. And the process of linking smells begins even before you're born. Babies who were exposed to certain smells in the womb, (garlic, for example, which I know my parents use all the time in their cooking) show a preference for those smells, while other babies might be disturbed by them (Source).

There is evidence that an actual scent will trigger stronger emotions than the verbal label associated with that scent. So, unless you're rubbing the pages of your writing with lavender, soaking them in bleach or having your cat sit on them for a while, you're probably not going to trigger any extreme emotions. However, you know the power of words as well as I do. If you can find just the right words to describe the smell of grief or joy, you'll touch readers more deeply than if you describe the sight, sound or feel of it.

So pay attention to what you're sniffing! And pay attention to what people around you are sniffing too. You just might end up with the most evocative piece you've ever written.

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.