The late Edmond Roudnitska was a creative genius, although, in common with most people, you probably haven’t heard of him. Unlike other great artists, Roudnitska’s work can’t be seen or heard. His voiceless masterpieces are invisible, and yet they continue to give pleasure to millions.
Edmond Roudnitska is not a household name, but he was one of the greatest perfumers of the 20th century, a virtuoso composer of fragrances, who, in his own way, was no less skilled than Mozart or Picasso. For instance, while creating Diorissimo for Dior in the 1950s, Roudnitska revolutionised the art form – doing what everybody said couldn’t be done by creating a near-perfect reconstruction of lily of the valley.
Sadly, we do not celebrate those who compose great fragrances, however we do enjoy the sweet scented fruits of their labours, especially in the UAE.
The Arabian Gulf, per capita, is the world’s largest consumer of perfumes, according to the Fragrance Foundation, a non-profit organisation aligned with the perfume industry. This is news, but it’s also history. The inhabitants of the Arabian Gulf have had a fondness for fragrances stretching back over millennia.
“They will spend the night hungry in order to buy perfumes with the price of their food ... When one of these women goes away the odour of the perfume clings to the place,” wrote Ibn Battuta, the great explorer, more than seven centuries ago.
Despite our long-standing love of fragrances, the sense of smell is the least studied and most underappreciated of all senses. However, in recent years it has begun to attract increasing research attention. For example, olfaction (our sense of smell) has been found to play an important role in memory.
It turns out that compared to other sensory cues (sights and sounds), odours trigger memories that are far more emotional. Consider for example encountering the unique scent of a lost love one on a hairbrush, or an item of clothing. This is typically far more emotive than looking at an old photograph.
This link between smell and emotion becomes even more obvious when a person loses the ability to smell – a condition known as anosmia. Such individuals tend to report a loss of emotional vibrancy to their lives, and the condition is commonly associated with clinical depression.
Of course, the link between smell and emotion is one of the central ideas behind aromatherapy. Aromatherapists have long claimed that the use of specific fragrances can help clients with both physical and emotional ills. This has also been an important component of traditional healing practices in the Gulf region, with the burning of aromatic agarwood (oud), frankincense (luban) and costus root (qist al bahri) central to many remedies.
This growing interest in the links between our sense of smell, emotion and human behaviour has given rise to a new area of scientific study, provisionally known as aromachology.
One remarkable finding is the observation that even virtually imperceptible odours (subliminal scents) can influence human responses. In one study, musk odour was added to a perfume in concentrations below the threshold of conscious detection. Participants in the study were asked sit with – and later rate the physical attractiveness of – a woman who, unknown to them, was either wearing or not wearing the subliminal musk scent.
The imperceptible fragrance seemed to do the trick, and the perfumed woman was generally rated as being more attractive than her unscented counterpart – even though the women used were identical twins. Beauty may be in the nose, as well as the eye of the beholder.
Another study exposed department store customers to either a subliminal fragrance or an odourless environment. On average, customers stayed in stores for 20 per cent longer when the subliminal scent was present. It seems that odours, even those we are not aware of, can be powerful shapers of our opinions and behaviours.
The findings from this exciting new field of aromachology suggest that the future of fragrance may lie not only in perfumery and cosmetics, but also in health care and marketing. The Gulf region, with its millennia-old aromatic traditions, seems well situated to make significant contributions to this emerging field.
Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well- Being in the Gulf States
On Twitter: @jaytee156
