Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. – Helen Keller
At Synaesthesia Magazine, we often tell our contributors to think about all of the senses when they write: the way that food feels, the way days sound, the way names taste. We ask them to give us tongue-poetry to allow us to experience the world as closely as possible through their writing. Writing with my nose is nothing new.
I had a conversation with Elena at Hollingdales Home Scents earlier this week about Scentsy. To give you a little background about Scentsy, it is perhaps most well-known for its alternatives to traditional candle burning. According to Dr. Anne C. Steinemann, an internationally recognized expert on pollutant exposures and associated health effects, ‘certain candles may emit numerous types of potentially hazardous chemicals […] that can cause damage to the brain, lung and central nervous system, as well as cause developmental difficulties.’ There are numerous articles that discuss the pollutants emitted by candle burning, and I simply had no idea about these dangers at all. Scentsy’s focus is an alternative to that, where safe and natural wax can be melted without a flame using a plug-in warmer, filling ‘the air with world-class fragrant all-natural and essential oils’.
Elena passed me the catalogue for this year’s spring/summer products. Opening it up, I read the editor’s note:
Close your eyes and feel the warmth of a sunny day, the ocean breeze combing through your hair, a handful of freshly picked wild flowers. Now that Spring is upon us, let fragrance transport your senses and add beauty to every moment.
I instantly thought of Synaesthesia Magazine and my own writing when I read this. How as writers, we’re encouraged to think with our nose, and allow smells to transport us back to associated memories of that scent. To focus on more than showing what something looks like: to make us feel with every sense.
I told Elena about how, for the first time, I sprayed my nana’s perfume on me recently. Before she died, she gave me various perfumes including Aromatics Elixir by Clinique. I hadn’t sprayed any of them; they just sat in my drawer, untouched and having last been used by my nana. I guess I didn’t really want to use them up – didn’t want to lose her scent. When I sprayed it, it instantly had me in tears. A combination of missing her, but also instantly being transported back to her warm smell: the way she’d sit in her armchair; the way she spoke; me combing her hair at eight-years-old. Scents can move us to any time, and any place. This is something that is universal: it’s not just specific to writers – it’s a human response that we all experience.
It made me think back to my writing, and actually ask myself: how often do I really focus on how things smell? I find myself easily writing about textures, tastes, sounds: but smell goes under-recognised, despite how central it is to everyday life, unconsciously infused and woven into my memories. How often I’ll be having a conversation with another person, walking down the street and suddenly: oh my goodness, it smells like India. An interruption to the conversation, where I am suddenly hit hard by memory. It makes me smile, it makes me cry, it makes me feel and remember.
Elena offered to give me a trial basket. In this basket there is a Scentsy warmer, a Scentsy bar, and some other various tester waxes for me to sniff to my heart’s content. It works like this:
There’s a huge variety of warmers and wax to choose from (honestly, a HUGE variety), and they become part of your home décor as opposed to simply a candle that eventually gets thrown away or recycled.
I decided that it’d be a great way to challenge myself as a writer, and post a series of writing challenges completely inspired by Scentsy fragrances. I’m seeing it as a scents and synaesthesia project – pushing myself to write with my nose, and allow what would normally be so unconsciously absorbed to be transposed to paper.
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If you’re interested in Scentsy, visit Hollingdales Home Scents to browse the incredible selection!
Annabelle Carvell 