After doing the “pattern and feelings” post, I started doing some research about our five senses. Something that I noticed just by asking my friends and family was that we have subconsciously prioritized senses. For instance, the sense of sight is the most important one and the other senses are somehow different for each person. For instance, I have a sensitive sense of smell, which is both good and bad. It is good because I enjoy smelling senses that I love. On the other hand, a small amount of an unpleasant odour can be so annoying for me. Having a sensitive sense of smell and my previous post which was about how patterns can affect our feelings, motivated me to find out if smells can affect people’s mood or not?
Have you ever experienced feeling sad and after entering a place that smells so good, you suddenly feel better? It has happened to me several times and those odours changed my emotions instantly. For me, scents are more than just a good or bad smell. I feel like it can bring back a whole memory and make me happy, sad, angry or anxious.
It has been proved by scientists that scents affect people’s mood. There are some researchers that believe “Odours do effect peoples mood, work experience and behaviour in a variety of ways but it isn’t because odours work on us like a drug, instead we work on them through our experiences with them(Herz, 2002)”. This research shows that our experiences and memories with scents are the reason for changes in our mood when we smell something.
Some researchers believe there is a 40% improvement in our mood after being exposed to a pleasant scent. Scents can play an important role in business such as building value, increasing shopper dwell time etc. (“Mood,” n.d.)
Now that I have realized, It has been proven experimentally by scientists that smell can affect human’s mood, I am more confident to expand my research about this sense. First I need to find out how does our brain work when we are smelling something.
Design Journey 