The Scent of Childhood: Why Smell Is So Closely Connected to Memory
Updated: 5 days ago
The home your child grows up in has a scent.
You probably don't notice it.
It's somewhere between freshly washed pyjamas, their favourite blanket, the bathroom after bath time and the familiar scent that quietly fills the house in the evening.
But years from now, one unexpected fragrance might bring a piece of it back.
Not just the room.
The feeling of being there.
Because our sense of smell has an extraordinary relationship with memory, and research suggests that some of the memories triggered by scent reach particularly far back into childhood.
At Matilda Organic, this is one of the reasons we believe home fragrance can be so much more than simply making a room smell beautiful.
Scent can become part of home.
Part of a ritual.
Part of childhood.
Why is smell so closely connected to memory?
Have you ever walked past someone wearing a familiar perfume and suddenly thought of a person you haven't seen for years?
Or smelled something cooking and immediately remembered a kitchen from your childhood?
This experience is sometimes called the Proust phenomenon, referring to the way a smell or taste can unexpectedly bring an autobiographical memory back to life.
Scientists have been studying this relationship between smell, memory and emotion for decades.
Research into autobiographical memory suggests that memories triggered by smell can differ from memories triggered by things we see or words we hear.
Studies have found that odour evoked memories can create a particularly strong feeling of being transported back to the original moment. Interestingly, research has also found that memories triggered by scent frequently reach back to the first decade of life.
Perhaps that's why a smell can sometimes make us remember something we didn't even realise we remembered.
Why can a smell bring back childhood memories?
Memory doesn't only belong to photographs.
Our experiences are created through all of our senses.
The sound of a familiar voice.
The texture of a favourite blanket.
The taste of something a parent always made.
And the smell of home.
Research comparing different types of memory cues has found that childhood related odours can trigger particularly rich autobiographical memories. In one experiment involving 170 participants, childhood related smells produced richer childhood memories than childhood related images.
Other research has found that memories prompted by odours often reach further back into childhood than memories prompted by pictures or words.
It doesn't mean that every fragrance a child experiences will become a lifelong memory.
Memory is far more complicated than that.
But it does tell us something beautiful.
Scent is part of how we experience the places and moments around us.
What does childhood smell like?
There probably isn't one answer.
For one person, childhood might smell like warm toast in the morning.
For someone else, freshly washed sheets.
Perhaps it's sunscreen on a summer holiday.
Rain on the walk home from school.
A grandmother's perfume.
Freshly cut grass.
The shampoo used after bath time.
Or the familiar smell of the house just before bed.
These aren't necessarily remarkable moments when they happen.
They're ordinary.
And perhaps that is what makes them so special.
Childhood is built from thousands of ordinary moments that don't feel important until they are gone.
Can children remember scents?
Children experience and learn about the world through smell alongside their other senses.
Research into olfactory memory has shown that previous experiences and associations can influence how smells are perceived and remembered.
But creating a scent ritual shouldn't be approached as a way of deliberately making a child remember something.
That's not what we mean at Matilda Organic.
Instead, we think about fragrance as one small part of the sensory landscape of family life.
Just like the same bedtime book.
The same little lamp glowing beside the bed.
The same song before sleep.
The same morning cuddle.
A familiar fragrance can simply sit quietly alongside those moments.
The smell of home is often made from ordinary things
When we think about creating memories for our children, it's easy to imagine that we need to create extraordinary experiences.
The perfect nursery.
The perfect birthday.
The perfect holiday.
But so much of childhood happens somewhere much quieter.
At home.
It's breakfast before nursery.
Tiny socks drying on the radiator.
A favourite teddy waiting in bed.
Bath water running upstairs.
A parent reading the same story for what feels like the hundredth time.
A sleepy cuddle before the lights go out.
These are the rituals that slowly become family life.
And scent exists quietly amongst all of them.
Why familiar scents can feel so emotional
There is something unusual about scent.
You can look at an old photograph and know exactly what you're looking at.
A smell can be different.
Sometimes the feeling arrives before you can even explain what you're remembering.
Research has repeatedly investigated this relationship between odour and autobiographical memory. Reviews of the evidence have found differences in the way scent prompted memories are experienced compared with memories prompted by visual or verbal cues.
Some studies have reported greater emotionality and vividness for odour evoked memories, although the science is nuanced and not every study finds the same effect.
So we shouldn't say that smell is a magical shortcut that guarantees stronger memories.
But there is good evidence that smell can act as a distinctive cue to personal memories.
And perhaps that explains something many of us already recognise.
A fragrance can sometimes make the past feel unexpectedly close.
Creating a scent ritual at home
A scent ritual doesn't need to be complicated.
In fact, we think it should be the opposite.
It might be opening the curtains in the morning and letting fresh air into the room.
Lighting a favourite candle downstairs once the children are settled.
Adding a few drops of an essential oil blend to a passive stone diffuser before the evening routine.
Folding freshly washed pyjamas.
Running a warm bath.
Reading a familiar book.
The fragrance isn't supposed to be the ritual itself.
It simply becomes part of it.
Over time, the scent becomes associated with the atmosphere of that particular part of the day.
Morning.
Home.
Bath time.
Quiet time.
Bedtime.
Family.
Scent and the bedtime routine
Bedtime is perhaps one of the clearest examples of a family ritual.
Children experience many of the same cues every evening.
The house becomes quieter.
The lights become softer.
Pyjamas go on.
Books come out.
Voices become quieter.
Adding a familiar scent to this environment can become another sensory detail associated with the routine.
That doesn't mean fragrance makes a child sleep.
We don't believe in making claims like that.
Instead, think of scent in the same way you might think about soft lighting or a familiar bedtime story.
One small part of a predictable environment.
Our Dreamy Snuggles blend was created with exactly this kind of family moment in mind.
Not as a sleep treatment.
As part of the ritual surrounding sleep.
Creating a naturally scented nursery
For families who enjoy fragrance, a nursery can have its own subtle scent without needing to smell heavily perfumed.
Fresh air and clean fabrics should always come first.
Fragrance is simply an additional layer.
A passive stone diffuser is one way to introduce essential oil fragrance gradually without producing a continuous mist.
Our Matilda Organic Nursery Stone Diffuser absorbs a small amount of essential oil into its porous surface and allows the aroma to disperse naturally over time.
The aim isn't to fill the room with an overpowering fragrance.
It's the opposite.
A scent you notice gently.
A fragrance that feels like it belongs there.
As with any essential oil product in a family home, the oil itself should be chosen carefully and both the diffuser and essential oils should always be positioned securely outside a child's reach.
The scents they'll remember might surprise you
One day the nursery won't be a nursery anymore.
The cot will become a bed.
The baby clothes will disappear from the drawers.
The toys will change.
The books will change.
Even the bedtime routine will change.
And you probably won't know which pieces of these years your child will remember.
Maybe it will be a particular song.
Maybe Sunday pancakes.
Maybe the smell of their freshly washed blanket.
Maybe the fragrance that always seemed to be somewhere in the background when everyone was home.
We can't manufacture childhood memories.
And we don't need to.
We can simply create homes filled with small rituals worth remembering.
The home your child grows up in has a scent
At Matilda Organic, we don't create fragrance simply because we want homes to smell beautiful.
We create fragrance for the moments happening around it.
The chaotic mornings.
The slow afternoons.
The bath times.
The bedtime stories.
The cuddles on the sofa.
The moments nobody photographs because, at the time, they seem completely ordinary.
Because childhood isn't only made from the big moments.
It's made from thousands of tiny ones.
And sometimes, years later, all it takes is a familiar scent to bring one of them back.
The home your child grows up in has a scent.
Make it one filled with beautiful moments.
