Yet fragrance provides many other benefits beyond pure pleasure and aesthetics – and likely beyond even what we know now.

Every day and night of our lives we smell odors, many of them go unnoticed, but they are there. Only when an odor pleases, triggers a warning, irritates or jogs a memory do we pause to take notice.

Just how do we smell? How do fragrances affect us?

The sense of smell is a remarkable and complicated sense, one which we are only just beginning to understand.

When we smell, currents of air swirl up through the nostrils, to an area about the size of a postage stamp containing millions of receptor cells, called the epithelium.

Fragrance molecules attach themselves to the watery mucus covering the pithelium.