Scent City: How to Collect the Scents Around You
Some of us collect photographs, tickets, postcards and little things to remember the places we love. These could be places we see every day, or the ones we discover during a trip of a lifetime. But there is another way to remember a place: by its scent.
The smell of rain on warm pavement. Fresh bread from a bakery you passed every morning. The perfume of someone sitting beside you on the train. The delicious smell of food from a street vendor. The familiar smell of home vs the sweet new smell of somewhere completely unknown.
Scent has a way of staying with us. Long after a place is gone, a familiar fragrance can bring part of it back.
With this post, we hope to encourage you to start noticing the scents around you.
Start with the places you already know
You don't need to travel somewhere new to begin collecting scents. Start with your own neighbourhood.
Walk the same street at different times of day. Notice how it changes in the morning, after rain, at lunchtime or late at night. Pay attention to the bakery, the florist, the café, the trees, the pavement after a storm.
Some scents are so familiar that we stop noticing them. Slow down enough to find them again.
Write them down
Start keeping a record of the scents you encounter. You don't have to know the technical fragrance note. “My mother's kitchen on Sunday morning” is a perfectly good scent description. So is “the scent of my favourite store.”
Scent is deeply personal. It can belong to a person as much as it belongs to a place.
Your records could be as simple as:
Place: Barcelona, 3:30 PM
Scent: Pizza, cinnamon rolls, dulce de leche
Feeling: Happiness, familiarity, sweet
Over time, these notes become a personal map of your life, a collection of places, people and moments remembered through scent.
Don't only collect the beautiful ones
A scent doesn't have to be pleasant to be memorable.
The smell of a train station. Chlorine from a swimming pool. Old books. Petrol after rain. A particular cleaning product from your childhood home.
Sometimes, the scents we dislike are the ones that tell us the most about where we have been.
And finally, create your own Scent City
Your Scent City records can be from your city or a city you're visiting for the first time.
Think of your life as a city made of scents.
Your home has its own atmosphere. Your neighbourhood has another. Every café, hotel, street, person and season adds something to it.
Start paying attention, and you may realise that you have been collecting these scents all along. You just weren't writing them down.