Woman's Day, the biggest women's weekly magazine in Australia, had something to say about fragrance zoning after speaking with Andrew O'Keefe, the director of Scent Australia Home.
When the magazine spoke with Andrew, they detailed what fragrance zoning is, what it does, and why it's so effective today. Fragrance zoning, Andrew says, is exactly as the term suggests. It presupposes that having a different scent in each area of the home can be amazing when properly executed.
The science behind fragrance zoning lies in the unique configuration of the human brain. The nose is directly linked to a part of the brain that the other four senses are detached from. Put simply, this means that the way we process smell is very different from the way we process all other information.
Instead of being connected to the logical part of the brain, our noses are connected to the amygdala and hippocampus where we formulate emotions and memory.
That's why fragrance zoning, especially when done with the right fragrances, can transform your home. It can conjure different emotions in you, according to the different spaces of your home.
The key to fragrance zoning is to match each smell to how you want to feel. The scent of a room should dictate the mood of the room, and in turn, directly affects the behavior, frame of mind, and overall disposition of the room’s inhabitants.
This could mean anything from using a fresh invigorating scent like Bergamot for your home office, and a soothing fragrance like Sandalwood in the living room. For homes where a room doubles as both, one could switch scents depending on the time of the day.
Andrew warns that each fragrance should be kept light so that they don't blend into an overpowering cloud that could ruin the mood you set out to create.
The entire idea behind fragrance zoning is this: certain scents will evoke certain feelings. If you've felt down, or uninspired by the way you feel around your home, fragrance zoning might just be that solution to your problem. If you do it right, you'd surely find yourself feeling just the right way in and around your home.