Nostalgia can create the smell of a memory that doesn’t exist and put it in the iconic Fragrantica layout

Fragrantica Notes or the Fragrantica Trend, also known as the Fragrantica Meme, is a series of exploitable memes using the 2000s layout for the perfume encyclopedia website Fragrantica’s scent notes tool, which tells users the notes they might smell in a given perfume.

Some things we never lived, but we can picture how they would smell. Some other things seem like we’ve all strangely been through, and we can all recall how the happiest day of summer as kids smelled.

Some people online have designed the most perfect smells that would instantly transport us to the deepest, most specific memories and points in our lives, or perhaps in the lives of other imagined beings who lived what we never dared to.

Smell can be a very quick way of being transported to other scenarios. If you think about it, only one smell can take you to a country, to a point in history, to the house of someone you love, almost imediately.

You have to be very sensitive and delicate to be able to decode what composes a very peculiar smell, and how to tell a story through it. I guess that’s what people who work as noses do. The trend originated on TikTok and populated the rest of the internet from there.

None of these notes have to be objectively correct; fragrance, just like art, is not an exact science. It’s vocabulary for creating an atmosphere. One that’s particularly left out of most artistic works. There is no smell in movies, paintings, or music, and it’s just as powerful when it comes to creating atmospheres and evoking feelings.

I like smell because it creates a three-dimensional experience; one can close their eyes and feel transported. I’d love to see more artists exploring smell. We already have playlists for every conceivable mood, movies for every taste, and food for every palate. I want to have commercial perfumes that evoke a specific character or the smell of rain in Minnesota.

I met a girl online a few weeks ago who gets together with a group of people to review fragrances, and they often go to places where they create niche fragrances and try them and all. I asked her to invite me to their next meeting, and I’ve been super excited about it.

The last one got cancelled because the group decided that the place they had rented for the meeting had ‘too many smells coming from the streets’ and that would interrupt our ‘smelling session’. I thought it was hilarious, but it made me even more curious to see how seriously they were taking the whole thing. As soon as I go, I’m going to write about it.

Perhaps smell can become another way to experience art, a profoundly meditative one, because it requires closing your eyes and connecting to the present moment very vividly.

Have you ever smelled something and felt 15 years younger for a second? Can anyone imagine what a very fond memory smells like? An objectively bad smell, like a musty bedroom smell, can still evoke a beautiful memory from our childhood?