I just read about a research study in which the link between scent and memory was examined. It got me thinking about which scents I could recall from childhood.

Two powerful scent memories immediately and effortlessly waft into my “memory’s nose” - one, the scent of “Chloe”, the perfume my mom wore when I was little, and two, the strong odor of fish that I first smelled when I walked into a market in the town where I grew up.

On the one hand, the perfume memory is a more positive one because of its personal link to my mother. On the other hand, while the fishy smell was unpleasing to my nose the first time I caught wind of it, I don’t have any particularly bad feelings connected to it. Still, I remember both scents with equal power.

When I call up that “Chloe” scent, my memory fills with the powdery, soft scent and how I’d get a noseful of it whenever I hugged my mom or played dress-up in her nurse’s scrubs. And that first fishy scent floods my senses in complex and intricate detail. When I remember it, I am instantly that 6-year-old walking timidly through her first fish market, trying to be nice and fight the urge to scrunch up my face, wince, or plug my nose.

Researchers in Israel showed test subjects certain objects and associated those objects with either a pleasant or an unpleasant scent. When asked to recall the objects a week later, those objects associated with the “bad” smells were more easily remembered. Their hopes are to use this information to help people “to better forget early and powerful memories, such as trauma.

Can you recall the first scent that made a strong impression on you? One that, even now years later, you can call up like the smell’s origin were right under your nose? I just remembered another - the way my hands would smell after climbing on and hanging from the metal monkey bars on my school’s playground.

Please share your scent memories in the comments!