“We need to be able to visualize our creative thinking as one thing and the discipline we work in as another. Once you speak the language of creativity you can talk about many different subjects. When you learn the language of creativity it alters the lens through which you can see all disciplines.” Said David Usher. Using the language of Matisse… “A thimbleful of red is brighter than a bucketful of red.” Taking that language of creativity and using it in the discipline of fragrance and we have the concept of contrast. A fragrance can be developed from the paintings of impressionism or cubism using the common language of creativity. A dress of a specific color and style can be creatively spoken into a fragrance.

When a person smells a fragrance the odor registers immediately in the limbic system, the oldest, reptilian section of the brain. That is where our EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, MOTIVATIONS, VISIONS, COLORS and MEMORIES evolve from. Because it is the oldest part of the brain it has no capacity for words, or adjectives. These register in the newer part of the brain, the rational section.

Communicating your idea or fragrance to another would be more vivid, have more layers of meaning, by tapping into the limbic system, since that is where the fragrance goes uninhibited. This link to the brain’s emotional center makes smell a fascinating frontier in behavioral science and marketing. Describing a scene, or showing a picture has the emotion which will resonate immediately in the limbic system. Creating a vivid image or story in one’s mind, will engage the imagination of the person perceiving the fragrance. This is how to talk your fragrance. Using ingredients to describe a fragrance to an individual who has no training with the materials, would make a disconnect to the natural process of relating to a fragrance. Our emotional centers in our brain react quicker than our rational centers. An image tends to hit us in the gut quicker and more consistently than the written word. We are hardwired to storytelling since the caveman days. Marketing people, evaluators and sales persons should reside in the vision, the dream, the story. Appreciating a fragrance by smelling the ingredients, loses the message, the vision of the fragrance. Cezanne always used blue in his paintings; in peoples faces, the rocks, the trees, the leaves, the earth. He felt the color blue was a representation of life. When you look at a painting of Cezanne’s do you say “look he has blue in that beautiful tree, or look at the blue in the rock.” No, you appreciate the vision, the image, the story. SO, WHEN APPRECIATING A FRAGRANCE CLOSE YOUR EYES AND WALK INTO THE DREAM AND TALK ABOUT THE STORY THAT COMES INTO YOUR EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING.

Categories: PERSPECTIVES Philosophical Perspective

ron winnegrad

Ron Winnegrad has been a Perfumer and teacher for 46 years. As a perfumer, Ron has been able to express the world he sees through a rainbow of olfactive and emotive visions. As a teacher, Ron has helped others to see fragrance through his own multi sensorial lens.