Taking the Time - Why I Started a Scent Journal
Most people already live with scent more intuitively than they realise.
We light candles without thinking too much about it.
We associate certain smells with memories we can’t always explain.
We return to the same notes season after season even when trends change.
None of this is new.
Scent was quietly shaping my days long before I ever thought about writing it down.
Why memory alone isn’t enough
Scent is deeply tied to memory, yet it’s surprisingly hard to recall later. (I explored this more deeply in a previous piece on why smell is our most powerful sense for memory.)
A scent can feel important in the moment : comforting, grounding, familiar… and then disappear a few days later. Not because it didn’t matter, but because it had nowhere to land.
It wasn’t about capturing scent. It was about noticing what stayed.
Not every day. Not every detail. Just the moments that returned.
What “tracking ” means here
When I talk about tracking scent over time, I don’t mean recording or logging.
There’s no daily practice. No catalogue of notes. No attempt to be precise.
Tracking, here, is simply paying attention to patterns:
what comes back
what fades
what feels seasonal
what quietly anchors a moment
Over time, certain associations repeat themselves. Others pass through once and never return. That distinction started to matter to me.
Why I started a scent journal
The Scent Notes journal began as a place for fragments.
A word
A sentence
A brief impression memory
could sit without needing explanation.
Not to analyse scent, but to give fleeting moments somewhere to sit without needing to explain them.
It’s less about description, and more about association.
That idea stayed with me. Because what’s written’ down isn’t the scent itself, but the feeling it carried.
Over time, I noticed I was choosing scent differently. Paying attention made more aware of how scent moves through rooms, moments and seasons.
A quiet practice, not a system
I don’t keep a scent journal to do it “right”.
I keep it so moments don’t disappear completely.
It’s a way of slowing down something we already do instinctively and giving it just enough attention to matter.
