Remembering Better

On perfume, music, and the memories we choose to make more vivid

By Anca Jalba

We spend much of our lives trying not to forget.

We take photographs of dinners, weddings, birthdays, hotel rooms, city streets, flowers in markets, children with ice cream on their faces, sunsets that looked more extraordinary in real life than they ever will on a screen.

We document because we know that time is unreliable. What feels unforgettable while it is happening can later become strangely difficult to retrieve. The facts remain. The feeling fades.

A photograph can show us where we were. It can show us who was there. It can remind us what we wore, what the table looked like, what the sky was doing at that particular hour. But it cannot fully return us to the atmosphere of a moment. It cannot give back the air.

This is where scent begins to matter: not as decoration, not as vanity, not simply as something beautiful to wear, but as one of the most intimate ways we have of storing a life.

Marcel Proust understood this long before neuroscience gave us the language for it. In In Search of Lost Time, his narrator tastes a madeleine dipped in tea and is suddenly returned to childhood with a force that is almost physical. Not reminded of the past, but placed back inside it: the room comes back, the light comes back, the feeling comes back.

More than a century later, science has helped explain why this happens. Scent has a uniquely direct relationship with the parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory. It does not politely wait in line with the other senses. It arrives quickly, often before we have found the words for what we are feeling.

That is why a fragrance can undo us.

A street in summer.

A grandmother's kitchen.

A hotel lobby.

Orange blossom through an open car window.

Leather seats in a car you have not sat in for twenty years.

Someone you loved.

Someone you lost.

Someone you used to be.

Most conversations about scent and memory begin here, with the past: a smell appears... a door opens... and we are returned.

But I have become increasingly interested in the opposite possibility. What if scent does not only help us remember what has already happened? What if it can help us create memories more deliberately in the first place? What if perfume is not only a key to the past, but a way of making the present more retrievable for the future?

This question sits at the heart of Scent Stories. Because the more I work with fragrance, the less I believe it is only about preference. It is not simply a question of liking rose, amber, leather, iris, sandalwood or citrus. It is a question of emotional architecture:

What do we want to feel?

What do we want to remember?

What part of ourselves are we trying to bring closer?

What moment are we trying to make more vivid?

I began thinking about this more seriously after an evening in Oslo called Salon De Concert, created and hosted by classical pianist Tatia Chikovani and where I was a guest together with associate professor and classical guitarist Petter Richter. The evening brought together classical music and fragrance. My role was to pair a scent with each piece they performed. On paper, this sounds simple. In reality, it was one of the most creatively demanding projects I have worked on. I did not want the fragrance to sit beside the music like an accessory. I wanted it to enter the same emotional space.

Before choosing a single perfume, I spent time with the music. I read about the composers. I listened to the pieces repeatedly. I tried to understand not only what each composition sounded like, but what it was carrying: grief, longing, stillness, fire, memory, ritual, dream, return.

Then I approached the fragrances in the same way. Not by asking which perfume note resembled which musical note. That would have been too easy, and probably too superficial. The real question was different: can these two works place us in the same emotional landscape? Can the fragrance deepen what the music is already asking us to feel? That became the entire point. The scent was not there to compete with the performance. It was there to make the memory of the performance more complete.

During the evening, the audience listened while holding fragrance strips. Sound and scent arrived together. One through the ear, one through the breath. Neither asked to be analysed immediately. Both simply entered the body. 

What happened in that room was subtle. There was no spectacle, no grand explanation, just music, fragrance, and a group of people allowing themselves to experience both at the same time.

But the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I realised that something important had taken place. Those who were there had not only attended a concert. They had created a layered memory. The music carried the emotion. The fragrance anchored it. And somewhere in the brain, the two became linked.

Years from now, one of those people may encounter the same perfume again. In a shop. On someone's skin. In the air of a room they did not expect. And perhaps the music will return: not as a recording, not as information, but as atmosphere, the stillness of that evening, the feeling of sitting among strangers and being moved by the same thing. The exact emotional temperature of a moment that would otherwise have softened with time.

This is what fascinates me. We often think of memory as something that happens to us: something unreliable, something we either keep or lose. But perhaps some memories can be made more intentionally: not controlled, not manufactured, but supported, deepened and given more ways to find us again.

This changes how I think about perfume. A fragrance chosen for a wedding is not only part of how someone smells that day. It becomes part of how that day may return.

A perfume worn during a summer in Beirut, a first trip alone, a new beginning, a farewell dinner, a pregnancy, a birthday, a period of healing, a return to oneself — these are not small choices. They are emotional markers: invisible, but powerful.

We understand this instinctively in other parts of life: we choose music for important moments, we choose flowers, we choose clothes, we choose places. We choose what will be photographed and what will be saved. But scent is often left to chance, even though it may be the sense most capable of bringing the feeling back. Perhaps that is because perfume has too often been treated as an accessory: something external, something decorative, something chosen to please others.

But the most meaningful fragrances are rarely only about how we are perceived. They are about how we experience ourselves. A scent can become a private form of continuity. A way of saying: this mattered, I was here, this is how it felt.

That is why Scent Stories exists. Not to tell people what they should wear. Not to reduce fragrance to trends, notes, seasons or compliments. But to help people understand perfume as something more personal and more lasting. A way to connect identity, memory and emotion. A way to mark a chapter. A way to remember better.

The evening with Tatia and Petter gave me a language for something I had felt for a long time but had not yet fully articulated. Perfume does not simply belong to the world of beauty. It belongs to the world of memory. And memory is not only about the past. It is also about how we choose to live the present while we still have it. This is where the real power of fragrance begins: not in the bottle, not in the list of notes, not even in the first impression, but in what it becomes attached to: the dinner, the city, the person, the transformation, the version of yourself you were becoming.

One day, without warning, a scent returns. And with it comes proof that the moment was not lost. Only waiting.

We spend our lives taking photographs so we will not forget. Perhaps we should also choose fragrances that help us remember life's most important moments more vividly. 

Because a photograph can show us what happened.

But scent can bring back how it felt.