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Scent back in time: how ancient odours can bring the past to life
For half a century, AromaPrime has been creating historically accurate scents for museum exhibits and heritage attractions. Carly Hilts spoke to Heritage Scenting Consultant Liam R Findlay to learn more about how smells can help to conjure up the distant past.
In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a single bite of a tea-dipped madeleine is enough to transport the author back into a vivid world of recollection. Our sense of smell is even more powerful in this respect than taste, however, with a direct route between the olfactory bulbs and the parts of the brain linked to emotion and memory. This can be harnessed to great effect when creating atmospherically immersive experiences for museum exhibitions and heritage attractions – and, for the last 50 years, specialists at AromaPrime have been creating bespoke scents to help bring the past to life.
To find out more, I spoke to Liam R Findlay, the company’s Heritage Scenting Consu
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