Meghan: Scented candles do not add just ambience to your home. They actually change the way you see your rooms. Some candles make your rooms look bigger while others make your room look smaller and today I am meeting with Rick Ruffolo, the senior vice president of brand marketing and innovation at Yankee Candle to learn about this thing he calls scentmosphere.
I am hitting the road, searching for answers and finding great design. It is a quest for beauty, function and of course inspiration.
I understand that the different scents you pick actually affect the way you see your room.
Rick: You know it is really interesting. We call it scentmosphere and it is--
Meghan: That is the word for it.
Rick: Yes it really is it. It kind of captures this idea that people probably do not realize it but the sense of smell is one of the most powerful they have and it is one of those things that, as I have mentioned earlier, when you walk into a person’s home, before you actually see their home and see what is going on inside their home, the décor, the color, you know what is going on in the music in the home? You actually smell their home and it sounds odd but smelling their home, immediately what you do naturally you breath and you smell, you walk in and you make an immediate impression.
So if it is in vanilla that is in the air or apple pie, you are immediately have a warm, comforting, inviting feeling coming about as a result of that. Everybody reacts differently to fragrance but there are some common things. Vanilla, as an example, for most Americans is a very positive feeling when they smell it and that can be translated into the rooms at your homes. You know when people, especially these days trying to sell homes? You know vanilla is one of that great fragrances that you can put into your home when you are selling it or you are trying to have a showing because it is an immediate welcoming fragrance before someone even walks into your home, they are going to smell it and they are going to right away realize hey this is a place for me.
And what is neat about that again is you can take that specific fragrance, a floral or a fresh fragrance, a spice fragrance and it will set the time for the room. The same room in the spring time with the floral fragrance or in the summer time with the fragrance like island spa or in the winter with fragrances that are more cinnamon based or vanilla based. You can change the feel of that room without actually changing anything else about the décor of the room.
Meghan: I heard that you could actually change the way the size of the room perceived.
Rick: That is true. There are certain fragrances that have the effect on people that makes it feel more airy and light and open and just, to some degree if you think about windows and ceilings as another way of kind of tricking people about their perceptions of the size of a room, the more light that comes into a room, the higher the ceilings, the feeling is you have a bigger room, the same thing with scent. You can create a feeling that the room is actually bigger than it is based on the type of fragrance you use and you can do the same thing about trying to make it warm and cozy so you can take a large room and make it feel more intimate with the right fragrances.
Meghan: So what scents make a room bigger?
Rick: I knew you are going to ask me that. There are a number of them but most of them tend to be in the floral and fresh family. So fresh families would be things like island spa or sun and sand and this whole idea, they are breezy, clean cotton. There is this feeling of openness and open air and the way that most of them are named are about outdoor spaces and--
Meghan: Everything that reminds you of spring?
Rick: Exactly, it is spring and the outdoors. I think those are two very good fragrance feelings that give you this openness. Now, things that kind of give you more of a warm, cozy feel are fragrances in the food family or in the spice so you know, a butter cream and a vanilla or some of our spices, cinnamon stick. Those tend to be more po
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