Scents and beauty – a cultural perspective

As a skincare product junkie, I was never as obsessed with fragrances as I was with product texture, performance and packaging. However, I noticed with the launch of JUARA, my own line of products, that people’s first reaction to my products was completely scent oriented. One very frequent comment I would get from customers in stores after smelling our Body Crème or our Rice Facial Cleanser was “Your products smell so amazing, I am addicted to the scent.” My Japanese distribution contact also commented that JUARA would be successful in Japan because the products would smell good to the Japanese customer. So I asked myself: Why do people get hooked on a scent and base their purchasing decisions on scent, even though the scent has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the product? And also, what is the Asian perspective here?

In my search for answers, I spoke to Lucy Adler, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Ungerer & Company, a global fragrance and flavor house, who shed some light on my question.

“We feel certain emotions when we smell something, because that particular scent is connected to a memory, for example, our first love or a wonderful vacation”, Adler explains. “This does not happen consciously. Our scent receptors are directly connected to the limbic system, a part of the brain that is considered the home of deep-seated emotions.” This means, you feel an emotional reaction that you’re not even fully aware of, when you pick up a certain scent. Of course we are able to consciously recognize a lot of scents and are able to name them, but this happens way after they have evoked an emotional reaction. What makes a scent experience so fascinating, says Adler is that your emotional reaction to a scent is a combination of the universal, cultural and personal, drawing from both our own vast personal memory bank and a physiologically predictable mechanism.

For example, the scents of citrus, or mint are generally recognized as positive. Citrus connotes freshness and the scent of mint enhances relaxation. However, it’s entirely possible you personally associate citrus-scent with household cleaners and annoying household chores during your childhood, triggering a rather negative emotion. Or perhaps fragrances in restrooms in your particular culture are citrus based and therefore you would find a citrussy note in your skincare cream rather off-putting.

The cultural component is indeed significant. “There are huge cultural differences when it comes to preferred scents,” says Adler. As she explains, one of the reasons why scents of pumpkin and vanilla are so hugely popular in North America and even in beauty products, is that the North American culture is a baking culture. So there is a strong, positive association with these notes, while the same notes have no or even a rather negative association in other cultures. I distinctly remember my mother’s complete bafflement on a trip to the US when she smelled some pumpkin pie shampoo/ shower gel. My mother, being Japanese and having never lived in the USA, couldn’t believe that a sane person would actually want to wash her hair with a product that smelled like cake. “I don’t think it would clean properly,” was my mother’s insistence, even though the cleansing ingredients are pretty much the same as in other shampoos that don’t smell like cake.

East Asians, especially the Japanese, are incredibly picky and sensitive when it comes to scents and their products always smell different from Western brands, no matter how subtle the difference. Brands like Frederic Fekkai and Eau Thermale Avene for example, had to adapt their products’ fragrances specifically for the Japanese market. “For beauty products and scents to become accepted and popular in East Asian markets, they usually have to smell watery, fresh and clean,” Adler explains. “They can have fruity notes or floral notes or even coconutty notes, but the key is that they smell watery; watery not in the sense that it’s a watered-down scent, but rather that it conjures up the fantasy, the texture and the thirst-quenching experience of clean water. When you bite into a juicy plum, you feel the burst and texture of water. To create a watery scent, you have to capture that experience and translate it into a scent.”

I realized that this made complete sense, considering the East Asian ideals of beautiful skin and the promises of East Asian skincare products. In Japan for example, the term “mizumizushii” is used to describe beauty and refers to the qualities “youthful”, “fresh”, “watery” and “supple”. When spelled with Japanese characters (Kanji), mizumizushii literally means “water-water-like”. Specifically, mizumizushii-looking skin is skin that looks plump and supple with the water (i.e. hydration) contained in it. Having mizumizushii-looking skin represents one of the highest beauty ideals in Japan and not surprisingly, it is directly connected to water. There is a deep reverence of water in Japan and other East Asian cultures, which can be observed in their bathing rituals, the popularity of koi-ponds, as well as the beauty products. Toner/ beauty waters are considered essential in East Asian skincare rituals to saturate skin with pure hydration before applying a moisturizer. Moisturizers, even those for very dry skin, usually have a lotion-like, watery-fresh texture, rather than that of a thick cream. So it makes perfect sense that the scent experience that accompanies skincare and beauty products in Japan and other East Asian cultures, also must conjure up that same feeling of watery-freshness. As Adler puts it, whether skincare product or fragrance, it is the same emotional desire that we are trying to quench.

Yoshiko hosts the skincare column here every month. She is half Japanese. Her skin care line JUARA can be found at www.juaraskincare.com.