Of course, studying the Proust effect doesn’t make one immune from experiencing it; “I don’t remember anything from Christmas at my grandparents when I was six or seven years old, but give me a smell or a taste and it can bring back the whole picture immediately,” van Campen recounts. “For me, as a scientist, it’s really something wonderful.”It’s also wonderful for companies who can capitalize on the nostalgia surrounding holiday foods and their scents by synthesizing that emotional connection to the past.Jennifer Genson is head of development for Yankee Candle, the company behind aromas such as spiced pumpkin, “cherries on snow,” sugared apple, and, perhaps most notably, “turkey & stuffing.” In a lot of ways, Yankee Candle’s research and development involves understanding the same mechanism explored by Proust more than a century ago, and faithfully recreating some very precise aroma combinations.“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time.
So, once a fragrance like, say, spiced pumpkin is deemed marketable, how does Yankee Candle create a pumpkin-spice candle that consumers will want to spend money on? That undertaking begins by collaborating with perfumers who design the smells using what Genson calls “reconstituted chemical raw materials” and natural ingredients. “The perfumer comes back with fragrance proposals and we smell them to evaluate them and make sure they are telling the story we want to tell. And then we do consumer testing to make sure that it’s not something that we actually chose. We ask as many people as possible.”READ MORE: This Is Your Brain on Pumpkin Spice