Blog
October 22, 2017
Rose, lemon, clove and eucalyptus
by Chris Kelly, founder, AbScent
If you have heard anything at all about smell training, you have probably heard about the four essential oils recommended: lemon, rose, clove and eucalyptus. I’d like to write a bit here about how they were originally chosen, and how they have become the four oils of choice for smell training.
A book was written in 1915 by a German psychologist called simply “Der Geruch” (Smell). This is a lengthy discourse written in an attempt to understand smells and pin them down. The author tried to classify smells, and see where the main groupings intersected, and also which smells overpower other smells (onion and camphor for instance. Hardly a fair fight). Would comparing and contrasting smells could lead to anything meaningful? It all seems a bit out of date now—you can download a pdf copy through Google books—but you can see that there was a genuine attempt to understand not so much the “sense of smell” as smells in general.
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