The Scent that Remains
From ancient rituals to neuroscience, scent has always occupied a space between presence and absence.
There are things we keep because they still seem to contain something of someone.
A shirt. A pillow. A bottle of perfume. A room left almost exactly as it was.
Their physical presence may be gone, yet something remains in the air.
Long before science began to understand the relationship between smell, emotion and memory, human beings were already turning to scent at moments of death, transition and remembrance. Across thousands of years, fragrance has appeared again and again in the rituals we create around absence.
Perhaps because scent has an unusual quality: it cannot be held, yet it can make something feel present.
When scent became ritual
The relationship between fragrance and death reaches deep into antiquity.
In Ancient Egypt, incense was not simply used to perfume a space. Historical accounts of its religious use describe it as an integral part of temple ceremonies, funerary rites and offerings to the gods. From the Old Kingdom onward, scenes in tombs and temples depict priests burning incense before gods and kings, while aromatic substances such as myrrh and frankincense became closely associated with purification and the sacred.
The material itself seems almost perfectly suited to ritual.
A precious resin is placed onto fire. Its physical form disappears. What remains is invisible, but unmistakably present: smoke, fragrance, something that moves upward and fills the surrounding air.
Incense therefore became more than an object. It became an intermediary between what could be touched and what could not.
The gesture survived even as religions and cultures changed.
In Christian liturgy, incense came to signify prayer rising toward God, while during the Catholic funeral rite the casket may be incensed as a gesture of blessing, purification and honour toward the deceased. The symbolism is different from that of Ancient Egypt, yet the sensory act remains strikingly familiar: fragrance accompanies the moment in which a physical presence becomes an absence.
Across millennia, we continue to burn something precious when someone leaves.
But what if the power of that gesture is not entirely symbolic?
When ritual meets neuroscience
In 2008, a study published in The FASEB Journal investigated a fascinating biological dimension of frankincense.
Researchers including Arieh Moussaieff and Raphael Mechoulam examined incensole acetate, a constituent of Boswellia resin — the resin traditionally burned as frankincense.
They discovered that incensole acetate activates TRPV3, an ion channel whose role had previously been associated particularly with the perception of warmth in the skin, but whose mRNA is also found in neurons throughout the brain.
In experiments conducted on mice, the compound produced behavioural effects described by the researchers as anxiolytic-like and antidepressive-like. These effects were not observed in mice lacking functional TRPV3 channels, leading the researchers to suggest that TRPV3 may play a role in emotional regulation.
The distinction is important: this was a preclinical animal study. It does not demonstrate that burning incense treats anxiety or depression in humans.
What it does reveal is more subtle — and perhaps more interesting.
A substance that has been burned for millennia during religious and ceremonial practices contains a molecule capable of interacting with biological pathways associated with emotional behaviour. The authors themselves proposed that the biochemical and pharmacological properties of incensole acetate might provide one possible biological dimension to deeply rooted cultural and religious traditions.
Science does not prove that ancient cultures understood this mechanism.
But it raises another possibility: that long before we could describe receptors, molecules and neural pathways, human beings had already learned — through experience — that certain scents could change the emotional atmosphere of a moment.
The ritual came first.
The explanation came thousands of years later.
The olfactory presence of a person
There is, however, another relationship between scent and absence that requires no incense at all.
It begins with the smell of a person.
In their 2023 paper Grief, Smell and the Olfactory Air of a Person, published in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, philosophers Becky Millar and Louise Richardson examine something surprisingly common among people experiencing bereavement: smelling the clothes, pillows, perfumes or possessions of someone who has died in order to feel close to them.
Their argument moves beyond the familiar idea that smell simply triggers memories.
Sometimes, they suggest, an odour does not merely remind us of an experience we shared with someone.
It seems to bring us closer to the person themselves.
Millar and Richardson describe this dimension as a person's “olfactory air” — the distinctive way in which smell allows us to experience another human being as a physical body situated within an environment.
This may be one reason why scent feels fundamentally different from looking at a photograph.
An image shows us someone.
A scent occupies our space.
It enters the same air we breathe.
And because the smell associated with someone can remain on fabric, bedding or personal objects after their death, the sensory experience itself can continue even when its original source is no longer present. Millar and Richardson argue that this can create what they call an olfactory form of a continuing bond with the deceased.
Among the experiences discussed in their research are people preserving shirts and pillows, returning to a loved one's perfume or aftershave, or wearing their clothing simply to experience that familiar smell again.
An everyday object becomes something else.
An olfactory relic.
Can a presence be preserved?
What happens when we try to preserve that trace before it disappears?
In 2015, Smithsonian Magazine reported the story of French entrepreneur Katia Apalategui, whose idea began with a deeply personal observation.
After her father died, she watched her mother hold on to his pillowcase because it still carried his smell. Apalategui began wondering whether that invisible trace could somehow be preserved.
She eventually connected with Géraldine Savary, a chemist specialising in scent at the University of Le Havre.
According to the report, Savary and her team developed a process using a person's clothing as the starting material, extracting around one hundred odour molecules from the fabric and reconstructing them in perfume form.
The idea almost reverses the traditional purpose of perfume.
Normally, we select a fragrance and gradually make it part of ourselves. It becomes associated with our skin, our clothes and eventually the memory others have of us.
Here, the process moves in the opposite direction.
The person becomes the perfume.
Fragrance is no longer being used to create an identity.
It is being asked to preserve one.
What remains
An Egyptian censer, a Catholic funeral, a laboratory studying Boswellia, a shirt kept inside a wardrobe and a perfume reconstructed from someone's clothing appear, at first, to belong to entirely different worlds.
Yet they circle around the same human intuition.
Scent seems uniquely able to exist between presence and absence.
Ancient rituals used aromatic smoke to accompany moments of death and transition. Neuroscience has begun to identify biological interactions hidden within substances used in some of those rituals. Philosophy is questioning why the smell of another person can sustain an unusual sense of closeness after they are gone. And contemporary perfumery has even experimented with capturing that olfactory trace before time erases it.
Perhaps this is what makes scent different from the other traces we leave behind.
A photograph remains still.
A letter waits to be read.
But scent has to be breathed.
For a moment, something that belongs to the past enters the present again.
At Esprit de Vie, we explore fragrance not simply as something we smell, but as a language through which spaces, bodies and memories continue to speak.
Because sometimes what remains of a person is not something we can see.
Sometimes, it is simply something still present in the air.
Explore the world of Esprit de Vie
https://espritdevieparesthernigro.com/collections/scents
Sources
Wikipedia
Religious Use of Incense (Ancient Egypt section) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_use_of_incenseEncyclopaedia Britannica, “Incense”
Funeral Rites and Liturgy
https://www.britannica.com/topic/incenseCommunio, “The Catholic Use of Incense”
Incensing of the Coffin during the Funeral Mass
https://communio.stblogs.org/?p=27980Sun Journal, Celebrating the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul
A Comparative History of Incense
https://new.sunjournal.com/?p=2043598ScienceDaily
Burning Incense Is Psychoactive (2008)
https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080520110415.htmThe FASEB Journal, Moussaieff et al.
Incensole acetate elicits psychoactivity by activating TRPV3 channels
DOI: 10.1096/fj.07-101865
https://cris.huji.ac.il/en/publications/incensole-acetate-an-incense-component-elicits-psychoactivity-by/Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Millar & Richardson
Grief, Smell and the Olfactory Air of a Person (2023)
https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/grief_smell.pdfSmithsonian Magazine
Eau de Death: Perfumer Develops Scents Based on Dead Loved Ones
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/perfume-smells-your-dead-loved-one-180955106/
