“Everything from washing powder to
fabric softener contains perfume, designed
to create a sense of cleanliness.”
The smell of success
We hear from Miele Professional about why a clean smell is important in the hospitality and care industries.
How can a smell affect your memory? Do particular smells make you think of home or evoke feelings of safety and security? There has been much research in this area by notable professors and psychologists linking smell to a wide range of different emotions.
However, the link between smelling clean and the reassurance of knowing that something is clean has never been more important than it is now as we face the effects of COVID-19.
Smell is more closely linked to memory than any other sense but it’s highly personal. A pleasant smell to one person can be awful to another: for example, farmyard smells might evoke pleasant memories for someone who grew up on or near a farm whereas others might find these smells unpleasant or overpowering. As well as being closely linked to memory, smell is also highly emotive. The perfume industry is built on the ability of a smell to evoke an emotional response.
However, this is not the only industry that strives to evoke positive memories with smell. The laundry industry has spent a lot of time, money and effort to create smells that evoke positive emotions and suggest to us that laundered clothing and other textiles are clean. Everything from washing powder to fabric softener contains perfume, designed to create a sense of cleanliness.
There’s a formula somewhere between the pungent smell associated with cleaning products such as bleach, and the subtle perfumed fragrance of fabric softeners, that signals to us that a product is clean. Miele Professional’s new ProCare Tex range provides this reassurance, particularly when coupled with a commercial washing machine.
The way we form an association with smell may have something to do with the strong emotions experienced when faced with that smell again. The olfactory bulb that processes incoming smells lies close to two brain areas strongly implicated in emotion and memory: the amygdala
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and hippocampus. None of our other senses pass close to these areas and it’s likely these areas are most responsible for triggering memories linked to smells.
Behavioural Psychologist Jo Hemmings said: “Our reaction to smell is associative – it’s linked to our individual experiences, very frequently formed in infancy or early childhood, when we are our most impressionable to smell – and so we continue to have a strong conditioned auto- response – or trigger – to smells, good and bad, for the rest of our lives.”
The link is particularly important in hospitality and sectors where smells associated with cleanliness are important to reassure that an establishment can provide to its residents or customers. A clean, hygienic smell is reassuring, particularly at a time when anything less than clean could potentially be harmful to us. In hotels, this could be the smell associated with fresh bedding; in a restaurant the smell of the table linen reinforces what the eye can see; and in care it could be the smell of clean clothing.
A psychological link between a clean smell and imagined reassurance of hygienic cleanliness is vital. Jo Hemmings continued: “Research has shown that not only does our mood improve around a clean smell – especially that of clothes, ambient air, towels and bedding – it also increases our pro-social behaviour. For example, we are more likely to help strangers, neighbours or friends as a result of the uplift in our mood. This clear link between a clean smell and our resulting mood and behaviour, both decreases anxiety and promotes self-care as well as giving us comfort, optimism and reassurance.”
Miele Professional recently launched its new range of Little Giants for the hospitality and care sectors. To prevent the spread of infection, all models within the range have disinfection programmes which hold temperatures of 85°C/15 minutes, 60°C/20 minutes, and 40°C/20 minutes.
www.miele.co.uk/professional twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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