How Scented Candles Affect Your Home

    Scented candles can do much more than just add to the ambiance in a room, they can change the way you perceive it. No, they can't magically turn your eight-by-ten room into a palace, but just like big windows and high ceilings, the right scent can make a room feel a bit more spacious. And that's just the beginning of what decorating with scent can do.
    To learn all about the scented candles and how their scents can affect a room, I visited Yankee Candle, the self proclaimed "Scenter of the Universe," and talked with Rick Ruffolo, the senior vice president of brand, marketing and innovation at Yankee Candle. I was told Rick's title could be shortened to Chief Scent Officer, and after talking with him for just a few minutes, I could see why he had that title. His knowledge about scents and scented candles was impressive, and thankfully, also very useful to know when decorating. So, here's what I learned from Rick.

Don't Neglect Your Scent:

    Your sense of smell is very powerful, yet often overlooked. When was the last time you really thought about how your home smells, and what its smell says about your home? Is it communicating what you want it to?
    "When you walk into a person's home, before you actually see their home, and see what's going on inside the home, the décor, the color, what's going on, the music, you actually smell their home," Rick explained. "And it sounds odd, but smelling their home is what you immediately do naturally, you breath and you smell and you walk in, and you make an immediate impression."
    Just as the colors, textures, artwork and lighting can make a good or bad impression; scent does the same thing. So, don't let chance dictate the scent of your home. You need to think of decorating with scent the same way as you pick out colored pillows for your couch. Match the feeling and style of your home as well as the season.

Selecting Your Scent:

    When selecting a scent you should consider two things, how much you personally like it and what that scent communicates. The most significant being how much you like the way something smells.
    "I really think that the most important thing you need to do is make sure that it's something you like," Rick said. "So, you should ask yourself some questions. What are the things you like? So, if you like fruit, for an example, or you like flowers, and not everybody likes flowers, and do you like to cook, do you like baking scents?"
    Asking yourself about the type of things you like will give you a general idea of the type of scents that you'll find pleasing. After you've narrowed the field to scents you personally find pleasing, next you need to think about how that scent will affect your home.
    "So, now people buy candles to create an environment, an ambiance in their homes that they like," Rick said. "So, I would encourage people to think what you want, how do you want your house to be transported or transformed."

Manipulating Spaces With Scents:

     There's no need to tear down a wall to add a couple feet to your room or repaint you walls to add extra intimacy, just add a little scent. Now, I know your dying to know which scents do what, so I'll get right to it.
    "There are a number of [scents that increase the perceived size of a room], but most of them tend to be in the floral and fresh families," Rick explained "So, fresh families would be things like Island Spa or Sun and Sand and the whole idea of the breezy, clean cotton, there's this feeling of openness and open air. And the way most of them are named are outdoor spaces and things having to do with Spring.
    "Now, things that give you a warm and cozy feel are fragrances in the food family or in the spice family," Rick said. "So a Buttercream or a Vanilla or some of our spices, like Cinnamon Stick. Those tend to be more powerful fragrances, but they also tend to be fragrances that make you feel warm and cozy, and that intimacy that is created with that makes that room feel like you're not all the way across the hall."
    As Rick explained it to me, there is some science to this, but it also has to do with our associations. So, picking out scents to change the appearance of your room is fairly intuitive. Light and airy scents make your room bigger, while warm and spicy scents make your room cozier.

Mixing the Many Scents:

    Don't think that you're stuck with just one scent for your entire house, you can mix and match scents just like you do with other home accents. And just like those other accents, although some things match better than others, there really are no hard-and-fast rules to follow.
    "The ideas is that you want fragrances that have a nice flow," Rick explained. "You don't want to necessarily mix and match just any fragrance. But, believe it or not, fragrances are pretty flexible. You can put a floral and with a food and it works. If  you think about menus. If you go to a lot of the more leading edge restaurants these days they're combining edible florals with the food, and they're putting spices in with things that you wouldn't normally spice up, and that whole same feel of that culinary arts, you can kind of translate to fragrance."