Rose oil is good for numerous things beginning with every letter in the alphabet, Liz Breslin writes.
It happened, literally, overnight. One day I was a ‘‘wake up and chug the coffee'' kind of chick, the next, I'm floored by the lure of floral tea.
Rose tea, to be precise. With vanilla. It's the scent or the flavour of it, way more than the taste. Flavour being smell plus taste, don't you know. I want to drink it, sniff it, slather it on my skin. I'm not sure if this new obsession dates back to the day I inhaled from one of the Damascene beauties at the new Cardrona Distillery. But it could well be so.
What's in a smell? We may not think of smell as a primary sense and yet it could be the most primal.
Scientists reckon that even single-cell organisms have the ability to detect their surroundings by some sort of olfactory trickery. As animals, we're pretty far down the scent-smell chain. We've got only around six million scent cell receptor things to a dog's cool 22 mill. And they don't even make the top 10 of sniffability in some lists. Bears. They can smell honey or the honeys they're after from 3km away. Moles. Some of them can smell in stereo. Seriously.
Anyway, not that I want to go around sniffing out roses like a Labrador snuffles up to awkward areas and nor do I want to turn into a talc-loving comfy-cardy-wearing slipper-shuffler just yet. But it's amazing how helplessly we can be led by our olfactory whatsits. The complexity of a sense system that allows us to register, yearn for and act on the subtlest of sensory cues.
We can, literally, be led by the nose.Those devious businesses that pump the fake smells into retail spaces know all about that.
In one experiment, coffee sales at a mini-market went up more than 300% when some sneaky coffee scenting was introduced. It works for manufactured cinnamon essence in bakeries, a whiff of artificial chocolate in a lolly shop, and, intriguingly, eau de pina colada pumping through a toyshop. Makes the parents happy to linger, apparently. An olfactory mind-flip. Like this: Hey, this shop makes me feel like I'm on holiday, somewhere hot. Here, kids, take the credit card. I'll be by the pool.
Smells can move us to emotion, to memory. Bacon on the point of crisping gives my nostrils warm fuzzies of historical hangovers and camping trips.
And I've been told about one of those molecular gastronomy restaurants where the smell of the pine needle icecream brings diners to tears in reminiscence of all their Christmases past. My only olfactory association would be like this: Pine needles. Yuck. Get the broom. Or the vacuum cleaner. Just saying.
Maybe that's why my body is telling me on some deep and Hawea Flat-hippy level that I need to wake up and smell the roses. And how lucky am I that I live in a place and a time and a mindset that I can even notice sensory cues?
Rose oil is good for numerous things beginning with every letter in the alphabet, as far as I can work out from all the very reputable online sources I've trawled. It benefits bits of me I can't identify, spell or pronounce. It also seems to be anti-everything-bad, which is simply, well, rosy. It's also cheering to note that since my olfactory system is being so astute, it bodes well for my life expectancy.
A 2014 study found out that ‘‘olfactory dysfunction is a harbinger of five-year mortality'' in the slipper-shuffling talc-lovers age bracket. The conclusion? Those who literally can't smell the roses any more are literally more than three times as likely as rose-smellers to not wake up at all in the next five years. Harbingers of doom, y'all. Thanks.
Sans smell, sans taste, sans everything. Imagine a world without smells. It's definitely unsettling. I need something antidepressing, astringent, bactericidal, cicatrizing and calming.
I think I'll have myself a lovely cup of rose Rosie Lee.
