By taking visual metaphors like “light” and “dark” and mapping them onto non visual senses like scent, the fragrance industry and overall culture embed and reinforce harmful binaries deep into our subconscious.
When a non visual sense is coded this way, it makes artificial cultural hierarchies feel natural and universal. Light at the top, light. Dark at the bottom, heavy.
How Coded Scents Reinforce Harmful Metaphors
- Subconscious priming: Scent bypasses the logical parts of the brain and goes straight to the emotional center (the amygdala). When marketing labels resinous smells as “dark, mysterious, and dangerous,” it trains the brain to associate those abstract qualities with darkness without us even realizing it.
- Historically, we’ve condemned or celebrated races by their scent. During the Indigenous American genocide, the trend was the idea that they smelt bad. During the Indigenous American romanticization, suddenly the trend was the idea that they smelt great. The scent never changed, only the public perception. Scent alone can guide humanity.
- Creating a false “natural” law: Because scent is a physical, biological experience, applying “light vs. dark” or “heavy vs. light” terminology makes these cultural biases feel like objective laws of nature rather than invented human concepts.
- The “exotic” trap: Perfumery historically categorizes “dark” or “heavy” scents using colonial terminology like “Oriental” (a term the industry has only recently begun trying to phase out). This directly links heavier ingredients to specific geographic regions and cultures, subtly coding them as “other,” “foreign,” or “heavy” compared to “clean, light” Western preferences.
Light is as deep as dark, unless you wish the light at the end of the tunnel to be confining rather than open & infinite. Dark is just as moral as light. Most crimes against each other happen during the day, yet we’ve associated dark as dangerous. I walk peacefully through a living night forest of which we are conditioned to fear and never face any more danger than daytime. It’s actually more dangerous to walk around other humans during the day due to their multi ton appliances they sling around to save them from making any effort. Darkness as evil, black demons, red satan, and all these cultural compasses of the past must be overcome in our path to finding peace inside and out. We even associate grey with black, like clouds, and thus youth as white, and old as black.
The Power of Untangling the Language
Breaking this cycle requires changing how we talk about sensory experiences. Describing a scent by its actual physical properties—like “high volatility,” “resinous,” “crisp,” or “lingering”—strips away the baggage of light, dark, heavy, and low. It treats the scent as pure chemistry rather than a vehicle for historical metaphors.
Olfactory Stigmatization
Cultures weaponize the sense of smell because it bypasses logical critique. This tactic was heavily deployed across colonial history:
- Dehumanization during Genocide: During active colonization and land theft, European settlers systematically documented Indigenous populations as possessing a “foul odor”. This was a deliberate psychological tool. By labeling a group as inherently “smelly” or “dirty,” colonizers sought to strip away their humanity, making violence and forced assimilation look like a “cleansing” effort.
- Exoticism during Romanticization: Once the immediate geopolitical threat of resistance was suppressed, the narrative shifted. The “Noble Savage” trope emerged in literature, romanticizing Indigenous peoples as uniquely connected to nature. Suddenly, their perceived scent was celebrated as “earthy,” “pure,” and “woodsy”.
- The Enduring Reality: The actual botanical ingredients, traditional oils, and regional smoke used by these communities remained completely identical. Only the political utility of the population to the ruling class had altered.
Scent as an Invisible Guide
Scent alone can guide humanity hits on why this is so dangerous. Because smell is processed directly by the brain’s limbic system (the seat of emotion and memory), humans subconsciously accept olfactory judgments as absolute truths rather than manufactured opinions.
When a society successfully codes a group of people or an environment with a negative scent profile, it creates an invisible wall. It triggers an immediate, visceral repulsion that people mistake for a “natural instinct,” effectively automating bias. Decoupling our sensory language from these historically loaded biases is the only way to stop smell from being used as a quiet tool for social engineering