Kids Smell Sweet Orange as Sharply as You Do. They Just Can’t Name It Yet

Children rarely comment on how a room smells. So when one of them stops in the doorway and says it smells amazing, the scent has done something worth noticing.

The Review That Made Us Smile

A Dark Radiance owner wrote to us less than a month after their Nebulizing Diffuser® arrived. Most of the note was about pure oil and how the room smelled, but one line stayed with us: “Even my school age[r] said how amazing my room smelled and we all know kids aren’t typically concerned with such matters.” A second unit went into the family room soon afterward. That small moment says something true about how children smell the world.

They Smell It as Well as You Do. They Just Can’t Name It Yet

In 1995, William Cain and colleagues tested people across the whole lifespan. Children aged 8 to 14 picked up faint odors just as well as young adults did. When asked to name everyday smells without hints, though, they scored about the same as elderly adults. Their noses were fine. What they were missing was vocabulary, the store of smell names that builds up slowly over a lifetime.

Adults aren’t as good at this as we might think. Unprompted, most people name fewer than half of familiar household smells correctly. Psychologists Harry Lawless and Trygg Engen called this the “tip-of-the-nose” feeling. Unlike a word on the tip of your tongue, you usually can’t recall even its first letter. A name, a memory, or a hint is what unlocks it. So “it smells amazing” is what a child’s nose says when it has noticed everything but doesn’t yet have the word.

A Name-the-Room Game for Dark November Evenings

Pick one familiar oil, such as sweet orange, and run it on low in the family room for about fifteen minutes before dinner. Keep the door open and the unit out of small hands. Don’t ask your child what the oil is. Ask what it reminds them of. Then hand them a curl of real orange peel and let them connect the two. Write their word on a little card, whether it’s “Grandma’s kitchen” or “sunshine,” and keep the cards in a jar. Over a winter you’re building their smell vocabulary one evening at a time. With younger children, keep to gentle oils and skip mint and eucalyptus. If you’re curious, here’s why sweet orange suits these short November days.

Here’s to the small noses in your home, and every word they find for the scents they love.
Warmly,
Chad