Why we start with breath
Wellbeing
Before a single drop touches skin, there's a ritual of breath.
It's easy to miss, because it takes no time at all. You unscrew the cap, and before the oil ever reaches your fingertips, you've already breathed it in. That half-second matters more than most of what follows.
Scent reaches the brain first
Of all the senses, smell has the strangest, most direct route into the brain. Sight, sound, taste and touch are all relayed through the thalamus — a kind of switchboard that filters and forwards signals before they reach the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. Smell skips that step entirely.
The olfactory bulb, which processes scent, sits with direct access to the amygdala and hippocampus — the brain's centres for emotion and memory. In practical terms, that means a smell can trigger a feeling or a memory before you've consciously registered what you're smelling at all. This is why a particular scent can put you back in a specific room, a specific year, before you've had time to think about it.
It's also why scent is such a direct route to calm. A racing mind is, in part, a body stuck in a stress response — and scent has a faster way of speaking to that system than words, or even sight, ever will.
The rituals we borrowed
This isn't a new discovery. Long before neuroscience gave it a name, smoke rituals were being used across very different cultures for exactly this reason.
In the Middle East, the burning of woods and resins — oud, frankincense, myrrh — has for centuries marked the boundary between one part of the day and the next: a welcome, a farewell, a moment of pause. In Old England, the tradition looked different but served a similar purpose — herbs and dried plants smoked over a fire, smouldering in a room to mark an occasion or settle a household.
Neither tradition needed to explain the neuroscience to know it worked. The ritual of smoke, and the pause it demanded, was the point.
Building that pause into a formula
When I built Menteath, I wanted to bring those two traditions together not as decoration, but as the actual mechanism of the product. Every blend starts with an aromatic profile chosen as carefully as the skincare ingredients beneath it, because the scent isn't an afterthought. It's doing the first part of the work, in the seconds before the oil ever reaches your skin.
That's also why we ask people to pause before applying — to breathe in before smoothing anything into the skin. It sounds like a small instruction, but it's the part of the ritual doing the most.
A small thing to try
Next time you reach for a facial oil, body oil, or anything with a scent you like, try this: before you apply anything, hold the bottle a few centimetres from your nose and take two slow breaths. Notice what happens in your shoulders, your jaw, the pace of your breathing. Then apply as usual.
It won't fix a hard day. But it might, for a moment, interrupt it — and that interruption is often enough.
Curious about the science behind our specific blends? We'll be covering individual aromatic profiles — and what each is chosen to do — throughout the month on the Journal.
