Are you serious about your fragrance? Do you obsess over how your home smells? Me, too. I use an aroma diffuser because it covers my whole home with my favorite fragrance. For years, I used everything from plugins and candles to room sprays, however, they never lasted, I wanted my house to smell great all the time like resort lobbies would when I would walk into a resort that uses a professional Aroma Diffuser.
Our Home Unit 101 Aroma Diffusion Machine uses the same technology that the big commercial scenting machines do; it diffuses atomized fragrance oil directly into the air just like the commercial Aroma Diffusers.
The most fun part of all this, of course, is selecting your ideal fragrance. Why not do it like the resorts do? Here’s how world-class resorts develop their signature fragrances for making their casinos, lobbies, and other public areas smell great. There are three main steps involved...
First, take a look at your design and décor.
What types of fragrances come to mind when you consider the different design elements of your home? For example, is your home open and airy, or warm and cozy? Are your walls shades of white or do you use sharp colors? Is your flooring light tile, dark wood, or lush carpet? How about when you consider your décor? Do you have rich leather overstuffed sofas or minimalist seating with decorative throw pillows? Are your walls lined with pictures, or mostly bare? What types of images appear in the artwork and pictures in your home? What types of plants do you keep in your home or in the garden that are visible from the windows? This exercise is very helpful in allowing fragrance types to come to mind.
Second, consider the mood that you want to promote with your scent.
Fragrances enhance mood because our sense of smell is our most primitive sense and our olfactory nerve is directly connected to the limbic part of our brain, which 
drives emotion, affinity, and long-term memory.
We all want to be happy, right? The good news here is that any pleasant-smelling scent will promote happiness. But, what if we wanted to emphasize a certain feeling? Think about what that feeling is that you want to promote the most, and let the fragrance elements come to mind. If you need some help visualizing, here are some well-known associations between the main types of fragrance ingredients and mood:
Citrus scents like lemon, orange, bergamot, and grapefruit = health and vitality;
Floral scents like jasmine, rose, white peony, and gardenia = love, and togetherness;
Herbal scents like mint, rosemary, and thyme = raised cognition and optimism;
Clean scents like blossoms, linen, and powder = clean and safe;
Woody scents like cedar, sandalwood, and clove = natural and adventurous;
Modern scents like musk, leather, and fir = wealth and power;
Vanilla Amber scents like brown sugar, crème, and spice rum = comfortable and cozy;
Fruity & Tropical scents like nectarine, plum, and hibiscus = carefree and vivacious;
Resin scents like myrrh, frankincense, and pine = traditional and homey;
Edible & Seasonal scents like cinnamon, cocoa, pine needles = festive and indulging.
There are a lot of crossovers here, so just because you avoid one type of ingredient in your fragrance does not mean that you will not reap those benefits. Professional-grade fragrances like the ones used at the resorts listed on Aroma Retail’s fragrance page are complex and carry many of these types of ingredients in each fragrance. The idea here is to select one based on which ingredients are prominent.
The third step in selecting your ideal scent is to consider your preferences.
Resorts will consider their target demographics when doing this exercise. Perhaps you could consider your favorite people that you would expect to be guests in your home as well—which types of scent do you think they would prefer?
Do yourself a favor here… never say never to a fragrance ingredient, even if it ranks low on your preference scale. Finding your ideal scent is all about combinations. For example, I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people say that they “cannot stand” vanilla, then fall in love with Aria’s Asian Garden with its floriental blend of Jasmine, Lily of the Valley and Tuberose with Vanilla, Amber and Soft Woods. On the other side of the spectrum, people will say “it has to be floral”, then fall in love with Mandarin Oriental’s Green Bamboo with its luxurious, fresh and clean blend of Bamboo Woods, Crisp Bergamot, Melon Rind, and Green Floral notes.
Using the main types of fragrance ingredients, you can use a scale like this to organize your thoughts:
After considering your design/décor, mood enhancement goals, and preferences, you can peruse the fragrance descriptions for each fragrance on our fragrance page, or even use the search button in the header of www.aromaretail.com to enter ingredients or keywords that you would like to see in the description of your ideal scent. If you’re still stuck, by all means, reach out to us in the contact section. We love to be part of our customer’s scent selection journey. Just tell us what you are looking for, or give us a summary of your design/décor, mood enhancement goal, and preferences, and we would be delighted to make some recommendations.
Let’s talk about that Aroma Diffuser a bit more.
An Aroma Diffuser that connects to the ventilation system is sometimes used in commercial applications because the air conditioners are always running in resorts and most other retail stores. HVAC-connected scenting machines (scent machines connected to the air conditioning or ventilation system) in homes and many stores or offices do not work that well because the air conditioning is connected to a thermostat that turns the fan on and off as needed. When you do not have airflow in your ventilation system, you are not getting the fragrance. Instead, the fragrance is building up in the ductwork. When the air finally comes on, you get a big punch in the nose from all that built up fragrance. In a worse case, where the air conditioning fan stays off for a long time or for many periods of time, the fragrance could build up so much that it turns the dust in the duct to slime. It’s a great-smelling slime, but it’s still slime that could leak and cause dust to build up much quicker.
This is why homes, and many businesses, for that matter, use freestanding or wall-mounted Aroma Diffuser like the Home Unit 101 Aroma Diffusion Machine. When the Aroma Diffuser is there in the room with you, it is much easier to change the settings and the fragrance oil.
I am asked about HVAC-connected Aroma Diffusers quite often, and I have two pieces of advice:
First, be sure you really need the larger machine and fragrance going through your air vents.
This is like wanting a big commercial mixer in your kitchen rather than a countertop mixer that would do the same job on a smaller scale. If you are concerned about hitting all the rooms of your home, you could always pop in another machine for the larger rooms like your basement game room, or just put a reed diffuser in the bedrooms and bathrooms. This is actually why Aroma Retail provides reed diffusers, room sprays and candles using the same fragrances that are used in the most popular resort Aroma Diffusers. Another important point to keep in mind is that hotels do not have fragrance going into the rooms where guests sleep, as most people prefer not to sleep in a scented environment.
Second, be sure you are ready to commit to the installation and maintenance involved in having an HVAC-connected Aroma Diffuser. Whatever you do, never NEVER connect a scent machine to your ventilation system if you do not have a reliable air sensor switch to cut power to the scent machine’s air pump motor whenever your fan is not running. Also, make sure you do not install your Aroma Diffuser right before your heating/cooling elements as it might cause problems with your air conditioning system.
My home is open/airy, somewhere between traditional and contemporary, I like green plants and fresh-cut flowers, I want to prioritize feeling clean healthy and comfortable in my home, I prefer citrus and floral blends with a twist of comfy musk, so I use Social House’ Bright Sunshine with its very complex blend of everything from grapefruit to jasmine to sandalwood.
I also want my scent products to be no-nonsense-easy to set up and operate, so I use the Home Unit 101 Aroma Diffusion Machine in the main area of my home, and I have a beautiful reed diffuser in each one of my bathrooms. The Home Unit 101 Scent Machine is mounted between my kitchen, family room, and entry. I did switch it up a bit with the reed diffusers and went with Wynn’s Asian Lily for the bathrooms. Who knows, I might even change the fragrance in my scent machine to something more seasonal like Monte Carlo’s Pomegranate & Sage for the holidays.
So, there you have it! You’re ready to scent like a pro!
Play it safe, save time and money, and don’t sacrifice quality or settle on a humdrum scent. Start with a reliable and simple aroma diffuser like the Home Unit 101, pick a fragrance to start with, and get some sample blotters of other fragrances that interest you in case you want to change things up later.
Most importantly, enjoy your great-smelling home 🙂
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