Educational articles

Laimė Kiškūnė / Photo by K. Petrikonytė

In Western culture, people tend to evaluate each sense separately, compartmentalizing them as if into distinct boxes. In reality, a scent doesn’t exist in isolation - it exists within the context of other senses. One sense triggers responses in others, creating something extraordinary, wonderful, and aesthetic. (...)

I recall an experience from childhood when I was flipping through a collection of paintings by the 20th-century Swiss artist Paul Klee. While looking at the images, I seemed to feel their textures, sense their scents, and perceive their taste, viscosity, and density. In short, I experienced a multitude of dimensions. I used to think, "How did this artist perceive the world so marvelously?" Back then, I didn’t understand that I was the one perceiving the world in that way and was capable of reading that information. Later, I learned that Paul Klee was a synesthete.

We are probably most familiar with the synesthesia of sound and color since it has been widely studied. Lithuania’s own M.K. Čiurlionis was a synesthete - he thought in sounds while painting and thought in colors while composing music. I deeply admire Čiurlionis and often travel to Kaunas to see his paintings. When I was crafting a perfume inspired by mimosa flowers, the scent somehow shaped a yellow-green, brownish-gold hue in my mind, and I immediately envisioned Čiurlionis’s painted Sonata - air bursting through gates, swallows darting about. Even earlier, while looking at his paintings, I would seem to smell a hint of mimosa, even before I knew what they smelled like. His paintings evoked that hue, that scent, which I later captured in the perfume bottle. (...)

Synesthesia isn’t exclusive to brilliant artists. In the scent seminars I conducted - fragrance contemplations - we would smell a particular scent, and participants would share their impressions. They could describe the scent with precision. For instance, they might envision white flowers even if the scent was entirely unfamiliar to them. Others would see yellow or blue flowers, often associating the scent with a color. Some people perceived scents as textures, such as green velvet or rough brown wool. These are clear examples of synesthetic experiences, where the modality of one sensory channel triggers a response in another. (...)

It is said that the ability to perceive and “translate” these experiences from one sense to another is a divine gift, granted to only a few. However, I believe there are far more people capable of this than commonly thought.

Excerpt from the podcast “The Table of Aesthetics”: https://www.gilu.media/tinklalaides/