Grounding through scent
There’s a reason certain smells can stop us in our tracks—science has long linked our sense of smell to emotion and memory, and researchers have explored how specific aromas might shift us toward calm or anxiety. The power of scent is so strong that it is able to take us back in time and even influence mindsets.
I’ve come across two brands that have the goals to help ground us amid a chaotic world. The few moments one has in a day to inhale and breathe deeply is enough to calm our senses and center ourselves.
Fashion designer Dona Lim—known for her timeless designs made with natural fabrics—has ventured into creating Neum, my current favorite shampoo and conditioner.
Then there’s Isabel Mallard, who has been in the field of holistic alignment and healing for many years. She’s the driving force behind Minima Mystica, a line of portable energy-infused oil blends. Both have opened up a world of grounding through scent.
Neum: An invitation to pause, settle, and focus
“It’s not enough just to smell something,” says Lim. “The scent is a cue, but the practice is what you do with that moment.” It’s why she uses fragrance as a trigger to pause, breathe, and either pray or meditate—bringing herself back into the present.
Both practices carry their own research behind them: Meditation has been studied for its effects on attention and emotional regulation, and prayer for its impact on calm, focus, and emotional states.
“I don’t think of the scent as doing the work for you,” she says. “It creates the invitation to pause; prayer, meditation, and intentional breathing are the practice. That philosophy is baked into Neum from the ground up—the scent isn’t there to make the shampoo smell nice. It’s there with intention.”
That same grounding effect, she says, extends beyond emotional regulation into focus. When the mind is overloaded, attention scatters. Settling the nervous system—even briefly—makes it easier to direct attention back to whatever is in front of you. “It’s not that a scent magically makes you productive,” she clarifies. “It can simply help you pause, settle, and focus.”
Research backs the general connection between scent, emotional state, and information processing, but she’s careful to frame it as a transition tool, not a productivity hack.
In practice, that transition can happen almost anywhere. Lim carries an unreleased Neum scent with her nearly everywhere she goes—pulling it out when stress creeps in, whether she’s about to walk into a meeting, settle into a flight, or navigate a harder moment. “I’ve learned that I don’t need to be somewhere perfectly quiet to create that moment for myself,” she says.
Minima Mystica: Scents that engage the senses
I came across Minima Mystica at a workshop where the inhalers and grounding spray were given as gifts. Unable to resist, I opened it up before we were supposed to.
I have never come across a grounding inhaler. I quickly followed Mallard’s account and reached out. It was incredible to have a tiny thing in my pocket that could help ground me within seconds.
Aromatherapy works, Mallard explains, by activating the olfactory receptors when an essential oil is inhaled. The resulting particles send signals to the limbic system—the brain’s emotional center—which governs mood, stress levels, and memory.
Essential oils are also commonly used to help lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety, and support immune function, though she’s careful to add a caveat: “I always suggest people do their own research before they use it for these.” Because for her, the real value of inhalation is that it pulls people out of their heads and back into their bodies.
“We’re engaging one of the senses, which helps with negative states of being,” she says.
That grounding effect, she argues, translates directly into focus and productivity. “When we’re more grounded, we’re more effective and productive overall. We are less reactive and can better direct our awareness and efforts.” One of her blends, Thrive, combines multiple grounding oils alongside programs built around integration and focus—designed to help people direct their energy more intentionally.
Mallard is especially drawn to scent as a tool around sleep and high-stimulation moments. “Definitely before bed, to help one unwind more efficiently and easily,” she says—and just as useful before and after meetings or encounters that leave us more activated than we’d like.
The mechanism, she explains, comes down to breath: Essential oils can be used topically, but inhalation engages the breath in specific ways that activate the parasympathetic nervous system, pulling the body out of fight-or-flight and back toward a neutral baseline.
Research vs. reality
On the question of evidence, Mallard is candid about the murkiness. “There are a lot of studies, but it also depends on which publications you trust,” she says, noting that this tension shows up across many fields—different camps citing different sources, each rejecting the other’s. Her advice is simple: Do your own research, and ultimately trust yourself to choose.
Still, Mallard points to aromatherapy’s growing mainstream footprint as a sign of legitimacy—essential oils showing up in affordable local cleaning products, and hospitals incorporating aromatherapy to complement other treatments.
Lim is also quick to draw a line between what the research actually shows and what it doesn’t. Smell’s link to memory and emotion is well-documented. But there’s a real gap between saying a scent can influence how we feel and claiming it can treat anxiety or any medical condition. “We have to be honest about where the science ends,” she says.
Where scent meets memory
Then there’s the part science can’t fully capture. The smell of rain, a mother’s cooking, a childhood flower, someone’s perfume—all capable of pulling up a feeling almost instantly. Some of that, Lim acknowledges, comes down to memory and association rather than chemistry alone.
“But I don’t think that makes the experience less meaningful. A scent has chemistry, but we bring our memories to it,” she adds. That intersection—of nature, science, ritual, and personal history—is where she sees Neum living.
For both Lim and Mallard, grounding scents are not limited to “earthy” scents. “At Neum, grounding isn’t limited to moss and cedar. We love creating complex, distinctive scents with the depth and evolution of a fine perfume,” Lim says, describing how the brand layers woods, resins, herbs, florals, and brighter top notes into fragrances that shift and unfold over time.
Because scent is so personal, one aroma might settle one person while energizing or transporting another entirely. “A fragrance isn’t just one note. It develops, it has depth, and we each experience it differently,” Lim adds. It’s why the goal was never simply to make shampoo smell good by default—it was to build scent with intention, and let it be beautiful, too.
Mallard also takes an expansive view. “I personally think all essential oils can be potentially grounding,” she says, though she concedes that resin-, tree-, and bark-derived oils tend to carry a more inherent groundedness. Beyond that, she frames grounding as something fundamentally personal. For her, it means “getting out of my head and more into my body, into the present, into a more integrated state of being.”
A quick inhale of a scent, a long meaningful exhale, and we are brought back to ourselves.
Get your grounding scents at Minima Mystica @minimamystica and Neum @neumwellness on Instagram. You may also check out Neum’s website at www.neum.store
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