Scent is a vessel for memory - it anchors moments, marks thresholds and carries meaning beyond the present.
I’ve been thinking about how we mark meaning in a world that moves too fast.
This began as research for a candle, but it became something else entirely.
For as long as humans have created flame, we’ve used it to mark what matters.
Before clocks, candles divided the day; before electricity, they carried meaning as well as light. A single flame could signal prayer, mourning, protection, or the presence of the sacred. In temples and homes alike, the act of lighting was a decision: this is the threshold between before and after.
The candle was never just about visibility; it was about attention.
It turned the invisible into the seen, the ordinary into ceremony.
In medieval Europe, candles were lit to mark the canonical hours, structuring the day around small pauses for reflection. In synagogues, the eternal lamp burns as a reminder of continuity. In domestic life, the flame once anchored the family, a literal and emotional centre.
When we light a candle now, we often think of it as atmosphere. But the gesture is the same: a way of distinguishing one moment from another. It’s the smallest possible architecture of ritual, a boundary, a recalibration of focus.
The ancient link between flame and meaning has a parallel in the body: the way scent operates inside the brain.
Unlike sight or sound, smell bypasses the usual relay stations of perception. It travels directly from the nose to the limbic system - the region governing memory and emotion. That proximity makes scent neurologically unique: it doesn’t pass through analysis before it becomes feeling.
We register scent before we understand it.
That’s why a smell can take us back to childhood, or to someone long gone, with a clarity that’s almost physical. Psychologists call it autobiographical odor memory… a term that sounds clinical but describes something profoundly intimate. Studies show that scent-evoked memories are both older and more emotionally vivid than those triggered by any other sense. They reach the parts of us that language can’t.
Scent, then, is data.
It stores information in emotional form - a neurological marker that links presence with memory. This is why incense, resins and anointing oils were so central to ancient ritual: burning them was a way of embedding meaning into the body.
When you combine scent with flame, you bring together two of the oldest rituals for marking significance.
The light defines time; the fragrance defines experience. One structures the outer world, the other imprints the inner. Together they create a feedback loop between matter and mind - a sensory conversation that’s been happening for millennia.
What’s changed isn’t the medium but the meaning we assign to it.
Industrial light and synthetic fragrance turned these sensory tools into products - efficient, replaceable, ambient. But the impulse behind them hasn’t disappeared. We still reach for light when we need focus. We still respond to scent when we need grounding. It’s an old intelligence resurfacing in new forms.
Lighting a candle, in that sense, isn’t aesthetic. It’s a neurological intervention - a way of re-teaching the body how to locate itself.
The flame measures time; the scent holds memory.
Together they create a point of return - a physical marker that reminds the body where it is and reconnects you to the present moment.
This is the foundation of Louise Salaun: objects designed for reconnection.
Each one a sensory anchor - something to hold, to wear, to feel - a reminder of the quiet intelligence already within you.
The Ritual Candle is an exploration of how scent becomes signal for that.
Discover Ritual Candle 01
