[link] How To Make Homemade Glycerin Soap

Hello Natural has shared an easy tutorial to make a homemade glycerin soap with herbs and spices here. I definitely have to try this one! :-)

(via Make)

[link] cancelling pungent smells

A couple of researchers have claimed that they can produce a mixture that can cancel the pungent smells, or olfactory white - equivalent to white noise and white light.

Brothers Kush and Lav Varshney said that they have created a mathematical model that predicts how humans perceive the smell of a particular substance based on its physical and chemical properties, by matching a database of compounds to another of perceived smells.

Theoretically, canceling smells with smells should work because human perception of smell is synthetic, not analytic. That means that when human brains encounter multiple odors, they don't perceive them as a weighted mix. So it's not like, "Oh hey, this is 50 percent dairy compounds, plus 48 percent mild squash, plus two percent tree bark." Instead, human brains mush everything together: Smells like pumpkin pie!

To cancel out a smell, they calculate which compounds provide the opposite ratings, giving a zero score across the board. Previous research has shown that an equal blend of around 30 compounds creates "white smell".

Read the full articles here:
White noise for your nose cancels pungent aromas at New Scientist, and
How To Make 'Noise-Cancelling Headphones" For Your Nose" at Popular Science

Nusantara International Tea Festival

The Tea Festival was actually not a part of the KTCF 2014, but I was so excited that the two events took place at the same time so I could just drop by and drink some tea. Well actually, drink a lot of tea - I drank too much tea that day that I could not sleep until the next morning.

Anyway, I was just so excited to know that there was finally a tea festival in the middle of this coffee-dominated era. I particularly liked the booth of Oza Tea House, a new tea parlour in Bandung. The booth displayed all sorts of tea, from White Silver Needle Tea to Earl Grey to Vanilla. I could even smell most of the different kinds of tea, and I really loved their premium tea - the white silver needle tea (which has a very soft, soothing smell) and the Grey Dragon (with a rich, fresh fruity smell). I was sort on cash unfortunately, so I could only buy the white tea ;-)

And all of their products were nicely packed like foreign tea packages. The premium teas were even nicer - they were put in small vacuumed bottles so you were sure that the smells and freshness did not leave the tea leaves.

Titing and I also made a visit to the "Incredible India" booth, where the Tea Board of India served three kinds of tea: Darjeeling, Nilgiri, and Assam, all based on the regions they came from. The Assam tea was probably the most special, because it was planted on the low lands, near sea level, instead of the hills like the two other teas. It also had a rather stronger flavour.

We also went to had a look at the other booths, where we had a look at the Chrysanthemum buds and matcha powder, and later bought a bottle of cold Chrysanthemum tea to refresh ourselves.

Last but not least, surely I had to take a photo with this awesome quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky!

"I say let the world go to hell,
But I should always have my tea"

22.06.2014

[smell in music] Frankie Goes to Hollywood

According to this website, Paul Rutherford was taken as a member of Frankie Goes to Hollywood only "for the smell of it".

[link] Octopus's Olfaction for Reproduction

According to a new research, the octopus's olfactory system might have a strong role to the octopus's reproduction.

“They possess a well developed olfactory organ, but to date almost nothing is known” about how it works, write the authors of a new review paper on the topic, published online earlier this month in General and Comparative Endocrinology.

For most of its short life, an octopus focuses on getting food—and turning that food into body mass. Only in the last months (or in some cases possibly weeks or years), does an octopus’s interest turn to love—or reproduction, at least. Recent research suggests that somehow the olfactory organs are partly responsible in this switch from growing to reproduction. As it happens, the olfactory lobe in the octopus’s central nervous system is located near the optic gland, which as been implicated in sexual maturation—as well as the strange but inevitable phenomenon of post-reproduction rapid senescence.

[link] The Sweet Smell of Shops

Scents have been often used to attract customers, and a recent study from the International journal of Marketing Studies shows that customers "felt greater pleasure and stimulation, expressed intention to revisit the store and spent more in a scented environment than in an unscented one."

“Smell is one of the most unique of human senses,” said Jennifer Dublino, vice president of development at ScentWorld Events, the scent marketing industry’s US-based trade group. “Scent enters the limbic system [of the brain] and bypasses all of the cognitive and logical thought processes and goes directly to the emotional and memory areas of the brain. There’s an instant effect on the customer.”

According to Dublino, the global scent marketing industry is growing at a rate of 15% per year. Asia is the fastest-growing market, with Latin America and the Middle East following closely behind.

Read the full article here: Why it matters if stores smell delicious

Nose Knows What the Mind Tells It

I have been suffering from asthma for the last couple of years, and this article is a bad news for me.

According to a new study by Cristina Jaén and Pamela Dalton on the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, when people with asthma think they're smelling something obnoxious, their airways become inflamed, even when the odour is harmless.

Read the full article here: Nose Knows What the Mind Tells It