You ever get those moments where you smell something and suddenly you are back in your childhood bedroom in 1998? You can see the light coming in through your curtains and feel how soft your bed sheets were; not just remembering the place but for one moment actually being there.
That was what It's Giving was built to capture. Our scents are painstakingly built from our own treasured memories to help others relive those happy moments.
But how does that actually work? Is it just our imagination running wild?
The Sciency Bit
Sensory information from your eyes, ears, mouth and skin travels to a brain region called the thalamus, which acts like a switchboard operator, sorting and forwarding it on to wherever it needs to go, including the memory and emotion centres.
Smell works a little bit differently.
Odour signals travel straight from your nose to the olfactory bulb, which sits right next to and is directly wired into your amygdala (your emotion hub) and your hippocampus (your memory hub).
Researchers at Northwestern Medicine mapped how strongly different senses connect to the hippocampus. Smell had by far the strongest, most direct connection of them all. Scientists have described it as a "superhighway" between your nose and your memory.
That means a scent doesn't just remind you of a memory. It reactivates it, along with all the memories that come with.
Why Are Childhood Memories The Strongest?
In 1913, French novelist Marcel Proust described a moment where the taste and smell of a tea-soaked madeleine cake instantly resurrected a childhood memory he thought was long gone. It wasn't not just the memory of eating the cake, but the whole house, the whole town, the whole feeling of being that age again.
He called it "involuntary memory": the kind that arrives uninvited, fully formed, without you trying to summon it. Neuroscientists later borrowed his name for it: the Proust Effect.
Since then, decades of research have backed up what he noticed by instinct. A 2002 study published in the American Journal of Psychology found that scent-triggered memories are more emotionally intense than the same memories triggered by a word or an image.
Smell doesn't just tell the story. It actually puts you back in the room.
And there's a reason so many of these moments are childhood ones. The parts of the brain that process smell are among the first to fully develop, so scents encountered early get laid down particularly deep. It's why so much of what we're drawn to smell-wise isn't really about the smell itself, it's about reentering a time, a place, or a version of ourselves that simply doesn't exist anymore.
Where It's Giving Comes In
Most candles are built around a smell you'll like. A story is then woven around that smell to make the candle easy to sell.
We, however, start with the story and build our scents around it. Our scents are personal, sentimental, and built to recreate specific moments in time. They are not a gimmick or a marketing spiel.
That's why you won't find generic scents on our shelf, and why you will find something named for the exact feeling of a long, unhurried catch-up with an old friend, or a whole childhood summer condensed into one scent.
To us, a candle is a direct line back to a feeling you thought you'd lost.
It Just Makes Sense
Your nose has a stronger link to your memories than your eyes or ears ever will, and creating candle scents without bearing this in mind is a wasted opportunity to bring an incredible amount of joy into the lives of others.
