The world is a smelly place. There's the scent of our own bodies, of bread rising and spaghetti sauce cooking on the stove; the smell of rain and dirt, of exhaust and garbage; the aroma of evergreens on a woodsy path and low tide at the shore. Quietly, invisibly, these smells come into us, stirring up feelings and memories, alerting us to dangers or pleasures, and subtly altering our moods.
"Smell and emotion are intensely, intimately connected," says Brown University psychology professor Rachel Herz, Ph.D., author of The Scent of Desire, who notes that the two interact (along with memory) in an ancient region of the brain known as the limbic system.

But it's not just the natural aromas -- the crackling campfires, the blooming roses -- that influences. The "clean" smell of Tide or the "fresh" scent of faux-pine floor wax can elicit equally powerful feelings. Indeed, manufacturers add synthetic fragrance to everything from hair conditioner to clothing and even packaging in the hopes of soothing, exciting, or otherwise seducing us into picking products off store shelves. "In the past two decades," affirms Rebecca Sutton, Ph.D., an environmental chemist with the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit research organization, "production and use of fragrance has increased dramatically worldwide."

Unfortunately, that's not necessarily a good thing. Experts' concerns about the proliferation of fragrances have to do with their potential effects on our health: With an estimated 3,000-plus chemicals, mostly synthetic, used in the manufacture of artificial fragrances, "repeated exposures over a lifetime are creating a toxic soup in our bodies," says Sutton. The extent to which these exposures harm us is not known for certain, she adds, "because there's little regulation, and these substances don't necessarily get tested."

We'll never go back to a time when all smells emanate from the natural world. But that doesn't mean you can't limit what has become a deluge of chemical scents. To that end, we'll show you how to be savvy about fragrances and transition to unscented or botanically scented products -- some of which might even benefit your well-being.

Read more about plant fragrances in Six Essential Scents
Sniffling for alternatives to health-hazardous artificial fragrances? Read Overhaul Your Scents