Sue Phillips Uses “Scent Healing” to Help People with Loss of Smell

Aug 16, 2023

As one of the five senses, the sense of smell is incredibly important in daily life, helping us detect whether food is spoiled, as well as alert us of several dangerous situations, such as smoke from a fire or a gas leak. Smell is special, since it is the only sense that bypasses the brain's sensory relay system, instead going directly to the cortex for processing. It is also theorized that smell, as a form of chemoreception, is one of the earliest senses to evolve in primitive multicellular animals.

The scientific term for loss of smell is anosmia, and the COVID-19 pandemic has brought this disorder to the forefront, as more than 40% of patients reported loss of smell. The sense of smell is also strongly linked to the sense of taste, with a similar proportion of COVID-19 patients reporting a loss in the capability to taste, or dysgeusia. Some patients still report complete or partial loss of smell and taste for months or even years after recovering from the viral infection, as one of the symptoms of the “Long COVID” phenomenon.

COVID-19 is theorized to cause anosmia by destroying tissue in the part of the brain responsible for smell. Several other viral infections have been reported to cause the same symptom. Anosmia can have a significantly detrimental effect to quality of life, and many people with Long COVID are struggling to find ways to restore their sense of smell.

With so many people suffering from anosmia, world-renowned fragrance expert Sue Phillips wanted to do something, so she harnessed her decades of experience in scents, fragrances, and perfumes to help people regain their sense of smell. Having worked with several cosmetics and perfume giants worldwide for a long time, Phillips has created scents for major brands, and she now operates a bespoke fragrance initiative where scent lovers can customize a fragrance as unique as themselves.

While she is not a doctor nor a scientist, Phillips believes that she can contribute by using her understanding of how fragrances work and combine to create a Scent Healing program, which aims to help people retrain their brains to recognize scents again.

To help conduct her Scent Healing sessions, Phillips created a kit composed of 18 distinct fragrances spanning the entire olfactory palette. The sessions, typically lasting an hour, are held either in her studio in New York or via Zoom, and she also recorded an instructional video to guide people who purchase the kit but cannot meet with her in person or online.

Phillips' Scent Healing sessions have produced successful results, with many people regaining most of their sense of smell. She was also contacted by neuroscientist, Dr Mila Emerald, and they are currently writing a book about the entire Scent Healing process, with Emerald examining it from the neuroscientific side, while Phillips comes from an olfactory standpoint.

“I met a woman who had not been able to smell for 15 months after suffering from COVID, and I helped her start her Scent Healing journey. I gave her the first scent, and she couldn't smell anything. The second, the third, the fourth – still nothing. And then, by the 14th scent, there was a breakthrough and she could smell something. She became so emotional and started crying because it was the first time she could smell in more than a year,” Phillips says.

Phillips says recognizing the mental component of smell is important because people have not been taught how to smell – it is an automatic response beginning at birth. This is why, as part of her Scent Healing sessions, she instructs people to focus and concentrate, in her words “smell with your brain”, in order to regain lost neural connections and train the brain to smell again.

“Our olfactory sense is our most powerful, as there are so many aspects of fragrance that are tied to neuroscience: the limbic system, and brainwaves. Fragrance is powerful because it is closely tied with memory, with certain fragrances triggering strong emotions. Maybe, as a child, your parents took you to a fairground, and bought you vanilla ice cream. Years later, smelling vanilla can bring back fun childhood memories and it can lift your mood.”

With anosmia now thrust into the public consciousness, Phillips says that through her Scent Healing techniques she aims to help people who have lost their sense of smell even from other causes, such as brain trauma or aggressive cancer treatments. However, as she is not a medical doctor, she never guarantees 100% success. Despite this, her success rate with anosmia has been highly compelling as 96% of her clients have regained anywhere from 60% to 100% sense of smell, and has appeared on many TV programs, articles and podcasts with clients, as a testimony to her endeavors to help people who are suffering from anosmia.