If you’re old enough to remember clubbing before the smoking ban, you’ll remember smelling like an ashtray at home time. Now that those days are gone, it’s usually the heady aroma of booze-sweats that keep us coming back for more. But what if there was a club that didn’t reek of beer and bodily fluids, but instead smelled of orange groves, or peppermint, or the ocean? Can better smells make happy clubbers and, if so, what effect does scent have on our overall pub’n’club experience?

It’s long been accepted that good smells keep us ‘happy in the mall’ – even though that should be an oxymoron. Those clever mall barons waft cookie-scented air around and you follow it up and down those escalators until you’ve dropped from all the shopping. Jean-Charles Chebat of HEC Montreal Management College says smells have a heady impact on the “perception of product, which, in turn, affects spending”. The fact that good smells amounted to more dollaz in an environment characterised by fairly benign smells, like ‘new couch’ and ‘cheap cotton’, got people thinking: could it work in pubs and clubs?

Hendrick Schifferstein of Delft University of Technology ran an experiment to see if odorising bars with some yum smells could change how people perceive their whole environment. They chose three test clubs and used three different scents: orange (no. 102), seawater fresh and salty (no. 306) and peppermint (no. 007), courtesy of RetroScent, a perfumed oil aerosol company in the Netherlands. The scents were emitted at just the right quantities that they were “just noticeable throughout the space, without becoming evidently present”. So basically, they Jedi-mind-tricked people into not really knowing the smells were there.

Previous research had shown that different smells effect people in different ways, and Schifferstein predicted – from RetroScent’s advice – that the orange would be soothing – more chilling – the peppermint stimulating – more raging – and the seawater neutral. The study measured the impacts of these smells by seeing if 1) spending increased at the bar, 2) more people got their groove on, and 3) the surveyed participants felt more cheerful. And by all three accounts, the smells delivered.

All three scents “increased dancing activity, and they improved the evaluation of the evening, the evaluation of the music, and the mood (i.e,. cheerfulness) of the visitors”. Scents also corresponded with a lots more cents (!) changing hands at the bar. But the predicted differences between orange, mint, and sea weren’t supported; all three smells had pretty much the same effect, so it seems that as long as they override the sweaty booze smells, it’s a plus.

There’s already clubs with – I shit you not – AJs, or ‘Aroma Jockeys’ that “generate multiple smells over the night that are congruent with the music that is played at that specific moment”. The future is going to be weird.