Choosing the best perfume fragrance for a woman can be a challenge in today's world. Every department store, drug store and grocery seems to have dozens of choices. A fantastic assortment of perfumes is advertised in magazines and on television. It also seems as if every actress or celebrity has a fragrance named after her. With all the choices available, it is helpful to have a rational basis for selecting a special gift or even for changing one's own signature scent. If you could, would you select a gift of fragrance for a female friend or relative that would relax her, make her feel wonderful, produce a calm demeanor in almost everyone she came in contact with, that might help her stay on her diet successfully, and that would enhance her relationship with her "significant other"? You might be surprised at how close at hand that magic potion is!

Recent aromatherapy research has given the consumer the ability to choose a fragrance oil scientifically, depending on the wearer's physical or psychological health. Scientific studies have shown that exposure to certain odors or fragrances can affect people, both physically and psychologically. Test subjects exposed to certain fragrances have shown measurable changes in mood, while physical symptoms such as anxiety and stomach upset have been alleviated. One such fragrance oil is extracted from the common vanilla bean.

Vanilla has been used for centuries as a relaxing fragrance-one which will alleviate anxiety. Soaking a cotton ball in vanilla and placing it under the tongue or rubbing a small amount of the vanilla fragrance oil on the wrists or temples can calm a person who is hysterical. Sipping small amounts of vanilla syrup poured over shaved ice can calm a queasy stomach when nothing else will work. In fact, these antidotes were widely recommended by the medical community until recently, and still can be found as remedies in alternative medicine. Patients who are undergoing anxiety-producing medical tests (such as MRI's, where a cancer patient must hold still in a confined space for as long as an hour) are now exposed to the relaxing fragrance of vanilla to calm their nerves. In trials, this scent has been proven to be more effective than other scents ( i.e., lavender or orange), allowing the patient to be calm so he or she can remain still and confined long enough to complete the test. If the scent has the power to relax patients with extreme anxiety, it will certainly lift the mood of the casual user of this perfume.

Being around a person who is wearing the scent can also calm a person. In fact, people who wear or use the fragrance in their homes or offices are often told how relaxing or calming it is to be near the wearer. Students of this phenomenon would do well to choose a vanilla-based perfume or to burn vanilla candles or other vanilla scented home products. Their jobs would be easier if the people they work with are relaxed, or if their goal is to have a room where all who enter feel calm. Teachers, homemakers, and those in the medical profession may like to try this little trick of using the relaxing fragrance of vanilla.

The scent of vanilla is also gaining interest as a way to lose weight. Recent studies in Britain have shown that people who breathed the scent of vanilla on a skin patch before they ate each meal had fewer food cravings between meals and actually lost twice as much weight as those in a control study. This study was prompted after a bakery owner realized that the bakers in her employ rarely ate what they baked, and were of normal weight. The workers were exposed daily to the scent of vanilla. It is unclear whether this effect is caused by the dieter's reduced anxiety because of memories of wonderful smells in the kitchen or whether there is a chemical in vanilla that is also an appetite suppressant

One of the main reasons people use fragrances is to be attractive to the opposite sex. Tests have shown that vanilla is also a powerful sexual attractant. Scientists believe that it contains some of the chemical pheromones unique to humans that stimulate sexual attraction. Whether a man's heart is really reached through his stomach and the memories of his mother's kitchen, or whether the pheromones in vanilla are a secret "love potion," the ideal perfume fragrance for a woman must be vanilla.

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