They shone enticingly, just like the sky on the other side mall with the freedom to enter the stores that gleamed, calling for enjoyment, in sharp contrast with the bare, neutral aesthetic of the corridors.

In the corridors, a row of trees emphasized the confusion of mixed, contradictory sensations. Their green leaves evoked the eternal spring of the tropics where I grew up, since in the intensely orange autumn of those days, they seemed like a glitch in the Matrix. Seeing them, I felt compelled to forget that I was in a cage: forced to relax, to feel pleasure, uninhibited and at ease. When the sun began to set, the confusion deepened. The shadow of the trees on the floor managed to evoke an idyllic sense of the outdoors. With a certain thirst for nature, I approached the trees, but the deception slapped me in the face: the tree didn’t smell of anything. Visually, it had tricked my senses, connecting me with freedom again. But the invisible bars of the cage became more evident when the lack of scent revealed the artificiality of the three trees in a row, along with the absence of earth and wind.

I decided that maybe my nose could reveal some hidden truths behind this pantomime. Playing in the cage became possible, and I had fun realizing that when you move guided by your nose, other humans watch you with curiosity. I think I probably looked like moving in a pattern similar to that of flies, erratically going in and out of stores without any clear practical purpose, secretly searching for scents. The interactions with the confused employees in some stores became awkward, as if we had stopped following the script in The Truman Show.

For me, part of the wonder of what I adopted as a sensory hack of the mall is that it's invisible: some people stared at me, probably hoping to figure out what was motivating me to move in such an erratic way. They must have been frustrated because I made an effort to smell without making any gestures; I simply breathed and walked, focusing all my attention on the scent that entered through my nostrils. There was no visible goal in my walk, which must have seemed extremely strange in this context. I enjoyed a little internal chuckle.

I discovered that in the hall there were areas with an intense floral scent. Like a dog sniffing around, I tried to find those spots with the strongest aromatic intensity. I wanted to talk to someone from the cleaning staff and ask what kind of liquid they used on the floor, walls, or in the air to achieve such a pleasant scent—clearly designed to make us forget the cage. However, I couldn’t find a single cleaning staff member. Quite surprising, considering the place was immaculate.

I was fascinated for several minutes by the olfactory boundary between the hall and the stores. In some, this boundary was very noticeable, while in others, it was more diffuse. I thought about the evolution of sensory marketing from the 19th century to the present, reflecting on how the sensory experiences of  the olden-day stores were displaced by the functional spaces of discount stores and big-box retailers (Classen & Howes, 2014). Indeed, in stores like Sport Experts, with its functional and large-scale approach, the olfactory boundary was almost imperceptible. Essentially, the scent from the hall gradually faded as one entered the store. On the other hand, in stores like L’Occitane en Provence, which don't sell large-scale functionality but rather offer an intimate sensory experience, the contrast was striking. Its scent not only marked a boundary but seemed to snake ghostlike through the air of the hall: a subtle, unconscious, and effective seduction.

That scent captivated me and pulled me to the center of the store, where I saw the ceiling completely covered in dried plants: another attempt to deceive my senses. The most obvious assumption would have been that the smell came from the plants hanging from the ceiling, many of them colorful and striking. However, upon closely examining the species, I noticed they didn’t match the scent I was perceiving. Intrigued, I approached a salesperson and asked if they knew where that intense aroma was coming from. He suggested it might be from the creams they were selling, but upon checking, I found that wasn’t the case. I insisted on my question, and that’s when he revealed that the manager sprays the store daily with a spray that fills the air with that scent. Another simulation of nature.