Pie've Been Waiting All Year For This 🎃🥧🍂

It still may be summer on the calendar, but autumn is already in full swing thanks to pumpkin spice (lattes) and everything nice.

So why do we love this particular flavor so much? Turns out, we love to be reminded of fall and the warm feelings of family, home and nostalgia the season brings — and our brains associate those warm feelings with this particular flavor, psychologists and researchers say. So perhaps one of the most interesting things about pumpkin spice is that we tend not only to be obsessed with how it tastes, but we’re obsessed with how it makes us feel on an emotional level.

Indulging in those memories of fall can be seen in the rising numbers of pumpkin spice popularity. It's all pretty impressive for blend of (albeit delicious) scents that don't even include it's namesake ingedient, pumkpin. That's right. The typical mixture is made up of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and clove or allspice — but no pumpkin. Still, these spices together mimic the scent of cooked squash, and our minds fill in the gaps.

Pretty interesting, right? Don't mind us while we grab a cup, and indulge in our favorite past fall memories.