Are Scent Preferences Universal?

Try and imagine the smell of a freshly cut tangerine. Picture pressing your nose to a rose in bloom. Remember the last time you smelled a steak sizzling on a hot grill? For many of us, the scents these cues call up are pleasant if not rapturous. Now try to remember the last time you changed cat litter. Or boiled an egg. Or changed a diaper. Not so nice, right? But do we all have the same reactions? How much might odor preferences vary from person to person, or in different parts of the globe? Recent studies in psychology are beginning to provide us with some answers.

The Nose Knows

Our sense of smell is a powerful thing. Though for decades scientists discounted the role of human olfaction in shaping our minds and behavior, a large body of work suggests that our sense of smell may help us read the emotions of others, detect the presence of potentially dangerous pathogens, and navigate our spatial environments, as I wrote last year for Psychology Today. Our sense of smell is deeply tied to memory. A recent neuroimaging study revealed stronger connections between regions of the brain involved in olfaction, as opposed to those tied to our other senses, and the hippocampus, a brain region responsible for (among other things) storing our memories (Zhou and colleagues, 2021).

Is Beauty in the Nose of the Sniffer?

The kinds of smells we are exposed to can differ depending on the places where we live. And scents that are appetizing in one society—durian fruit in Vietnam, stinky tofu in China, or camembert in France, may be quite off-putting in other parts of the world. But how much do our preferences for different scents vary? One recent study put this question to the test. People were recruited from a variety of cultural groups to take part in the research, including city-dwellers in the US, Mexico, and Thailand, as well as members of small-scale communities that traditionally engaged in hunting, foraging, or subsistence agriculture, including the Imbabura Quichua of Ecuador and the Mah Meri of Thailand (Arshamian and colleagues, 2022). The scientists had people from these groups sniff and rate the odors of sticks doused in a range of compounds like vanillin (which, as you might guess smells like vanilla, and comes from vanilla orchids), linalool (which occurs naturally in many flowers and fruits) and isovaleric acid (that ripe funky smell you encounter in sweat or rancid meat). It turns out that culture did not explain much of the variation in people’s ratings of how pleasant these odors were. Instead, the properties of the scents themselves and individual differences among people each explained far more of the variance in odor preferences.

A Wrinkle in What Makes Us Wrinkle Our Nose

But another study, led by Agnieszka Sorokowska at the University of Wroclaw, suggests things may be bit a more complicated. Sorokowska and her team also gathered data from groups living in industrialized settings (Poles and Malaysians) and smaller-scale societies (Hadza, Yali, and Tsimane) and had them rate the pleasantness of 15 different scents (Sorokowski and colleagues, 2024). The odor sticks in this study included scents like peach, banana, and coffee, as well as turpentine, onion, and butter. Here too, analyses suggested a relatively small role for culture in explaining odor preferences overall. Although there were some notable exceptions. Poles and Malaysians both found the smell of coffee more pleasant than did members of the other groups. The Yali participants, who live in Papua New Guinea, found the smell of onions more pleasant than the other groups did. What might explain these differences? The researchers also asked their participants to rate how familiar each smell was. This was by far the best predictor of how pleasant scents were perceived to be.

Conclusion

Our evolutionary history likely shaped us to prefer some smells over others. It makes sense that we'd generally find scents that might cue us to potential pathogens or other dangers unpleasant. But against this relatively universal backdrop, research has found that our preferences can be tuned by our ecologies and cultures. And by our own idiosyncrasies.