What do you like the smell of the most? Well, do you know why you love this fragrance? Scientists say the structure of an odor molecule and how we take it in affect our sense of smell. A new study has found that the general consensus about what is considered “good” and “bad” has to do with our cultural backgrounds, but that’s not quite the case. Moreover, cultural background plays little role in the likes or dislikes of a fragrance, contrary to popular belief.
“Different cultures around the world rank different scents alike, and scent preferences have a personal, if not cultural, component,” says clinical neuroscientist Artin Arshamian of the Karolinska Institutet, author of the study published in Current Biology. In their research, there are people from different backgrounds and cultures on an international scale, who have never met the smells of fast food or world cuisine, and who have not left their own cultural areas.
At the end of the research, it was revealed that the most universally liked fragrance was vanilla. This does not mean that vanilla is every participant’s favorite fragrance, but it does show that it is at the top of the ranking. The least liked fragrance is a substance called isovaleric acid. This substance is also found in soy milk and cheese, and its smell is somewhat reminiscent of foot odor.
Arshamian says, “We now know that there is a universal sense of smell that is driven by molecular structure and explains why we like or dislike a particular scent,” says Arshamian. “The next step is to correlate this information with what happens in our brain when we smell a particular scent, and why I’ll examine that that’s the case.”
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