Whether a particular odor is perceived as pleasant depends more on the chemical structure of a substance than on cultural factors. This is the conclusion reached by a working group led by Artin Arshamian from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm based on a study with 225 people from nine non-Western communities on three continents. As the team reports in Current Biology, while there were significant individual differences, there was also great global agreement about which smells are pleasant and unpleasant. In contrast, different cultural backgrounds hardly play a role. The test subjects found vanillin to be the most pleasant, followed by ethyl butyrate, which smells like peach, and linalool, which smells like a flower and spice.
It didn’t matter whether the participants lived in a city or lived semi-nomadic in tropical forests, nor did the experts find a preference typical of a continent or a way of life. Which smells people prefer is a matter of taste everywhere; according to statistical analysis by Arshamian’s team, personal preference accounts for around 50 percent of an individual’s olfactory ranking. But the analysis also shows that the chemical structure – and thus the biological heritage of the human nasal mucosa – determines about 40 percent of the ratings.
On the one hand, the working group confirmed this finding by proving that test subjects from a Western culture, the North American urban population, also assessed odors in a comparable manner. And on the other hand, the global scent ranking from pleasant to unpleasant could be predicted with the help of a computer model that evaluates molecules based on chemical and physical properties.