More research on the differences in our scent perception

A recent article in Inside Science describes more evidence that people experience scents differently. (Perfume In Progress has followed this research topic for a number of years; you can find a series of posts about it by searching for the #genetics tag on our posts.) In this experiment, researchers broke the common smell of potato chips into three main aromatic…

|

Study Finds 30% Difference in People’s Scent Receptors

I’ve been talking about this for years on my blog based on my experiences with testers during the process of creating scents, and the studies keep coming in to support what we perfumistas have suspected for ages: our different sets of scent receptors in our noses make us smell scents differently. A study by Monell…

|

More Discussion About Individual Scent Perception

I’ve been talking about the topic of scent perception for several years on this blog, and here’s another interesting, though limited, study showing that we each smell things a little differently. Thanks to Robin at Now Smell This for the link. This investigation found that almost everyone was anosmic to some ingredient in the study,…

|

A couple links of interest about olfaction and categorizing perfume notes

Thanks to Nathan Branch for mentioning this link to an article about how we perceive the same scents very differently. We’ve talked about that phenomenon on this blog before and I always find it an interesting topic. Another recent interesting read can be found in this post by Victoria on the Bois de Jasmin blog…

Another tidbit on scent perception differences between people — “Every Human May Have A Unique Nose”

A few weeks ago, Robin on Now Smell This posted a link to a series of videos for a symposium called Headspace that covered topics on “Scent As Design.” I played the videos in the background while I worked on something else, and I found part of one of the four to be interesting enough…

| |

More on scent variation – a tale of sweet or dry

It’s amazing how different the same scent can be to different people, and just last week I had another vivid example. Someone emailed me to say that she’d received her samples and was enjoying most of them but was confused by Winter Woods because she perceived hardly any wood and instead mostly smelled sweet musk…

|

Our own scent truth

I’ve found it very interesting to see the variation in how people perceive a scent, and part of the reason for the variation seems to be that for any given note or ingredient people have different sensitivities and tolerances to it. What is often called “skin chemistry” also plays a role, but even if you…

|

Scent associations and a new book by a fragrance researcher

A new book is coming soon by another fragrance researcher: What The Nose Knows written by Avery Gilbert.  Here’s a link to the website for the book http://www.whatthenoseknows.com/ and a link to a review of the book on basenotes: http://www.basenotes.net/articles/20080610what-the-nose-knows.html I thought it was interesting that he has a background in psychology and has done some research into the colors…