Archive category from earlier years; news about research into olfaction and human scent receptors.
I saw this article a while back and haven’t had time to post a link until now, but I wanted to include it in our series of posts on the genetic variance in the sense of smell (other posts on this topic can be found in the Olfaction category and have the tag “genetics” )….
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…
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…
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,…
Now Smell This linked to an interesting article today on Yahoo News titled Super Sense of Smell Not Innate (by Marlowe Hood on Wed March 9). The article discusses how perfumers gain much of their ability to detect and identify scents through years of training and experience rather than being born with these skills. The…
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…
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…
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…
It’s been a busy week and I’ve not done much blending, but this evening I’m finally working on the woodsy amber. I plan to work on Bouquet Blanche tomorrow. I always find it interesting to see the variation in how people perceive aroma ingredients, so I enjoyed reading Luca Turin’s October Duftnote about an aromachemical…
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…
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…