Does culture determine how good we think a certain substance smells? No, according to new research: how we judge smells is mainly a matter of chemistry and personal taste.

Most of us will find vanilla a pleasant-smelling good. But is that the case everywhere in the world? Or does that only say something about what is the norm among Westerners, and people from other cultures think very differently about this?

Until now, scientists didn’t really have the answer to that question. Yes, all kinds of research has been done into the relationship between how a substance is chemically put together and how nice people think it smells. But the test subjects then almost always came from ‘our corner of the world’.

There have Artin Arshamian from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and colleagues now changed by letting people from nine groups, spread across the world, smell ten different scents. And this shows that culture plays only a very small role.

Small-scale societies

Arshamian and his team did not look at, for example, students from universities in various countries. That would undoubtedly have been the easiest – but then you might think that every test subject grew up with pizza, cola and instant noodles, and therefore has the same smell preferences.

Instead, the scientists mainly questioned small-scale societies that have little contact with the rest of the world. The maniq for example, hunter-gatherers from southern Thailand. Or the chachicwho farm on a small scale in the rainforest of Ecuador.

fragrance pens

These people were presented with ten pens, each of which gave off its own scent. vanillin was in between, the main ingredient of vanilla, but also for example isovaleric acid, a substance with a pungent odor that is found in both cheese and sweaty feet. After smelling them, the subjects had to place these ‘scented pens’ in order from ‘pleasant’ to ‘dirty’.

The result: the order of the odors was determined for 54 percent by personal preference and for 41 percent by the molecular structure of the substances. Culture explained only 6 percent of the results. In other words, it doesn’t really matter whether a Western student is assessing a substance or a hunter-gatherer from a remote Amazonian community.

Complex mixtures

Sanne Boesveldt, who conducts research into smell at Wageningen University & Research, notes that only 25 people per community studied took part in the study by Arshamian and his team. “That’s a bit small to draw general conclusions from.”

She also points out that the substances used each consist of only one type of molecule. She wonders whether such substances are suitable for picking up on cultural differences. “I would think that the cultural component of smelling something nice or bad is mainly in food and the environment. And most food or environmental odors are presumably complex mixtures of odor molecules.”