Who Smells Best?

Smell is critical to our appreciation of, and learning about, herbs.

On initially encountering a new plant we may first look, but before we taste, we sniff.

Nose blind

The power of smell, and our olfactory systems, have been appreciated much more since covid. The ability to detect and identify smell is one of the most personal emotions, closely linked to taste, because both are based on the perception of molecules, which is a very personal thing.

The human nose is capable of smelling over 10,000 different odours.

We think we’re not good at smelling, but this is a learned thing. We have become olfactorily lazy, only noticing a smell it if is particularly pleasant or offensive. But we still react subconsciously: food makes us salivate, fresh air makes us relax, smoke immediately sets us on alert. Scent provokes memories, and can influence mood and behaviour.

Smeller beware!

Aristotle thought smell was the fifth sense, evoking feelings and memories, but not telling us anything rational.

The Christian church believed odours led to wantoness and sin.

Kant called scent ‘transient and fleeting’, he thought it unreliable.

Freud (taking his lead from Darwin) believed our sense of smell atrophied when we started walking on two legs.

An anthropologist would tell you smell is attuned to memories and instinctive urges, a legacy of the ‘primitive brain’ (which may have fallen behind in evolutionary terms once we were upright, a position that favours sight and speech).

Making sense of scent

So we thought a little bit of ‘citizen science’ wouldn’t go amiss. Thank you to all the ‘guinea pigs’ who came along to the Herbal Takeover and took part in our ‘Who Smells Best?’ game.

Each willing participant was asked to sniff ten different scents at random, naming as many as they could. A score over five indicated a better than average sense of smell.

We also asked them to tick an age category as we were interested to know: “do our noses get keener as we get older, or does the sharpness go? Has the ‘chemical soup’ we all live in perhaps dulled our sense of smell over time, or does it impact us from the start?”

What did we find out?

There was no universally recognised smell, although the most recognisable was honey with an impressive 91% correctly naming this.

However, Paddington would not be happy to know how few people recognised his favourite marmalade (19%), and it was most often mistaken for honey. Other guesses were beeswax, tree sap, maple syrup and rosin.

In equal bottom place for recognition was honeysuckle. While most got ‘floral’ (the scent category) they couldn’t identify the specific flower. Guesses included chamomile, saffron, jasmine, sunflower, marigold, bergamot, ginger and orange. Honeysuckle is a beautifully beguiling scent.

More easily recognised scents were lemon rind (82%), coffee (86%) and toothpaste (86%). Where these were mistaken, the guess was very close: lemon mistaken for orange; coffee mistaken for tea, cocoa or burnt toast; toothpaste for Vicks or clove.

Our spiciest smell to sniff was nutmeg. Though people knew they were smelling a spice, they couldn’t distinguish which of the ‘mixed spices’ we casually toss into our baking it actually was. Guesses included clove, ginger, cardamom, saffron, walnut and hazelnut, sage and thyme.

The other scent in the spice category was mustard. A lot of people recognised this (73%) and other guesses were close with mentions of pickle and salad cream.

Woody scents are popular in perfumery, especially for a masculine blend. In this category we had coffee and pencil shavings. Just under half our testers identified the shavings (45%) and other answers drifted around the wardrobe area (mothballs, linen, wood) or, interestingly, into dried fruit and herbs (apple, grapes, rose petals).

The one green herb we had in the pots was rosemary. Just over half recognised her (55%), though most were sure they were smelling a herb they knew! She was mistaken for lavender, mint, tarragon, bay leaves, thyme, lemon balm, camphor and Vicks! Being able to distinguish our herbs enables us to benefit from their unique properties, they pay us back so generously for the small effort of getting to know them.

So, who smells best?

There was a clear pattern to our respondents across our three age categories.

Under 30s represented 36% of our testers and together achieved an average score of 6.5. The largest group was in the 31 to 60 age range, this was 45% of our respondents and they averaged 5.4. 18% of respondents were in the 61+ age range and collectively achieved an average score of 4.25.

So on this test, it seems the under 30’s smell best, and we may be seeing evidence of a decline in our ability to detect scents over time, despite amassing a vast experience of different scents.

Scent to the bottom of the class?

The good news is, whatever your score today, you can train your sense of smell to be even better simply by making a conscious daily effort to notice the smells around you. You don’t have to have a perfumier’s station.

And there’s a further benefit too that you might like to deploy. Managing scents can help you get things done! You can use scent to super-charge your habits. The right smell will encourage the emotional part of the brain, making you want to do something. So treat yourself to a bit of scent encouragement when you need that extra nudge to focus on a task.

Given the right attention, smell can be sensational.