Do Soft and Clear Describe More Than a Fragrance’s Sensory Qualities?

When we describe a fragrance as soft, we may be conveying not just a tactile-like quality but also a relaxed impression. A 2002 study found strong associations between softness and relaxation, and between clarity and uplifting impressions, in descriptions of fragrance.

The researchers narrowed sensory adjectives down to nine words to describe a variety of scents with a short vocabulary. At the same time, they investigated how much emotional meaning those words carried.

Starting with the difficulty of smelling repeatedly while using many descriptors

Scents are often described by their sources, with expressions such as lemon-like or rose-like. Yet comparing a broad range of scents on a common basis can require an increasingly long list of words. Extended evaluations also raise the problem of adaptation to the scent.

The researchers therefore focused on sensory adjectives such as sweet, soft, and transparent, which also apply to taste, touch, and vision. Their aims were to create a short, shared list of descriptors, examine overlap with emotional meaning, and test whether the words could describe fragrance characteristics.

Refining the words through three experiments

In the first experiment, 50 men and women evaluated 10 scents, including lemon, vanilla, rose, and sandalwood, using 30 sensory adjectives. A perfumer diluted the fragrance materials to approximately match their subjective intensities, and they were presented on smelling strips. The order was randomized, with five scents evaluated on each of two days.

Participants were asked how appropriate each word was for describing the scent. Factor analysis examined patterns in which responses to different words varied together, initially yielding four groupings. The researchers dropped indistinctness, which was relatively weak at distinguishing scents, among other limitations, and retained intensity–richness, clarity, and softness.

In the next experiment, participants, reported as 52 in the Methods section, evaluated the same 10 scents using 48 emotional adjectives. This yielded groupings of uplifting, relaxing, and stressful impressions. The analysis section, however, reports a number of ratings inconsistent with the participant count, leaving uncertainty about the precise number analyzed.

Finally, 50 people evaluated 11 scents over three days: six shared with the earlier experiments, plus additions including lavender, rosemary, and jasmine. They used both sensory and emotional descriptors to test whether similar groupings would emerge again.

Nine words describing the contours of a scent

The final sensory adjectives fell into the following three groups.

• Intensity–richness: rich, strong, heady
• Clarity: transparent, refreshing, sour
• Softness: soft, sweet, mellow

Sour was added because it frequently appeared in free descriptions of lemon in the first experiment, and it also grouped with clarity in the final experiment. The three-part structure emerged despite changes to some of the scents, and the ratings within each group showed internal consistency.

Specifically, in the final experiment, ylang-ylang and jasmine were characterized by intensity–richness, lemon and rosemary by clarity, and vanilla by softness. A small set of words could thus convey the broad impressions of the scents evaluated.

Softness carries emotional meaning too

Correlations calculated from the pooled evaluations of 11 scents by 50 people were 0.78 for softness with relaxation and 0.78 for clarity with uplifting impressions. Intensity–richness also had a positive association of 0.45 with stress, while softness was negatively associated with stress.

These were not independent responses from 550 people: the same 50 people evaluated multiple scents. Nor were the values measurements of before-and-after changes in mood. Participants rated how well words such as relaxed, refreshed, and irritated described each scent.

The authors interpreted the findings as showing that words apparently describing sensory qualities can also contain evaluations such as pleasantness or unpleasantness. Softness can communicate both a scent’s character and how it is received.

Similar scores do not necessarily mean the same smell

For the six scents shared between experiments, broadly similar patterns of factor scores appeared despite different participants. This supports the usefulness of a short descriptor list.

However, some pairs, such as rose and jasmine or chamomile and lavender, did not necessarily smell particularly similar despite similar score patterns. Closeness in scores can also reflect closeness in emotional evaluation.

Factor scores also depend on which scents are evaluated together. When one scent, such as vanilla, stands out strongly on a characteristic, the others may cluster nearer the average in relative terms. The authors argue that detailed descriptions of specific scents require combining shared descriptors with source-based descriptions.

Distinguishing fragrance impressions from actual effects on mood

The study also compared impressions described with emotional words against previously reported mood effects of fragrances. Lemon and rosemary had strong uplifting impressions, resembling descriptions of them as stimulating. Other examples did not match: lavender scored low on relaxation, and jasmine scored low on uplifting impressions.

This comparison did not retest those previously reported effects within the same experiment. The authors’ point was that rating a scent as refreshing needs to be distinguished from actually experiencing a mood change after smelling it. A questionnaire measuring fragrance impressions should not simply be reinterpreted as evidence of improved mood.

Summary

Sensory impressions of fragrance could be expressed concisely using nine words in three groupings: intensity–richness, clarity, and softness. At the same time, softness was associated with relaxation-related descriptions, clarity with uplifting descriptions, and intensity–richness with stress-related descriptions.

Fragrance vocabulary can communicate sensory characteristics and emotional responses together. A short, shared vocabulary is useful for comparison, but the practical implication is to use it alongside descriptions of specific scents and measurements of actual mood changes.

One author was affiliated with Shiseido’s Product Development Center when the paper was published. The paper acknowledges research assistance, but no separate funding or conflict-of-interest statement was identified.

Reference

Higuchi, T., Shoji, K., & Hatayama, T. (2002). A psychological study of sense-descriptive adjectives for characterizing fragrance. The Japanese Journal of Research on Emotions, 8(2), 45–59. https://doi.org/10.4092/jsre.8.45 (Original paper PDF)