Can Fragrance Change How We See Our Own and Other Faces?

Our own face in a mirror or photograph does not necessarily look the same to us every time. Could a fragrance in the surroundings also influence our impressions of our own and other people’s faces?

A study published by Jennifer Davies-Owen and colleagues in 2024 examined whether a pleasant fragrance changes women’s ratings of their own and other women’s faces, and how early it changes the brain’s responses to faces. It explored the interaction of vision and smell in processing both self and others.

Seeing the same faces with and without fragrance

The participants were 22 healthy women aged 19–30. Facial ratings were analyzed for 19 after excluding three participants with extreme response values; EEG analyses included 21 after excluding one participant with excessive movement-related noise.

Participants viewed six photographs of their own face and 12 photographs of other women. Their own photographs were taken from different left and right angles, while the other faces were frontal images from a face database. The expressions were neutral.

The fragrance came from a commercial body wash, LUX Magical Orchid. Rather than applying the product to the skin, the researchers delivered its scent near the nose through a device. The comparison condition was air with no added fragrance. The same participants experienced both conditions, with the order arranged to reduce systematic bias.

In each trial, participants saw two self-face images and four other-face images in sequence. One of the faces just shown then appeared again for rating. Participants answered on two of four continuous 0–100 scales: attractiveness, apparent confidence, femininity, and glamour.

At the same time, electrodes on the scalp recorded EEG. Repeated waveforms aligned to face presentation were averaged to examine what electrical responses occurred, and how many milliseconds after a face appeared. These responses are called event-related potentials, or ERPs.

Higher ratings of attractiveness, apparent confidence, and femininity

Faces were rated as more attractive, confident-looking, and feminine in the fragrance condition than in the no-fragrance condition. Glamour ratings, however, showed no statistically clear fragrance effect.

Here, confidence means how confident the face in the photograph appeared. The study did not test whether participants’ real-life confidence or behavior improved. Femininity, too, was a scale of impressions reported by these participants.

There was no clear evidence in the ratings that the fragrance effect differed between self and other faces. The study therefore does not establish that fragrance makes people see themselves as more beautiful than it makes them see others. Self–other differences appeared mainly in some of the EEG responses described below.

Differences even around 100 milliseconds after a face appeared

Fragrance-related EEG differences appeared as early as 75–115 milliseconds after face onset. A negative-going component called N1 was larger in the fragrance condition.

This does not mean that impressions changed 100 milliseconds after the fragrance reached the nose. Fragrance was presented for 15 seconds while several faces were shown. The timing was measured from the moment each individual face image appeared on the screen.

The researchers interpreted this early response change as suggesting that fragrance may influence initial attention to faces or visual processing. The important possibility is that it affects processing before the final rating stage, not just the answer itself. An N1 change alone does not prove that attractiveness was judged unconsciously.

Fragrance also affected N2, appearing at 170–290 milliseconds, and the late positive potential, or LPP, at 425–580 milliseconds. N2 became more negative and LPP more positive. The authors suggest that fragrance and facial information interact at several stages, from early attention to later evaluation involving emotion.

Responses to self and other faces become more similar

At some electrode groups, N2 and a component called P3 at 315–400 milliseconds showed interactions between fragrance and face type. With fragrance, N2 responses to self faces became more negative, moving closer to responses to other faces.

For P3, the positive response that had been larger for self faces became smaller with fragrance. Here too, the self–other difference narrowed. The EEG responses did not all simply become stronger.

The authors propose that fragrance may soften critical attention to one’s own face or self-specific ways of evaluating it. This is a hypothesis that people may view their own face from a slightly different perspective.

Another possibility is that the novelty of pairing an unfamiliar fragrance with one’s own photograph led the self face to be processed more like another person’s. Fragrance-related changes in mood or arousal also remain alternative explanations. The EEG findings did not directly identify a specific brain region responsible for self-criticism or establish the cause of the changes.

What one fragrance and a small experiment can show

Only one fragrance was tested. It remains unknown whether any pleasant fragrance would produce the same responses, or what would happen with other fragrance profiles or unpleasant odors. Individual differences in fragrance pleasantness and intensity showed no clear correlations with rating or EEG effects, but a small experiment cannot establish that no such relationships exist.

Self and other photographs differed in angle and number, and were presented at a ratio of 1 to 2. Thus, image characteristics and presentation frequency may have contributed to the EEG differences between self and others. Because no non-face images were used, whether the effects are specific to human faces also remains to be tested.

Unilever provided funding and the product, and five authors were company employees. The paper states that the company was not involved in data collection or analysis.

Conclusion

In this experiment, the same faces received higher ratings of attractiveness, apparent confidence, and femininity when presented with a pleasant body-wash fragrance. EEG responses also differed, from early face processing to later periods involved in evaluation.

The study is interesting because fragrance may influence not only final preference scores but also the processing of one’s own and other people’s faces. Testing the interpretation of reduced self-critical evaluation separately from photographic differences and fragrance novelty could help explain how self-perception is shaped by surrounding sensory information as well as vision.

References

Davies-Owen, J., Roberts, H., Scott, M., Thomas, A., Sen, S., Sethna, S., Roberts, C., Giesbrecht, T., & Fallon, N. (2024). Beauty is in the nose of the beholder: Fragrance modulates attractiveness, confidence and femininity ratings and neural responses to faces of self and others. Behavioural Brain Research, 465, 114932. DOI: 10.1016/j.bbr.2024.114932. Full author-accepted manuscript (University of Liverpool Repository). The author-accepted manuscript in the university repository is available under Creative Commons Attribution terms.