Can Odors Change How Pleasant Photographs Seem?

Does smelling an odor while looking at a photograph change how pleasant that photograph seems? What happens with faces need not happen in the same way with landscapes or objects.

A 2026 study by Lucrezia Pacinotti and colleagues compared vanilla, rose, lavender, and lemon odors with clean air containing no added fragrance. The researchers examined differences between image categories and their relationship to the emotions individuals associated with each odor.

The same participants view 42 images under five conditions

Forty people aged 18–35 took part in the UK. The analysis included 39 after one participant’s response pattern was identified as an outlier. Everyone had met the study’s eligibility criterion on a preliminary odor-identification test.

There were 42 images: 14 each of faces, landscapes, and objects. Every category included neutral and pleasant images. For the non-face categories, the researchers avoided people and subjects strongly associated with odors, such as flowers and food.

Each participant rated every image under all five conditions: the four odors and clean air. An odor was delivered for four seconds through a tube near the nose, with an image shown for two seconds during delivery. Immediately after the odor switched to clean air, participants rated image pleasantness from 0 to 10.

Fragrance concentrations were adjusted using preliminary ratings to make perceived intensity similar. Even so, the four odors were not equally liked in the main experiment. Lavender, rose, and vanilla were rated more pleasant than clean air, but that difference was not clear for lemon.

Different patterns for faces, objects, and landscapes

An initial analysis using odor and image category found differences in image pleasantness associated with odor, with the pattern varying by category. The odor-related effects were small, however.

Additional comparisons exploring particular differences found that faces were rated more pleasant with lavender than with clean air. Object images received higher ratings with lavender, rose, and vanilla.

For landscapes, this initial analysis did not identify an odor that outperformed clean air. Instead, ratings were lower with lemon. Other odors outperforming lemon is not the same finding as an odor making landscapes more pleasant than they are without added fragrance.

These pairwise comparisons were exploratory analyses of the pattern of results. They did not establish fixed applications such as “lavender for faces” or “vanilla for objects.” The experiment also did not measure the attractiveness or trustworthiness of real people, or behavioral choices.

Which emotions do people associate with an odor?

Besides odor pleasantness, the researchers asked about seven dimensions: happiness, nostalgia, disgust, thirstiness, relaxation, sensuality, and energy. They used a questionnaire designed to assess associations between odors and emotions in people in the UK.

While smelling the odors again, participants rated how well each term described emotions they had experienced when smelling that odor in the past. This differs from asking whether their current mood improved from before to after smelling it.

Adding these seven responses to the analysis reduced the odor-related differences in image ratings. Happiness, nostalgia, and thirstiness were positively associated with image pleasantness, whereas disgust was negatively associated. No clear associations with image ratings were found for relaxation, sensuality, or energy.

The authors suggest that differences between odor conditions overlap with individual differences in the emotions associated with those odors. They did not, however, establish a causal pathway in which happiness or nostalgia changed image ratings.

Accounting for emotional responses changes individual comparisons

The analysis incorporating emotional responses retained the overall finding that odor effects varied with image category. The results of individual comparisons changed, however. For landscapes, lavender now outperformed clean air, while for objects, clear differences between odor conditions were no longer found.

The initial analysis and the analysis accounting for individual emotional differences do not answer exactly the same question under the same conditions. Their difference illustrates why a uniform effect cannot readily be explained by the name of an odor alone. The authors emphasized considering image categories alongside individual emotional associations, rather than ranking which fragrance wins.

The authors also report that differences between odors became smaller overall when lemon was excluded from the analysis. Some differences remained, but the way this group perceived lemon influenced part of the pattern.

What people are looking at may also affect susceptibility to change

The authors suggest that evaluation may differ across image categories: faces carry social meaning, for example, while object evaluations may be more sensitive to contextual cues. Brain activity was not measured, and these mechanisms require further investigation.

The images, especially pleasant landscapes, also tended to receive high ratings even with clean air. Images rated highly at baseline may have had little room for further improvement. Given the sample of 39, a lack of clear differences in particular comparisons cannot rule out very small effects.

Conclusion

In this study, accompanying odors did not change the pleasantness of faces, landscapes, and objects in the same way. Some results changed after emotional associations were taken into account, showing that a single category of “pleasant odors” cannot fully explain their combination with vision.

The authors conclude that odor type, the object being viewed, and an individual’s emotional experience need to be studied together. Broader sets of images and odors, alongside investigations of emotional associations and brain function, could clarify how smell and vision jointly shape impressions.

References

Pacinotti, L., Roberts, C., Giesbrecht, T., & Fallon, N. (2026). Cross-modal impacts of olfactory perception and individual differences in emotional responses to odors modulate hedonic evaluations of visual scenes. Chemical Senses, 51, bjag027. DOI: 10.1093/chemse/bjag027 / Full text.

The research was supported by the UKRI BBSRC iCASE scheme and industrial partner Unilever. One author disclosed employment with Unilever, and two others disclosed research funding from the company. No Unilever products were used in this experiment. Original article: © 2026 The Author(s), CC BY 4.0.