Have you ever remembered someone’s scent together with the atmosphere of meeting them? If talking to that person leaves you wanting to meet again, might your impression of them from the same odor change as well?
A study by J. M. Gaby and colleagues, published in April 2025, examined this question at a speed-friending event where women had brief conversations with one another. A distinctive feature was that the researchers did not remove the smells of perfume or personal products: they examined the odors people wear in something closer to everyday life.
- Collecting everyday perfume and lifestyle odors together
- They smelled T-shirts and were asked whether they wanted to become friends
- Pre-meeting odor impressions were related to impressions after conversation
- Impressions after talking also carry over to the next sniff
- Person-to-person combinations, rather than a universally appealing smell
- What a brief encounter can tell us
- Summary
- References
Collecting everyday perfume and lifestyle odors together
The participants were 40 women aged 18–30 recruited at a university in the United States. The researchers gave them cotton T-shirts to wear for approximately 12 hours during their normal daily activities. Odors were collected one to three days before the event. After wearing the shirts, participants put them in bags, froze them, and brought them on the day.
Participants continued using perfume, deodorant, and similar products as usual. However, they were instructed to avoid smoking and drinking alcohol to prevent strong smells from obscuring their usual odor. Those who used fragranced products were asked to wear the same products to the event.
The study calls the odors people wear in daily life “diplomatic odor.” It may be easiest to think of this as everyday odor. It is not isolated natural body odor, but a smell that also includes the influence of fragrance products and daily activities.
They smelled T-shirts and were asked whether they wanted to become friends
Before the event, participants smelled T-shirts worn by other participants and answered four questions on seven-point scales, including whether they wanted to get to know the person, share an activity with her, or become friends.
Importantly, the main results were not scores for liking or disliking the smell itself. They concerned how much participants wanted to become close to the wearer based on her odor. The study calls this “friendship potential.”
Participants had previously viewed facial photographs for just 0.1 seconds and answered the same four questions. At the event, each participant then spoke with approximately 10 partners for four minutes each, recording an evaluation after every conversation. Finally, they smelled the same T-shirts as before, in a different order, and evaluated them again.
This sequence allowed impressions to be compared across different settings: photographs alone, odors alone, and after meeting and talking in person.
Pre-meeting odor impressions were related to impressions after conversation
First, partners rated as having greater friendship potential from their odors before meeting also tended to receive higher ratings after conversation. This association remained after statistically accounting for impressions from photographs.
In other words, odor-based impressions were associated with something not fully captured by first impressions from photographs. However, this was not an experiment in which a person’s odor was changed to see how subsequent conversation ratings shifted. It cannot establish that odor directly improved the impression made during conversation.
It is also premature to rank smell as more important than appearance. Photographs were shown briefly online in advance, whereas odors were smelled on site immediately before the interaction. Exposure duration, setting, and timing differed, so this was not a contest between their importance under identical conditions.
Impressions after talking also carry over to the next sniff
The other finding concerned T-shirt ratings after the interaction. When participants wanted greater closeness with someone after talking to her, their subsequent odor-only ratings also tended to be higher. This association remained after accounting for pre-interaction odor ratings and photograph ratings.
Because the same T-shirts were smelled again, the results fit the explanation that experience with a conversation partner became associated with interpersonal impressions formed from her odor. They suggest that scent-based impressions need not be fixed before an encounter and remain unchanged afterward.
This does not mean that everyone’s odor ratings improved uniformly. Again, what changed was the judgment of wanting to become close to a person, made through her odor. The main results do not show sensory changes such as the same odor becoming sweeter or the odor itself becoming more likable.
Person-to-person combinations, rather than a universally appealing smell
A closer analysis of variation in ratings found that it could not be fully explained by some people giving everyone high scores or some targets being broadly liked. Preferences specific to particular combinations of evaluator and target made a substantial contribution.
This offers a way to consider fragrance not simply as a universally appealing attribute, but within the relationship of how one person perceives another. Everyday odors included perfume and personal products, but the study did not test which perfume makes it easier to form friendships. It did not manipulate product use or compare fragranced and fragrance-free conditions.
What a brief encounter can tell us
The sample was limited to young heterosexual women at a US university. We do not know whether the same pattern would occur between men, in other age groups, or in other cultures. The study measured expectations immediately after brief interactions, rather than following whether friendships actually continued.
The data were collected in 2014, and the paper was published in 2025. The analysis plan was not preregistered before data collection. Nor did the design randomly manipulate conversation quality or odor pleasantness. It is therefore more appropriate to read the study as showing how multiple impressions are linked in relatively everyday encounters than as establishing causality.
Summary
After talking with someone, impressions of closeness formed from that person’s unchanged everyday odor were associated with impressions from the conversation. Odor may be not only a cue before meeting but also something perceived through the experience of the encounter.
These impressions involved person-to-person combinations that cannot be captured solely by asking whether someone is liked by everyone. When we remember another person’s scent, perhaps we are sensing not only fragrance and body odor but also the time we spent together.
References
Authors: J. M. Gaby, G. Gunaydin, V. Zayas
Article: The interactive role of odor associations in friendship preferences
Journal: Scientific Reports 15, 11228 (2025)
Published: 2 April 2025
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-94350-1
Full text: Publisher’s article page
Original article license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
