When You Hear “Natural Scent,” What Smells and Colors Come to Mind?

When you hear “natural scent,” what kind of smell do you imagine? Flowers or grass, freshness, lightness? These were among the words frequently mentioned in a survey conducted in France and the United States.

Yet respondents did not necessarily think that “if it is natural, its smell must be very faint.” And while green, white and yellow were often chosen as colors that suit natural products, red became the main choice when the question focused on strawberries. It seems that our image of naturalness is not determined by just one smell or color.

Exploring Expectations through Words and Colors, without Smelling Actual Products

This study examined consumers’ associations: what scents and colors they expect from “natural products.” It was not a test in which people smelled actual scents and tried to identify them as natural or synthetic.

The online survey received responses from 838 people in France and 505 in the United States. The analysis used weighting to bring the age and gender composition closer to that of each country’s population.

First, participants were asked to give one to three adjectives each for the associations they had with natural and unnatural smells. They then used an eight-point scale to rate the odor intensity and color vividness they would expect from natural foods, personal care products and household products.

They were also asked to select multiple colors from swatches to match natural products. As well as broad product categories, they chose natural and artificial colors for a specific item, “strawberries,” to see whether making the object more concrete changed their answers. Differences between countries and product categories were another central focus of the study.

“Fresh” Can Mean Freshly Picked or Cool and Refreshing

In both countries, freshness and words referring to flowers were frequently associated with natural smells. Positive words such as “good” and “pleasant,” as well as examples of plants, also appeared. For unnatural smells, “chemical” stood out, alongside negative words such as “stinky” and “unpleasant.”

French responses also showed associations with lightness and simplicity, while American responses showed associations with cleanliness. These were, however, word associations. The experiment did not demonstrate that substances of natural origin are necessarily pleasant and safe, or that artificial ones are unpleasant.

The authors drew attention to the ambiguity of the word “fresh.” It can mean being fresh and close to the original material, as with just-picked fruit, but it can also convey a cool, refreshing sensation. This survey alone could not distinguish which meaning respondents intended.

Nor did the expression “simple scent” involve counting its ingredients. Even a mixture of many molecules can be perceived as a coherent scent resembling a single flower. Simplicity as an association needs to be considered separately from complexity of chemical composition.

A Light Impression Does Not Mean Expecting No Smell

Words such as “light” and “subtle” were associated with natural smells, while “strong” and “overwhelming” were associated with unnatural ones. Yet when respondents were asked to rate expected intensity numerically, the odors and colors of natural products generally fell around 4–5 on the eight-point scale.

In other words, even if lightness forms part of the image of a natural smell, that does not necessarily mean wanting something almost odorless. The authors discuss the possibility that the words reflect a contrast with artificial products being more strongly fragranced.

The specific smell of strawberries was expected to be more intense than the smells of foods in general, personal care products or household products. There was no significant difference in expected odor intensity among those latter three categories. For color vividness, by contrast, expectations were highest for food, followed by household products and then personal care products.

American respondents expected greater intensity in both odors and colors than French respondents did. Higher expected intensity was also reported as a tendency among younger age groups and male respondents. These were differences in imagined intensity, not measurements of how sensitive people’s sense of smell was.

Colors That Suit Natural Products Depend on What People Imagine

For personal care and household products, green, white and yellow were frequently chosen in both countries. For food, the colors were green, orange and yellow in the United States, with white added in France. The combination of colors was not exactly the same across all categories.

As for differences between countries, French respondents selected white more often than American respondents. Colors such as orange and brown were also more readily associated with food, while blue and white were more readily associated with non-food products: the distribution of colors varied by product category.

Multiple answers were allowed here. The percentages for each color in the paper are shares of the total number of color selections, not the percentages of people who chose that color alone.

For Strawberries, Red: A “Natural Color” Depends on the Object

When the object was limited to strawberries, vivid red and dark red were selected as natural colors in both countries. Even if people associate natural products in general with colors such as green, their answers change when they consider what looks like a strawberry.

Vivid pink was frequently chosen as an artificial color in both countries. In the United States, vivid red was also selected as an artificial color. In discussing why the same color appeared on both the natural and artificial sides, the authors suggest that the 18 available colors may not have captured subtle differences in shade.

This result helps us avoid the simplistic view that making anything green will make it look natural. Our image of products in general and our image of the color inherent to a particular material appear to work differently, even as they overlap.

Natural “Origin” and a Natural-Seeming “Smell”

The open-ended answers included both words about how something is made, such as unprocessed, additive-free or extracted from flowers, and examples of natural things themselves, such as roses and grass. “Natural scent” seems to encompass two meanings: a scent obtained by natural means and one that feels like something found in nature.

Differences between countries may also involve factors such as the products people are accustomed to seeing on the market, symbolic meanings of colors and ways of using numerical scales. These answers alone cannot establish a single aspect of culture as the cause.

The research received funding from V. Mane et Fils and support from ANRT, and some of its authors were affiliated with the company. French respondents were recruited from the company’s online panel. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest concerning the writing and publication of the paper.

Summary

“Natural scent” was associated with freshness, flowers and plants, and lightness. Expected odor intensity was moderate, however: the results did not suggest that natural means almost odorless.

Colors and expected intensity also differed by country and product category, and for strawberries, a strawberry-like red was chosen rather than a generic natural color. Are we talking about natural origin, or about something feeling like a natural object? Being a little more specific about what we mean when describing a scent can make differences between our own image and someone else’s easier to see.

References

Dantec M, et al. Olfactory attributes and colors associated with naturalness. Food Quality and Preference. 2022;98:104495. doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2021.104495