The Effect of Perfume on Mood: What Research on Smell Says

You open an old wardrobe in your family's house, and out comes the smell of the oud your grandmother used to scent the clothes with. Before you can name the smell, you are a child in that house again, and you can almost hear her voice. Your brother smells the same wardrobe and remembers nothing.

Much of what is said about perfume and mood, such as perfumes that lift the mood and others that calm the nerves, goes further than what research has found. What it has found is closer to what happened at that wardrobe: one smell, and an effect on one person that is not its effect on another.

In short: The sense of smell is anatomically connected to brain regions involved in emotion and memory, and some researchers see this as the reason smells call up memories with stronger feelings than those a picture or a sound calls up, many of them from childhood. The effect of a smell varies from person to person, depending on what they expect of it, the name they hear for it, what they have lived through with it, their genes, and how many times they have smelled it. As for its effect on mood, controlled trials are few, and systematic reviews have found no convincing evidence that aromatherapy treats any condition. Perfume is a personal pleasure in scent, not a treatment.

Table of contents

• How does a smell reach the brain?
• Smell and memories
• Why doesn't a smell affect everyone in the same way?
• Expectation and the name of a smell
• Experience, culture and personal taste
• Genes
• Getting used to a smell
• Familiarity: do you like a perfume more the more you smell it?
• What have studies found about smell and mood?
• Lemon and lavender
• Rosemary and mental performance
• Aromatherapy: how strong is the evidence?
• How do you choose a perfume you will enjoy?
• Frequently asked questions
• Read also
• References

How does a smell reach the brain?

The signal from a smell reaches the brain's emotion and memory regions by a short route. Olfactory cells in the nose pick up odour molecules and send their signal to the olfactory bulb, the only relay between them and the smell centres of the brain [1]. From the bulb the signal travels to the piriform cortex and the amygdala, and then on to other regions, including the hippocampus and the orbitofrontal cortex at the front of the brain [1] [2].

The amygdala is involved in processing emotion and emotional memory, and the hippocampus in learning to link one thing with another [2], and a number of the regions that process smell also process emotion [1]. The smell signal differs from those of sight, hearing and touch in that it does not pass through the thalamus before reaching the cortex; it passes through it later, by an indirect route [2].

This anatomical closeness is what draws researchers to the link between smell, emotion and memory. It does not mean that a particular smell produces a specific psychological effect in everyone.

Smell and memories

A smell calls up memories that are more emotional than those called up by an image or a sound, and often older. When the same thing, such as cut grass or popcorn, was presented once as a smell, once as a picture and once as a sound, the memories its smell evoked were more emotional and gave a stronger feeling of being taken back to the past, though they were no clearer or more detailed than those evoked by its picture or its sound [3].

And when memories were cued in older adults by a word, a picture or a smell, most of those evoked by smells came from the first decade of life, that is, before the age of ten, while most of those evoked by words and pictures came from the ages of eleven to twenty. The smell-evoked memories were also ones their owners had seldom thought about before [4].

A smell does not carry the memory in itself. It is tied to what the person lived through with it, and their past experience is a key factor in the kind of memory it evokes [3]. An older review judged the evidence that smells are better at calling up personal memories to be preliminary [5].

Why doesn't a smell affect everyone in the same way?

Because our response to a smell does not come from its molecules alone. What we expect of it comes into it, and so do what we have lived through with it, our genes, and how many times we have smelled it.

Expectation and the name of a smell

The name you hear for a smell becomes part of your judgement of it. When a single odour was presented to participants once under a pleasant name and once under an unpleasant one, their judgement of it changed with the name it was given, by more than chance could explain [6].

The effect of the name goes beyond what the person says. When participants' brains were imaged while a single odour was presented to them once labelled "cheddar cheese" and once labelled "body odour", they rated it as less pleasant under the second label, and activity in brain regions changed with the label although the odour had not [7].

What we expect of a smell may be credited to the smell. In an experiment with the scent of lavender, the scent did not change a physical measure of relaxation, the electrical conductance of the skin. Relaxation on this measure alone was linked instead to what the participants had been told to expect, and in the opposite direction: those told the scent would hinder their relaxation relaxed more [8]. So some of what is attributed to a smell may come from what we expect of it, which does not mean the smell has no effect.

A smell may even have an effect without our noticing it at all. In a laboratory experiment, participants smelled odours at concentrations below the detection threshold and then rated pictures of neutral faces. Their judgement of the faces shifted with the pleasantness of the odour. This appeared only in those who were not aware of it, and the effect weakened the better a person was at detecting it [9]. A single experiment is no basis for saying that a perfume changes what people think of you.

Experience, culture and personal taste

What we have lived through with a smell and what we are used to in our culture both enter into how we judge it, but personal taste enters into it more than culture does. Learning smells starts very early. In an experiment with newborns, those whose mothers had eaten anise-flavoured foods during pregnancy showed a preference for its smell at birth and on the fourth day, while the others turned away from it or showed no response [10].

Culture plays a part. When Japanese and German women were compared on everyday odours, the two groups differed, most clearly in their judgements of pleasantness. An odour was more likely to be found pleasant by those who judged it to be the smell of something edible, so it is likely that what people are used to, especially in food, enters into how they perceive a smell [11].

But that part turned out to be small when measured against the rest. When 225 people from nine non-Western cultures ranked ten odours, each a single molecule, from most liked to most disliked, culture accounted for only about 6% of the variation in their rankings. About 41% came down to the molecule itself, and about 54% to differences between individuals, meaning personal taste together with how much a person's judgement wavers from one time to the next [12]. People agree on the ranking of many odours, and for these odours one individual differed from another more than one culture differed from another.

Whether a smell is pleasant or unpleasant is the main axis along which it is perceived, and this can be predicted in part from the molecule's physical and chemical properties. Although experience and learning shape odour perception a great deal, part of pleasantness is thought to be innate [13].

Genes

Every person, except identical twins, has their own set of working olfactory receptors [2]. Some people, for example, find the substance androstenone foul-smelling, others find it pleasant, and some cannot smell it at all; a variation in a single olfactory receptor gene explains part of this difference [14]. And some people cannot smell a particular substance even though their sense of smell is otherwise normal.

Getting used to a smell

When you smell something for a long time or repeatedly, your sensitivity to it drops temporarily, then returns after you move away from it, and this can sometimes take a while [15]. That is why you may stop smelling your perfume some time after putting it on, though it is still there.

Familiarity: do you like a perfume more the more you smell it?

Sometimes, not always. When participants in a laboratory experiment repeatedly smelled six odours that varied in pleasantness, including lilac, strawberry and a shampoo scent, their familiarity with all of them increased, but pleasantness increased only for the neutral and slightly pleasant ones. Judgements of the unpleasant and the very pleasant ones stayed as they were [16].

So a perfume that neither pleased nor put you off at first sniff may grow on you with repetition, while one you liked very much from the first time did not become more liked with repetition in that experiment. It used odours smelled from pens filled with them, not complete perfumes on the skin [16].

What have studies found about smell and mood?

Very little. Controlled trials of the effect of smell on mood are few, and few of them keep participants from knowing what is being tested on them, or include a comparison group [17].

Lemon and lavender

In a short randomized trial in a small number of healthy adults, the scent of lemon raised the positive mood participants reported, compared with water and lavender, and this was not linked to what they expected. Lavender did no better than water, and no lasting, long-term effect was tested [17].

As for the body, most of what was measured did not change with either scent, including the hormone cortisol, heart rate, blood pressure and the perception of pain [17].

Rosemary and mental performance

Twenty volunteers sat in a room with the aroma of rosemary oil, and then their performance on mental tests was measured. So was the level in their blood of 1,8-cineole, one of the oil's substances, which reached it through breathing. Their performance was linked to its level, and a higher level was linked to a larger drop in their feelings of contentment [18]. But they were a small group who all sat in the scented room, with no comparison group, so this does not support saying that rosemary improves concentration.

Aromatherapy: how strong is the evidence?

Aromatherapy is the use of essential oils with the aim of affecting health, and the evidence is not enough to say it treats any condition.

This is the conclusion of an overview in 2012 that brought together ten systematic reviews, most of them methodologically weak, on blood pressure, depression, anxiety, pain and dementia [19]. For people with dementia, the Cochrane review in 2020 found no convincing evidence of benefit; its trials were small, their results inconsistent, and most did not report side effects adequately. Nor did the Cochrane review find evidence of benefit for mood, sleep or quality of life, each of which was measured by two trials at most [20]. On insomnia, it is not yet clear whether aromatherapy helps, because there is little rigorous research on it, according to the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) [21].

We make perfume for its scent and the pleasure of it, and we do not offer it as a treatment for any psychological or physical condition.

How do you choose a perfume you will enjoy?

Choose it with your nose, and leave aside the promises written about it.

People differ in how pleasant they find the same smell more than cultures do [12], so choose what you like and do not rely on a description that promises a particular feeling. A perfume's name and description change your impression of it [6] [7], so try it before you judge.

We advise giving a perfume you are unsure about more than one try, because you may come to like it more with repeated smelling if it did not put you off the first time [16].

Take a break before smelling again a perfume you have just smelled, so that your nose's sensitivity returns. And do not spray more because you no longer smell your perfume: it may still be there, and it is your nose that has got used to it [15].

Be considerate of those around you. A smell you like may not be liked by others, and in a small trial perfume worsened asthma symptoms in some patients.

Frequently asked questions

Does a perfume reveal its wearer's personality?

In the sources we consulted, we found no peer-reviewed evidence that a type of perfume indicates a personality trait. Perfume is a choice that follows taste, occasion and weather.

Can perfume cause an allergy?

Yes, in some people. Specific fragrance substances cause skin allergy, which a dermatologist diagnoses with a patch test. In this test the substances are placed, diluted, on the skin under patches for about two days, and then their effect is read.

Read also

• Why Doesn't Your Perfume Last? Longevity, Sillage and Olfactory Adaptation
• How to Choose, Test and Apply Perfume: A Practical Guide
• Harms of Perfume and Bakhoor: What the Evidence Says on Allergy and Smoke
• Perfume Ingredients: From Raw Material to Note

References

1. Soudry Y, Lemogne C, Malinvaud D, Consoli SM, Bonfils P. Olfactory system and emotion: common substrates. European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Diseases. 2011;128(1):18–23. doi:10.1016/j.anorl.2010.09.007. PMID: 21227767. Accessed 6 October 2026.
2. Herz RS. The Role of Odor-Evoked Memory in Psychological and Physiological Health. Brain Sciences. 2016;6(3):22. doi:10.3390/brainsci6030022. PMC5039451. Accessed 6 October 2026.
3. Herz RS. A naturalistic analysis of autobiographical memories triggered by olfactory, visual and auditory stimuli. Chemical Senses. 2004;29(3):217–224. doi:10.1093/chemse/bjh025. PMID: 15047596. Accessed 6 October 2026.
4. Willander J, Larsson M. Smell your way back to childhood: autobiographical odor memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 2006;13(2):240–244. doi:10.3758/BF03193837. PMID: 16892988. Accessed 6 October 2026.
5. Chu S, Downes JJ. Odour-evoked autobiographical memories: psychological investigations of Proustian phenomena. Chemical Senses. 2000;25(1):111–116. doi:10.1093/chemse/25.1.111. PMID: 10668001. Accessed 6 October 2026.
6. Herz RS, von Clef J. The influence of verbal labeling on the perception of odors: evidence for olfactory illusions? Perception. 2001;30(3):381–391. doi:10.1068/p3179. PMID: 11374206. Accessed 6 October 2026.
7. de Araujo IE, Rolls ET, Velazco MI, Margot C, Cayeux I. Cognitive modulation of olfactory processing. Neuron. 2005;46(4):671–679. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2005.04.021. PMID: 15944134. Accessed 6 October 2026.
8. Howard S, Hughes BM. Expectancies, not aroma, explain impact of lavender aromatherapy on psychophysiological indices of relaxation in young healthy women. British Journal of Health Psychology. 2008;13(Pt 4):603–617. doi:10.1348/135910707X238734. PMID: 17845737. Accessed 6 October 2026.
9. Li W, Moallem I, Paller KA, Gottfried JA. Subliminal smells can guide social preferences. Psychological Science. 2007;18(12):1044–1049. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02023.x. PMID: 18031410. Accessed 6 October 2026.
10. Schaal B, Marlier L, Soussignan R. Human foetuses learn odours from their pregnant mother's diet. Chemical Senses. 2000;25(6):729–737. doi:10.1093/chemse/25.6.729. PMID: 11114151. Accessed 6 October 2026.
11. Ayabe-Kanamura S, Schicker I, Laska M, Hudson R, Distel H, Kobayakawa T, Saito S. Differences in perception of everyday odors: a Japanese-German cross-cultural study. Chemical Senses. 1998;23(1):31–38. doi:10.1093/chemse/23.1.31. PMID: 9530967. Accessed 6 October 2026.
12. Arshamian A, Gerkin RC, Kruspe N, Wnuk E, Floyd S, O'Meara C, Garrido Rodriguez G, Lundström JN, Mainland JD, Majid A. The perception of odor pleasantness is shared across cultures. Current Biology. 2022;32(9):2061–2066.e3. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.062. PMID: 35381183. Accessed 6 October 2026.
13. Khan RM, Luk CH, Flinker A, Aggarwal A, Lapid H, Haddad R, Sobel N. Predicting odor pleasantness from odorant structure: pleasantness as a reflection of the physical world. Journal of Neuroscience. 2007;27(37):10015–10023. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1158-07.2007. PMC6672642. Accessed 6 October 2026.
14. Keller A, Zhuang H, Chi Q, Vosshall LB, Matsunami H. Genetic variation in a human odorant receptor alters odour perception. Nature. 2007;449(7161):468–472. doi:10.1038/nature06162. PMID: 17873857. Accessed 6 October 2026.
15. Dalton P. Psychophysical and Behavioral Characteristics of Olfactory Adaptation. Chemical Senses. 2000;25(4):487–492. doi:10.1093/chemse/25.4.487. Accessed 6 October 2026.
16. Delplanque S, Coppin G, Bloesch L, Cayeux I, Sander D. The mere exposure effect depends on an odor's initial pleasantness. Frontiers in Psychology. 2015;6:920. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00920. PMC4490210. Accessed 6 October 2026.
17. Kiecolt-Glaser JK, Graham JE, Malarkey WB, Porter K, Lemeshow S, Glaser R. Olfactory influences on mood and autonomic, endocrine, and immune function. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2008;33(3):328–339. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2007.11.015. PMID: 18178322. PMC2278291. Accessed 6 October 2026.
18. Moss M, Oliver L. Plasma 1,8-cineole correlates with cognitive performance following exposure to rosemary essential oil aroma. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology. 2012;2(3):103–113. doi:10.1177/2045125312436573. PMC3736918. Accessed 6 October 2026.
19. Lee MS, Choi J, Posadzki P, Ernst E. Aromatherapy for health care: an overview of systematic reviews. Maturitas. 2012;71(3):257–260. doi:10.1016/j.maturitas.2011.12.018. PMID: 22285469. Accessed 6 October 2026.
20. Ball EL, Owen-Booth B, Gray A, Shenkin SD, Hewitt J, McCleery J. Aromatherapy for dementia. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2020;(8):CD003150. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD003150.pub3. PMC7437395. Accessed 6 October 2026.
21. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). Aromatherapy. Last updated: January 2020. nccih.nih.gov. Accessed 6 October 2026.

Prepared and edited by: Sedr Al-Khaleej Perfumes team

Last reviewed: 16 October 2026