The Scent We Can't Name: The Last Private Language

Unlike vision and sound, scent doesn't pass through the parts of the brain that help us categorize, label, and name things.  Instead, smell takes a direct shortcut to the limbic system—the part of the brain responsible for emotions and memory.  That's why scent hits you in the gut before you even realize what you're smelling.

Vision, for example, has an entire area of the brain (the occipital lobe) dedicated to processing and naming colors.  That's why you can instantly recall "blue" or "red" without much effort.  But scent gets processed in areas tied to experience rather than language.  You recognize a scent before you can describe it.  You know it.  You feel it.  But the words?  They don't exist in the same way.  This isn't a personal failing.  It's how we're wired.  Scent lives in a part of your brain that doesn't need words to function.

Interestingly, not all languages struggle equally with scent descriptions.  Studies on Indigenous groups like the Jahai in Malaysia found that their language has a dedicated vocabulary for smells—something English and most Western languages lack.  Where we compare scents to familiar objects ("it smells like apples"), they use precise scent-based words, much like how we describe colors.

For the Jahai, scent isn't secondary.  It's survival.  They have words like cŋəs (the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings) and plɛʔ (the smell of blood, raw meat, things that attract tigers).  These aren't metaphors.  They're direct descriptors.  The Jahai don't say "it smells like blood"—they have a word for that specific olfactory quality, independent of the source.

So is the issue biological—or just the way we've built our languages?  Probably both.  Our brains make naming scent difficult, but our culture hasn't prioritized it.  We've invested linguistic energy into what we see and hear.  Scent got left behind.

Some contemporary thinkers and artists are trying to change that.  Catherine Haley Epstein and Caro Verbeek co-founded the Odorbet—an online collaborative database dedicated to inventing and collecting original scent-related words beyond traditional industry terms.  They've created playful, precise new labels for scent experiences: "musky-humid," "doppelspritzer," "silfage."  Not borrowed from objects.  Not metaphors.  Direct olfactory descriptors.

Meanwhile, olfactory researcher Jonas Olofsson and his colleagues are developing semantic maps and datasets to describe and position new odor terms scientifically—quantifying how we associate and specify scent words.  Psycholinguists, anthropologists, and cognitive scientists are building cross-cultural databases, recognizing how much existing vocabularies are lacking and working to innovate new terminology.

These efforts matter because they validate what many of us have felt: scent deserves its own language, not just borrowed words from other senses.  But until that language is widespread, we have to work with what we have—which means getting creative.

What makes this even more interesting is that in an age where every thought becomes a tweet, every moment a photo, every feeling a status update—scent remains private.  You can't Instagram a smell. You can't livestream an aroma.  You can describe it, but the description will always fall short.  The experience itself stays with you.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asked whether there could be a private language—a language only one person understands, inaccessible to anyone else.  He argued that true private language is impossible, because language requires shared use and mutual understanding.  But scent comes close.  Even when we try to share it, the experience remains intensely personal.

When you say, "It smells like the attic where I found my father's old letters," you're inviting someone into your memory—but they'll never smell exactly what you smelled.  Their associations with "attic" and "old paper" are different.  The scent you're describing is yours alone, even as you try to translate it into words.

In a world where privacy is increasingly elusive—where algorithms know your preferences before you do, where your location is tracked, your purchases analyzed, your behaviors predicted—scent remains a sanctuary.  It's one of the last sensory experiences that can't be fully captured, commodified, or shared.  It's still yours.

Wittgenstein also argued that language isn't about fixed meanings—it's about how we use words in context. He called them language games.  The same word can mean different things depending on who's speaking and what they're trying to communicate.

A simple phrase like "this smells fresh"—to a perfumer, it means crisp citrus top notes.  To a hiker, it's mountain air after rain.  To someone doing laundry, it's detergent and sun-dried cotton.  The word "fresh" doesn't have one meaning.  It has many, all of them valid, all of them shaped by experience.

Scent works the same way.  It isn't absolute.  It's personal, contextual, alive.  This is why prescriptive scent advice often fails.  "Lavender is calming" might be true for most people, but if your childhood bedroom had lavender sachets and that room felt lonely, your nervous system remembers.  For you, lavender isn't calming—it's something else entirely.

Your response to scent is shaped by your entire history.  Every place you've lived.  Every person you've loved.  Every version of yourself you've been.  Which means the only way to understand what a scent does for you is to notice what it actually does—not what it's supposed to do.

Since we struggle to name smells directly, we rely on associations instead.  We borrow language from other senses.  We call a scent "smooth" or "sharp," "warm" or "cool," "heavy" or "light."  We describe sandalwood as the color of twilight, the texture of polished wood, the feeling of stillness.  We describe petitgrain as morning light, the tempo of a brisk walk, the sound of a conversation starting easily.

This isn't imprecise language.  It's how our brains actually process olfactory experience.  Recent research on how people make sense of smells shows that we naturally describe them through metaphors and references to other senses—sound, texture, color, even architecture.  This cross-modal processing isn't a workaround for lacking vocabulary.  It's how olfactory memory and emotion actually work.

Studies show that when people encounter scents, they instinctively reach for multisensory descriptions because that's how scent becomes memorable and meaningful.  The more senses we engage—visual, tactile, auditory—the stronger the emotional response and the deeper the place attachment.

This is why describing scent through texture, color, rhythm, or spatial quality isn't poetic license.  It's neuroscience.  Your brain is already doing this.  We're just making it conscious.

If scent is this powerful but hard to describe, what does that mean for how we live?  Think about how often we design a home based on what we see—the furniture, the colors, the lighting.  But if scent is one of the strongest emotional triggers, and if it operates in a realm that's private, pre-verbal, and deeply personal, then shouldn't we be designing with it just as intentionally?

The question isn't "What scent should I use in my home?"  The question is: What do I want this space to feel like?  What emotions do I want to anchor here?  Which scents remind me of belonging, comfort, energy, rest?

Since we can't rely on universal scent formulas, we have to rely on our own associations.  And since scent resists language, we have to pay attention to what we feel, not what we think we should feel. Scent becomes a tool for emotional honesty.  It can't be faked.  Your body will tell you immediately whether a scent works for you or doesn't.  If eucalyptus makes a space feel too sharp, you know.  If sandalwood makes a room feel grounding, you know.  The knowing happens before the naming.

This is why at Symbiosis, we describe essential oils through cross-sensory associations—texture, color, architecture, sound. Not because it sounds poetic, but because research shows this is how humans actually make sense of scent.  When we say sandalwood feels like polished wood, twilight, stillness—we're not being metaphorical.  We're describing how the scent registers across multiple sensory channels, the way your brain naturally processes it.  We're giving you permission to trust what you feel, even if you can't name it.

Even if you've never deliberately scented your home, it already has a scent.  The real question is: Is it shaping your space the way you want it to?  Maybe your home already carries the warm, nostalgic scent of wood and spices.  Maybe it feels absent—like something's missing.  What if you could choose the scent of your home the way you choose its colors, its textures, its light?

Scent, though hard to name, is one of the most powerful ways to make a space feel like yours. Because it lives in the part of your brain that doesn't need language to know what home means.  It just knows.  And in a world where so much is named, categorized, shared, and exposed—there's something deeply grounding about a sensory experience that's still private.  Still yours.  Still impossible to fully translate.

Maybe that's not a limitation.  Maybe it's a gift.

For research on olfactory ineffability, see Olofsson & Gottfried's work on neurocognitive limitations of olfactory language.  For cross-cultural scent vocabulary, Majid & Burenhult's studies on the Jahai offer fascinating insights.  For contemporary efforts to build scent vocabulary, explore the Odorbet project by Catherine Haley Epstein and Caro Verbeek.  For cross-sensory processing of scent, see research on sense-making of smell-triggered emotions in place.