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

Part of the answer is in the wiring. Sight has a whole region of the brain given over to processing and naming what we see, which is why blue or red comes to you the instant you look. Smell is handled more in the areas tied to emotion and memory than to language, with less of the labelling machinery in between, so you tend to recognise a scent before you can describe it. You know it, you feel it, and the words arrive late, if they arrive at all. That is not a personal failing. It is simply where smell lives in us.

But it is not only biology, because not every language struggles with this equally. The Jahai, a hunter-gatherer people in Malaysia, have a dedicated vocabulary for smells, the way English has one for colour. Where we say a thing smells like apples, reaching for the nearest object, they have precise scent words that stand on their own. They have a word, cŋəs, for the smell of petrol and smoke and bat droppings, and another, plɛʔ, for the smell of blood and raw meat, the things that draw tigers. These do not point at a source. They name the quality itself. So the difficulty sits both in us and in our habits. Our brains make naming smell hard, and our culture, having poured its linguistic energy into what we see and hear, left scent behind.

Some people are trying to change that. Catherine Haley Epstein and Caro Verbeek founded the Odorbet, a collaborative database that invents and gathers scent words beyond the trade's usual terms, playful and precise coinages like musky-humid and doppelspritzer, made to describe a smell directly rather than by what it resembles. The olfactory researcher Jonas Olofsson and his colleagues, meanwhile, are mapping how we associate and place scent words, building the cross-cultural datasets a real vocabulary would need. These efforts matter because they confirm something many of us have felt without saying, that scent deserves a language of its own and not a set of loans from the other senses. Until that language is common, though, we work with what we have, which means working by association and a little invention.

There is something else that makes scent strange, and it is the most interesting part. In an age where a thought becomes a post and a moment becomes a photograph, smell stays where it is. You cannot send an aroma down a wire. You can describe it, and the description will always come up short, and the experience itself remains with you. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked whether there could be a private language, one only a single person could understand, and concluded there could not, since language needs shared use to mean anything at all. Scent comes closer to the exception than almost anything we have. When you say it smells like the attic where you found your father's old letters, you are inviting someone into your memory, and still they will never smell quite what you smelled. Their attic, their old paper, carry their own associations. The scent you mean is yours alone, even as you hand someone the words for it. In a time when so much is tracked and predicted, your preferences guessed before you know them, scent stays one of the last experiences that cannot be fully captured or sold. It is still yours.

Wittgenstein also thought that words take their meaning from use rather than from fixed definitions, and scent behaves the same way. Say a thing smells fresh: to a perfumer that is crisp citrus at the top of a fragrance, to a hiker it is mountain air after rain, to someone hanging out washing it is cotton dried in the sun. The word holds many meanings, all of them valid, each shaped by a life. This is why prescriptive scent advice so often misses. Lavender is calming may hold for most people, but if your childhood bedroom kept lavender sachets and that room was lonely, your body remembers the loneliness too, and for you lavender is something else. Your response to a smell is built from everywhere you have lived and everyone you have loved, which means the only way to learn what a scent does for you is to notice what it actually does, rather than what it is meant to.

Because we cannot name smells easily, we reach for the other senses to describe them, and this turns out to be how the mind actually handles smell. We call a smell smooth or sharp, warm or cool, heavy or light. We say sandalwood is the colour of twilight, the texture of polished wood, the feeling of stillness, and petitgrain is morning light, the pace of a brisk walk, the sound of a conversation starting easily. Research on how people make sense of smell finds exactly this, that we describe it through sound, texture, colour, even the shape of a space, and that the more senses a scent engages, the more strongly it lodges in memory and feeling. Describing a scent through colour or weight or rhythm, then, is close to how the mind already works, and we are only making the process conscious.

It is also why, when we describe an oil at Symbiosis, we reach for its texture, its colour, its sound, rather than a promised feeling. The aim is only to hand the words back to your own experience.

All of which has something to say about how we live. We tend to compose a home for the eye, the furniture, the colour, the light, and leave its scent to chance, even though scent reaches feeling more directly than any of them. The useful question is not which scent you should use. It is what you want the space to hold, which feelings you want anchored there, which smells already carry belonging or comfort or rest for you. Since there are no universal formulas to lean on, you lean on your own associations instead, and since scent resists language, you pay attention to what you feel rather than what you think you ought to. That makes scent a kind of honesty. It cannot be faked. Your body tells you at once whether a scent belongs in a room. If eucalyptus makes a space feel too sharp, you know it. If sandalwood settles the room for you, you know that too, and the knowing comes before the naming.

Even if you have never thought about it, your home already has a scent. The only question is whether it is shaping the space the way you would choose. Perhaps it already holds the warm, woody smell of cooking and old timber. Perhaps it feels like something is missing. You can choose the scent of a home as deliberately as you choose its colours and its light, and because scent lives in the part of us that knows what home means without words, it is one of the surest ways to make a place feel like yours. In a world where nearly everything is named, sorted, and shared, there is something quietly steadying in an experience that stays private, stays yours, and refuses to translate. That is not a shortcoming of scent. It may be the best thing about it.

On olfactory ineffability, see Olofsson and Gottfried on the neurocognitive limits of olfactory language. On cross-cultural scent vocabulary, see Majid and Burenhult on the Jahai. On contemporary efforts to build a scent vocabulary, see the Odorbet project by Catherine Haley Epstein and Caro Verbeek. And on cross-sensory processing, see research on the sense-making of smell-triggered emotions in place.