Why Are Smells So Hard to Describe, When You Can Name a Face From Its Eyes?

Show someone a thin strip of a famous face, just the eyes, and there is a good chance a name pops out before they have finished squinting.

Now blindfold the same person and hold an open jar of cinnamon under their nose. They know it. They have smelled it a thousand times. And yet what comes out is "uh... sweet? Christmassy? It's on the tip of my tongue."

So why are smells so hard to describe, when a sliver of a face is enough? The gap is real, it is one of the more reliable findings in perception research, and it says as much about language as it does about noses. This guide walks through what the studies show, what it means for your own nose, and how to build a smell vocabulary you can actually use.

Key takeaways

• People know roughly 5,000 faces, and a crop of eyes and brows often carries enough to name one.
• Without cues, people name familiar smells correctly only about half the time or less.
• The failure is usually naming, not recognising: you know the smell, the word won't come.
• The human nose is not as weak as its reputation. Language is a big part of the problem.
• Some languages, such as Jahai, have abstract smell words, and their speakers name smells about as easily as colours.
• Expertise alone does not fix it: wine and coffee experts were no better than novices at naming everyday smells.
• A shared vocabulary, like perfumery's accords and notes, is a reasonable way to practise.

Contents

• Faces: the skill you practise all day
• Why are smells so hard to describe? Familiar but nameless
• Is it your nose, or your language?
• Why we name faces but not smells
• Do smell experts do any better?
• Can you train your nose's vocabulary?
• Try it: a smell round for quiz night
• Common mistakes when you describe a smell
• FAQ

Faces: the skill you practise all day

You meet faces constantly, and almost every one comes with a name attached. Over a lifetime that adds up to a huge, well-labelled library.

How many faces do people know?

In a 2018 study, a University of York study asked people to list every face they could recall from their personal lives and from the media, then tested which famous faces they recognised. The team, Jenkins, Dowsett and Burton, estimated that people know about 5,000 faces on average, with individuals ranging from roughly 1,000 to 10,000. The participants were young adults, so treat the number as a ballpark rather than a rule for everyone.

Why a strip of eyes is often enough

You don't need the whole face. The region around the eyes carries a lot of identity, and one classic experiment suggests the eyebrows matter even more than people assume. When MIT researchers Sadr, Jarudi and Sinha removed the eyebrows from photos of familiar faces in a 2003 study, recognition dropped more than when they removed the eyes themselves. So an eye crop that catches the brows is handing you two strong clues at once.

That is the bet behind guess the celebrity by their eyes: a strip of eyes is often enough. Other features work too, which is why we also built the smile-only round.

It's also why our parody composites (edited game images, not real photos) catch so many people out. Many of our cards paste one star's eyes onto another star's photo, so the clue you trust most is the one that's been swapped. Our About page explains how the game's edited images are made, and the guide on how to spot a face swap shows what to look for.

Not everyone finds faces easy

Face recognition varies a lot between people. At the far end is developmental prosopagnosia, often called face blindness, a lifelong difficulty learning and recognising faces. A widely quoted figure of about 2 percent comes from a 2006 German study by Kennerknecht and colleagues, which estimated 2.47 percent among 689 medical students using questionnaires and interviews.

A 2022 study by DeGutis and colleagues tested 3,116 adults online and found that the cutoffs researchers most commonly use give a rate nearer 0.93 percent. They also found no natural dividing line, which suggests face recognition ability sits on a continuum. So if you are rubbish at our eyes round, you have plenty of company.

Why are smells so hard to describe? Familiar but nameless

Smell works differently. You can know a smell intimately and still have nothing to call it.

How often do people name familiar smells?

In lab tests where people sniff everyday odours with no other cues (no label, no packaging, no context), naming accuracy for familiar smells rarely gets above about 50 percent, according to a review chapter by the psychologists Jönsson and Stevenson. Unfamiliar smells do worse.

A 2015 review by Olofsson and Gottfried in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, titled "The muted sense", puts it more starkly. Drawing on earlier studies, it reports that healthy people named only about 20 to 50 percent of common odours correctly, against nearly 100 percent for pictures of the same things in an equivalent task.

The lemon problem

Jönsson and Stevenson's example is lemon. Smelled on its own, a lemon feels completely familiar, yet naming it is much harder than naming a lemon you can see. The failure is not about recognising the smell. You know you know it. The name simply won't come.

Olofsson and Gottfried make the same point from the other side. People can easily tell common odours apart in pairs, and accuracy rises sharply when they get a multiple-choice list. Their explanation is a weak link between smells and words, not weak smelling.

The tip of the nose

Researchers call this the "tip-of-the-nose" state, a term usually credited to a 1977 paper by Lawless and Engen. It's the smell version of the tip-of-the-tongue feeling: strong familiarity, a sense the answer is close, and nothing to say.

Context does most of the work

In daily life you rarely notice, because the world hands you cues. The smell comes from a mug, a bakery or a bottle with a label. Take the cues away and most people discover how much of their "smelling" was really reading.

Is it your nose, or your language?

For a long time the easy explanation was biology: human noses are just weaker. That idea has taken a beating.

Is the human sense of smell actually weak?

In a 2017 review in Science titled "Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth", the Rutgers neuroscientist John McGann traced the belief back to the 19th-century anatomist Paul Broca, whose claim rested on theory about the brain rather than on testing anyone's nose. According to the Rutgers summary of the review, the human olfactory bulb is quite large and similar in its number of neurons to that of other mammals. Rats and mice have genes for about 1,000 kinds of smell receptor against about 400 in humans, but McGann argues that does not make our sense of smell poor. He suggests people can discriminate maybe a trillion different odours, far more than the 10,000 often quoted in textbooks. That figure is an estimate, but the direction is clear: the hardware is better than its reputation.

The Jahai: a language with smell words

Then linguists went looking outside English. The Jahai are hunter-gatherers in the Malay Peninsula whose language has a set of abstract smell words, used the way English uses "blue" or "purple". A later paper by Croijmans and Majid puts the number of these basic smell terms at as many as 12.

In a 2014 study in the journal Cognition, Asifa Majid and Niclas Burenhult asked Jahai speakers and a matched group of English speakers to name smells and colours. The Jahai named smells about as easily and consistently as colours. The English speakers struggled. Their smell descriptions were around five times longer than their colour descriptions, and mostly named a source, such as banana, or said how pleasant the smell was.

ScienceDaily's write-up of the Jahai study captures the English side well. Faced with cinnamon, participants offered spicy, sweet, candy, smoky, potpourri and more. It also notes that English speakers correctly named familiar everyday smells only about half the time, which lines up with the lab figures above.

Twenty languages, five senses

A 2018 study of 20 languages, published in PNAS and including three sign languages, tested all five senses: sight (colour and shape), sound, touch, taste and smell. Pooled together, smell came out as the hardest sense to put into words. But not everywhere. Hunter-gatherer communities coded smell better than the rest, and for speakers of Umpila in Australia, smell was the easiest of all the senses to describe. The authors also found that communities with specialist musicians described sounds more consistently, though they call these culture links tentative.

The takeaway: a large part of the problem is vocabulary and practice, not just the hardware in your nose.

Why we name faces but not smells

Put the two findings side by side and the difference is clear.

• Faces arrive with labels. Every face you learn comes with a name. Smells usually arrive with a source instead, and the smell itself never gets a word of its own.
• Colours have abstract words, smells mostly don't. In English, "red" works for a bus, a rose or a logo. Most smell words are borrowed from objects. When the object isn't there, the word goes missing too.
• Faces get feature-level practice. You read eyes and brows for identity and mood all day. Most of us rarely stop to ask what exactly we're smelling.

So a hard face crop is a fair fight with a skill you've practised for decades. A blind smell is a fight with one hand tied behind your back.

Do smell experts do any better?

You might expect people who smell for a living to have solved this. If training alone answered the question "why are smells so hard to describe?", wine and coffee professionals would be fluent. The evidence says: only up to a point.

In a 2015 conference paper titled "Odor naming is difficult, even for wine and coffee experts", Croijmans and Majid tested wine experts, coffee experts and novices on everyday smells such as chocolate, leather and lemon. Neither group of experts was more accurate or more consistent than the novices. Experts and non-experts alike relied overwhelmingly on source-based descriptions. The authors conclude that expertise alone is not enough to overcome the limits of the language you speak.

That is a useful warning. Years of sniffing wine do not hand you a general smell vocabulary. What experts do have is practice within their own field, and the words that come with it. That points to the next question.

Can you train your nose's vocabulary?

The research points to a cautious maybe. If culture and practice explain a lot of the gap, building a vocabulary should help, much as the musicians in the 2018 study had more consistent words for sound. None of the studies above tested a crash course, and the expert study shows that experience alone is not a shortcut, so treat this as a reasonable bet rather than a promise.

Borrow a ready-made word list

Perfumery already has the kind of vocabulary you'd want. Fragrance people describe scents in accords, blends that read as one impression, and notes, the individual ingredients you can pick out. Fragranxe, a fragrance discovery site, has an explorer of 88 fragrance accords that works as a word list: each accord is a shared name for one smell impression, the kind of agreed vocabulary most English speakers never practise.

What does oud smell like?

"What does oud smell like?" is a perfect example of the problem. Ask five people and most will reach for sources: wood, smoke, leather, a temple, an old wardrobe. A better route is to smell oud next to its neighbours and attach words as you go. You can search fragrances by single notes like oud, vanilla or vetiver, then read the notes pyramid of an oud fragrance such as Creed Royal Oud before you smell a tester. Reading the listed notes before you smell gives your nose something specific to look for.

A five-minute drill

1. Pick three things from your kitchen: a spice, a citrus peel, something toasted.
2. Smell each one with your eyes closed and describe it without naming the source.
3. Look up an accord word that fits, and use it next time.
4. Repeat with a perfume sample, and see how many words carry over.
5. Once a week, compare two similar fragrances. Reading Bleu de Chanel vs Sauvage side by side and then smelling both on paper shows you which words actually separate two well-known men's fragrances.

If you need a starting point, browse the most popular perfumes on Fragranxe. You have probably smelled several of them on other people, which gives your new words something familiar to stick to.

Keep it honest

Expect slow progress. The studies above suggest your words will grow fastest for smells you practise, and slower for everything else. That is still more vocabulary than you had, and it makes "what does it smell like?" a fun question instead of an awkward one.

Try it: a smell round for quiz night

If you host quizzes, a blind smell round is the perfect sequel to a face round. It is also a live demonstration of everything above. If you are planning a whole evening, our guide to hosting a quiz night with friends covers the rest.

Setup

Fill six opaque jars with kitchen staples (coffee, cinnamon, lemon peel, vanilla, mint, smoked paprika), number them, and let teams sniff. Cover each jar with a cloth or perforated lid so nobody can peek at colour or texture. Pass them round in the same order for every team.

Scoring

Give one point for the exact item and half a point for a sensible family ("citrus", "spice"). Teams that use describing words but miss the source still deserve credit for trying, so a bonus point for the best description keeps quieter players involved.

Make it multiple choice

Olofsson and Gottfried's review notes that naming accuracy rises sharply with a multiple-choice list. Use that. Read four options per jar, built from the other jars, the same way a four-option face round works. It turns a frustrating round into a fair one.

Safety

Check for allergies first, and keep everything food-safe. Never ask anyone to taste a mystery jar.

Switch back to faces

Expect plenty of tip-of-the-nose moments. Then switch back to faces with guess the celebrity by their nose, where the nose is the clue instead of the tool. If you would rather do the smell round with real fragrances, Fragranxe's guide on how to run a blind fragrance test covers blotters and labelling. And if you want a picture round too, here are picture round ideas beyond famous faces.

Common mistakes when you describe a smell

• Naming the source and stopping. "It smells like a candle" tells nobody much. Add one quality word: warm, sharp, powdery, green.
• Judging instead of describing. "Nice" and "gross" are verdicts, not descriptions. They are also what most English speakers default to.
• Smelling too many things at once. After four or five strong smells, everything blurs. Take a break and smell something neutral, like your own sleeve.
• Trusting the label. Read the notes after you smell, not before, when you are testing yourself.
• Assuming experts have the answer. The wine and coffee study shows experts struggle with everyday smells too.

FAQ

Why can't I describe smells even when I know them?

This is the everyday version of the question "why are smells so hard to describe?" Most people can recognise a familiar smell but cannot retrieve its name, which is a naming problem rather than a smelling problem. English has few abstract smell words, so we borrow object words like "lemony", and when the object is missing the word goes too. Lab studies find people name familiar smells correctly only about half the time or less without cues.

What is the tip of the nose phenomenon?

It is the smell version of having a word on the tip of your tongue. You feel sure you know a smell and that the name is close, but you cannot produce it. The term is usually credited to a 1977 paper by Lawless and Engen. It is common in blind smell tests, which is why a smell round at a quiz night is so frustrating and so funny.

What does oud smell like, and how do I learn it?

Oud is hard to describe for the same reasons any smell is. Most people answer with sources such as wood, smoke or leather rather than abstract words. The best way to learn it is to smell an oud fragrance next to its listed notes, compare it with other woody fragrances, and write down your own words each time.

Is the human sense of smell weak?

Not as weak as its reputation. A 2017 review in Science by John McGann argued that the idea of poor human smell is a 19th-century myth traced to the anatomist Paul Broca. The human olfactory bulb has a similar number of neurons to that of other mammals. Our trouble is mostly putting smells into words.

How many faces can a person recognise?

A 2018 University of York study estimated that people know about 5,000 faces on average, with individuals ranging from about 1,000 to 10,000. That includes people from personal life and famous faces from the media. It is one reason a well-cropped celebrity face is often guessable from the eyes alone.

Are some languages better at describing smells?

Yes. Jahai, spoken by hunter-gatherers in the Malay Peninsula, has a set of abstract smell words, and Jahai speakers named smells about as easily as colours in a 2014 study. A 2018 study of 20 languages found hunter-gatherer communities coded smell better than others, and Umpila speakers in Australia found smell the easiest sense to describe.

Can you recognise someone from their eyes alone?

Often, yes, especially for people you know well. The region around the eyes carries a lot of identity, and a 2003 MIT study found that removing the eyebrows hurt recognition of familiar faces even more than removing the eyes. That is why an eyes-only celebrity round is hard but fair, unless the eyes have been swapped from someone else.

Your nose, your words, your next round

So, why are smells so hard to describe? Mostly because English gives you few words for them, not because your nose is broken. Faces are easy because every one of them comes with a name and a lifetime of practice. Next time a smell leaves you stuck, try one quality word and one accord word before you give up.

Then test the other half of your brain: try an easy 10-face round with no sign-in, or sign in with Google for today's three-face daily celebrity round. For the smell side, Fragranxe's fragrance accords explorer is a free list of 88 accord names waiting to be used. And if this sent you down a rabbit hole, our other guides on quizzes and perception are a click away.