Scents

As written by Clara Moskowitz, “The sense of smell, it turns out, is highly individual—a scent that is enticingly floral to one person may be off-putting and chemical to another.” Researcher Miriam Quick came to us with a pitch on the topic—complete with content suggestions. I then styled her charts, and designed the spread shown here.

Source: “A Dataset of Laymen Olfactory Perception for 74 Mono-Molecular Odors,” by Antonie Louise Bierling et al., in Scientific Data, Vol. 12; February 2025 (data)

For more context, read the full article at Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-some-smells-are-pleasant-and-others-are-off-putting-according-to-science/