Why We Trust Our Nose Less Than Our Eyes

I was standing in a spice souk in Dubai — not as a tourist, exactly, but not yet as a resident either — when a merchant held out his palm and asked me to close my eyes. He had three resins in front of him. I had been trying to describe the difference between them, and I was failing. Not because my nose could not distinguish them. It could. One was sharper, almost citric. One was rounder, sweeter, with a kind of gravitational pull. The third had a mineral coolness that made me think of stone churches. I could feel the differences clearly. What I could not do, standing there with my eyes shut and the afternoon heat pressing against my neck, was say them. I had no words. Not imprecise words — no words at all.

That moment has stayed with me, not because it was unusual, but because it was so ordinary. Every person who has ever tried to describe a smell to someone else has lived some version of it. We can talk about colour with extraordinary precision — mauve, cerulean, burnt sienna. We can describe sounds with a vocabulary that spans centuries of musical theory. But smell? We borrow. We approximate. We say it smells like something. Always like. Never what it is.

This essay is about why. Not just why English lacks a dedicated smell vocabulary — though it does — but why an entire civilisation decided, millennia ago, that the nose was less trustworthy than the eye. And what we lost in making that decision.

The Hierarchy We Inherited

The ranking begins with Plato. In his framework, sight and hearing were the intellectual senses — the ones capable of participating in truth, beauty, and reason. They operated at a distance. They were clean. Smell, taste, and touch were the bodily senses, mired in proximity, in appetite, in the embarrassingly physical fact of having a body at all. Plato deemed smell a sense of a "half-formed nature" and suggested that not much could be said about it. That judgment, delivered in Athens roughly twenty-four centuries ago, set the template for Western thought about sensory experience.

Aristotle largely agreed. He ranked the senses in order of their connection to intellect, and smell fell somewhere in the middle — above touch, below sight. But it was Immanuel Kant, writing in 1798, who delivered the most damning verdict. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, he called smell "the most ungrateful" and "the most dispensable" of the senses, writing that "it does not pay to cultivate it or refine it at all in order to enjoy." Kant's argument was not that smell was unpleasant. It was that smell was unworthy of intellectual attention. It could not be refined. It could not elevate. It was sensation without cognition — pleasure without meaning.

This is a remarkable claim when you examine it. Here was one of the most rigorous minds in human history declaring that an entire sense — one shared by every living human, one deeply wired into memory and emotion — was beneath serious thought. And the intellectual tradition largely followed him. Philosophy became a discipline of the eye and the ear. Aesthetics was built around the visible and the audible. Smell was left to the marketplace, to the kitchen, to the body — precisely the domains that serious thinking was supposed to transcend.

We built an entire epistemology around seeing and hearing, then wondered why we had no language for what the nose already knew.

The Language That Never Developed

The consequences of this philosophical demotion are most visible in language. English has hundreds of words for colour. It has a rich vocabulary for texture, for sound, for spatial relationships. For smell, it has almost nothing. We have no basic smell terms — no equivalent of "red" or "loud" or "rough." When researchers ask English speakers to name common odours in laboratory settings, success rates hover between twenty-five and fifty percent. For colours, accuracy approaches ceiling. The asymmetry is staggering.

Diane Ackerman captured this beautifully in her 1990 book A Natural History of the Senses: "Smell is the mute sense, the one without words." She observed that smells are often right on the tip of our tongues but no closer, and that this namelessness gives them "a kind of magical distance, a mystery, a power without a name, a sacredness." There is something generous in Ackerman's framing — she sees the silence as enchantment rather than failure. But the silence is also a limitation. You cannot think precisely about what you cannot name. And you cannot build a culture around what you cannot discuss.

But here is the crucial finding, and the one that reframes the entire question: the olfactory muteness of English is not universal. Research led by cognitive scientist Asifa Majid at the Max Planck Institute demonstrated that speakers of Jahai, a language of the Malay Peninsula, can name odours with the same ease and precision that English speakers name colours. Jahai has around a dozen abstract smell terms — not comparisons, not "it smells like cinnamon," but dedicated words for categories of olfactory experience. The word ltpit describes the smell of various flowers, ripe fruit, and perfume. Cnes describes the smell of petrol, smoke, and certain roots. These are not metaphors. They are categories. The Jahai have what we do not: a grammar of smell.

The implication is profound. The reason English speakers cannot name smells is not biological. Our noses work fine. The deficit is cultural. We never built the vocabulary because we never valued the sense enough to need one. The language gap is not evidence that smell is lesser. It is evidence that we decided it was, and then our language faithfully reflected that decision back to us as though it were natural law.

The Civilisational Bargain

Freud offered a different, stranger explanation for why smell was suppressed. In Civilisation and Its Discontents, he argued that when early humans adopted an upright posture, the nose was physically elevated away from the ground — away from the scent trails that had once governed sexual behaviour and territorial knowledge. Vision replaced smell as the dominant sense, and this shift, Freud believed, was not incidental to civilisation but foundational to it. Smell was repressed because smell was animal. To build cities and institutions and codes of conduct, we had to stop being led by the nose.

You do not have to accept Freud's psychosexual framework to recognise the insight buried in it. There is something about smell that resists the organising impulses of civilisation. Smell is involuntary — you cannot close your nose the way you close your eyes. Smell is intimate — it requires proximity, shared air, the molecules of one thing entering the body of another. Smell is democratic in a way that sight is not — you cannot control what others smell on you, and you cannot fully control what you smell on them. In a culture that prizes autonomy, rationality, and individual control, smell is an affront. It crosses boundaries without asking permission.

This is why, I suspect, fragrance occupies such an ambivalent position in contemporary culture. We spend billions on it — the global fragrance market exceeds sixty billion dollars — but we rarely discuss it with the seriousness we bring to visual or musical aesthetics. There are no smell critics in major newspapers the way there are film critics or music critics. There is no Pulitzer for olfactory composition. Perfumers — the people who create the scents that millions wear — remain largely anonymous, their names absent from the bottles they fill. We consume smell voraciously and think about it almost not at all.

Smell is the only sense we spend billions indulging and almost nothing understanding. That asymmetry is not an accident. It is a cultural inheritance.

What the Nose Actually Does

The irony of smell's philosophical demotion is that, neurologically, smell has privileges that sight and hearing do not. Olfactory signals bypass the thalamus — the relay station that processes visual and auditory information — and travel directly to the limbic system, the brain's centre for emotion and memory. This is why a smell can return you to a moment twenty years gone with an immediacy that no photograph can match. It is why the scent of a specific laundry detergent can make you feel safe, or why a stranger's cologne can trigger grief you thought you had finished with.

Smell does not pass through the cognitive checkpoint that sight and hearing do. It arrives in the emotional brain before the thinking brain has a chance to intervene. This is precisely what made philosophers suspicious of it — its unmediated quality, its refusal to be processed rationally before being felt. But it is also what makes smell the most honest of the senses. A smell either moves you or it does not. You cannot be argued into liking a scent the way you can be argued into appreciating a painting.

We built Accordist, in part, because of this paradox. Fragrance is one of the most personal aesthetic choices a person makes, yet the infrastructure for understanding that choice barely exists. There are no widely shared frameworks for describing why you are drawn to woody-resinous compositions and not to aquatic-fresh ones. There is no common language for the emotional architecture of a scent. When someone asks why you wear what you wear, the honest answer is usually some version of "I just like it" — not because you lack depth, but because the culture never gave you the words.

Seeing with Your Nose

I have come to think that the hierarchy of senses tells us very little about biology and a great deal about power. Sight is the sense of surveillance, of evidence, of proof. "I saw it with my own eyes" is the ultimate claim of authority in Western culture. "I smelled it" carries no such weight. Sight is the sense of science, of law, of institutional knowledge. Smell is the sense of the body, of instinct, of the private and the subjective. And in a civilisation that built itself on claims of objectivity, the subjective was always going to be suspect.

But objectivity has limits, and some of the most important things about being human live on the other side of those limits. The smell of your home when you return from a long trip. The perfume your mother wore. The scent of rain on hot pavement that transports you, without warning, to a childhood you thought you had outgrown. These experiences are not lesser because they cannot be quantified or articulated with precision. They are, if anything, more significant — more constitutive of who you are — than the things you can see and name and file.

The perfume industry understands this intuitively, even if it rarely says so explicitly. The reason fragrance is sold through imagery and narrative rather than through olfactory description is not only because we lack the words. It is because the experience of smell is so interior, so entangled with personal history and emotion, that it resists the kind of shared critical framework we apply to other art forms. A perfume does not mean the same thing to any two people. That is not a flaw. That is the nature of the medium.

Rehabilitating the Invisible Sense

I am not suggesting we can undo two millennia of sensory hierarchy in a generation. But I do think we are at an inflection point. The COVID-19 pandemic, which stripped millions of people of their sense of smell, did more to demonstrate the centrality of olfaction to human wellbeing than any philosophical argument ever could. People who lost their sense of smell reported not just an inability to detect danger or enjoy food, but a profound sense of disconnection — from their environment, from their memories, from themselves. They described feeling less human. The sense that Kant dismissed as dispensable turned out to be, for many, essential to the felt experience of being a person in the world.

This is where data becomes useful — not as a replacement for subjective experience, but as a bridge. When we map a fragrance into its constituent accords and show you the shape of your preferences, we are building a vocabulary. Not a definitive one. Not one that replaces the irreducible subjectivity of how a scent makes you feel. But one that allows you to begin articulating what the culture never equipped you to say. Your nose has always known what it likes. We are just trying to give it a language.

The nose has never needed philosophy's permission to know the world. It has been knowing it all along — silently, faithfully, without a single word.

Somewhere in a spice souk, a merchant is still holding out three resins and asking someone to close their eyes. The differences are real. The knowledge is real. The only thing missing is a civilisation willing to take it seriously. I think we are getting closer. But we have centuries of mistrust to unlearn, and the first step is understanding that the hierarchy was never about the senses themselves. It was about us — about what we chose to value, what we chose to name, and what we allowed ourselves to know without naming it at all.