Visualising fragrances through colours: the mediating role of emotions

To facilitate communication about fragrances, one can use the colours people tend to associate with their smells. We investigated to what extent odour-colour correspondences for fine fragrances can be accounted for by underlying emotional associations. Odour-colour matches and degree-of-fit judgments revealed that odours were matched to colours non-randomly. Matching colours differed mainly on blackness (brightness), and less on chromaticness (saturation) and hue. Furthermore, we found a consistent negative relationship between odour-colour degree-of-fit ratings and the difference between the odour scores and the colour scores on one of the emotion dimensions (pleasure). This suggests that emotional associations may partly underlie odour-colour correspondences.