Abstract

It is controversial among philosophers and psychologists whether or not it is appropriate to label a scent as beautiful. However, based on the concept that a beautiful stimulus requires structure, it is demonstrated that scent experiences have several kinds of structure, and thus are bona fide candidates to be described as beautiful. The aesthetic emotions of liking, attraction, and pleasure are differentiated from beauty; however, all three of those aesthetic emotions are necessary, but not sufficient conditions, for an experience of beautiful scent. Neuroaesthetics tell us how we find scent beautiful; evolutionary psychology tells us why we find scents beautiful. It appears that the beauty of a scent experience is processed in the right anterior insula and in the medial orbital frontal cortex, as are most forms of beauty experiences. Humans have evolved to find spicy, fruity, woody, and floral scents beautiful because they played a part in safety and sustenance, and thus the attraction to these beautifully scents was sexually and naturally selected into the human gene pool. Only one study has been published presenting empirical evidence that some, or many, people do find a scent beautiful. Nonetheless, based on theory and evidence that we learn to smell, and that we construct our emotions, including aesthetic emotions like the feeling of beauty, it is now dependent on human choice as to whether or not we encode beautiful scents into our brains as beautiful.