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Category: Project

Description: Body odors are influenced by a range of processes, including genetics, hormonal changes, inflammatory processes, nutrition, and emotions. While body odors are perceived by humans and affect social interactions, they are challenging to describe. Previous research has utilized a limited number of verbal terms, or asked for ratings of pleasantness, intensity, or attractiveness, to articulate differences in the perception of body odors. These fail to adequately capture qualitative differences between body states. To address this, the current study aimed to create a multilingual lexicon to describe body odors. To this end, we conducted an online survey with 2,607 participants from 17 countries speaking 13 languages. Participants were asked to provide words describing body odors of individuals who are healthy, sick, stressed, or have exercised, and for body odors from different parts of the body. Those descriptions were standardized and sorted by frequency for each language. The final descriptor lists for 13 languages were used to construct a standardized lexicon for body odor words – BOW – of those terms which appear frequently across languages. The descriptors were largely comparable between countries and reliably differed between the four body states and five body parts. The final lexicon consists of 25 words, presented here in English, representing 44.7% of all descriptions. A confirmatory study in which body odors of 99 participants were described by a separate group of 170 perceivers, confirmed the BOW descriptors. In conclusion, this study provides a lexicon for describing body odors that are suitable for capturing state differences and that can be utilized in studies of body odor perception.