Olfactory white

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Smell composed of strong, diverse smells

title: "Olfactory white" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["olfaction"] description: "Smell composed of strong, diverse smells" topic_path: "general/olfaction" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_white" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Smell composed of strong, diverse smells ::

Olfactory white is a smell composed of many equally strong but diverse smells, perhaps over 30. Mixtures of many different smells across the perceptual range all tend to smell very similar to humans, despite different components making them up. The concept is similar to all different spectral colours combining to form white. Olfactory white is neither pleasant or malodorous. A nonsense name "laurax" was coined for one of these mixtures.

One example combination of smells that neutralise each other is broccoli, angelica seed oil, cumin, mussles, raw barley, lobster, blackberry brandy, rose wine, vitis, turnip, lamb, Indian dill root, loganberry, elderberry, raw peanut, prawn and citrus.

References

References

  1. Corbyn, Zoë. (2012). "The whiff of white could hide strong odours". Nature.
  2. Weiss, T.. (2012). "Perceptual convergence of multi-component mixtures in olfaction implies an olfactory white". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  3. (19 November 2012). "The "white noise" of smells". National Geographic.
  4. (6 November 2014). "Smell-canceling odors are like white noise for your nose".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

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