Body Odor Perceptronics

We have a winner - this article has a year's worth of stuff to look into. 

An aromatic lexicon: Comprehensive fragrance database offers insights into human perception of odors

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-02-aromatic-lexicon-comprehensive-fragrance-database.html

University of Jena and Technical University of Dresden's Olfactorial Perceptronics Fundamental Odor Database - The project brings together various research disciplines: psychology, physics, chemistry, materials science, and medicine. For the database, they had more than 1,200 test subjects smell 74 monomolecular odor samples, then describe what they perceived with their nose in their own words and also used a rating scale to assess, among other things, how pleasant or intense they found the respective odor. 

Paywalled results https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04644-2

Public-access app (German language only) https://crown-dataset.streamlit.app/

University of Jena and colleagues from Finland, Israel and the Czech Republic Smart Electronic Olfaction for Body Odor Diagnostics or SMELLODI - The researchers asked 2,600 test subjects in 17 countries how they would describe the odor of individual parts of the body and how it differs when a person is ill or has been exercising. This resulted in a catalogue of descriptions for various odors in 13 languages, which produces clear overlaps and thus allows general statements to be made about how certain areas of the body smell. The test subjects perceived armpit odor as sweaty, sour and stinky, they described bad breath as either fresh or stinky and foot odor as cheesy.

Paywalled results https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04630-8

Public-access app https://bow-descriptors.streamlit.app/

Here's a sample of the Standardized Lexicon of Body Odor Words, in English:

• "healthy" - fresh, clean, neutral, sweet, natural
• "after exercise" - sweaty, strong, salty, sour, musky, ... wet,
• "from the mouth" - food, rotten, minty, sour, foul, gross, garlicky, fresh, strong, 
• "from the feet" - sweaty, sour, cheesy, stinky, pungent, strong, dirty, smelly, bad
• "from the female genitals" - fishy, sour, sweet, musky, ... metallic, ... salty, 
• "from the male genitals" - sweaty, musky, salty, musty, sour, cheesy, stale, urine, ... fishy, 
• "stressed" - sweaty, sour, strong, pungent, stinky, sharp, salty, 
• "from the armpit" - sweaty, strong, sour, musky, salty, sweet, ...

via University of Jena and TU Dresden: Antonie Louise Bierling et al, A dataset of laymen olfactory perception for 74 mono-molecular odors, Scientific Data (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-025-04644-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04644-2

Also: Antonie L. Bierling et al, A standardized lexicon of body odor words crafted from 17 countries, Scientific Data (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-025-04630-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04630-8

Mostly unrelated image credit: AI Art - The Great Pheromone Distributor - Damien Hirst's Pharmacy 1992 - 2024

Know Your Acids

Looking at the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, a universal language of coffee’s sensory qualities. There's a lot of good stuff in here, especially in the way they come up with 'reference smells' for their descriptors. For example, for "Fermented" they have two seemingly dissimilar things to give you the idea of what it is - 1. Guinness Extra Stout beer in a glass, and 2. grass left in a sealed jar for two weeks (to ferment).

The category for "Sour" seemed way simpler than I expected, with only four substances, all acids. There's plenty of good stuff in here, but I'll start with this brief category.

They begin by reminding you what Sour is: "The fundamental taste factor associated with a citric acid solution," and this is best represented by Citric Acid. They then go on to describe Sour Aromatics: "An aromatic associated with the impression of a sour product," and this is best represented by Bush's brand Pinto beans from a can (go figure, I'll have to remind myself what this smells like). Then we get into the acids themselves; there's only four.

ACETIC ACID

A sour, astringent, slightly pungent aromatic associated with vinegar.

BUTYRIC ACID

A sour, fermented-dairy aromatic associated with certain aged cheeses such as Parmesan.

ISOVALERIC ACID

A pungent, sour aromatic associated with sweaty, perspiration-generated foot odor and certain aged cheeses such as Romano.

CITRIC ACID

A mild, clean, sour aromatic with slight citrus notes accompanied by astringency.

MALIC ACID
A sour, sharp, somewhat fruity aromatic accompanied by astringency.

Now for the good part. All of these, except for citric and malic acid (I think) are the core of body odor aromas. Can I call them aromas then?

The smell comes not from the body itself, but from the skin flora, the critters that live on your body, digesting your excreta and then themselves excreting the odorful products. They break down the fat in your sweat to get energy for themselves, and their waste product is a smelly acid. Different species of bacteria produce different acids, and these listed above are the big three. I guess they're in your coffee too. 

source document:

World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, 2016

World Coffee Research

5728 John Kimbrough Blvd., Suite 201

College Station, TX 77843-2477

www.worldcoffeeresearch.org

Brits and Twits

Some words just sound funny, and sometimes sounds are just more important than semantics.

Booty, booby and nitwit—academics reveal funniest words
Aug 2017, phys.org

Tomas Engelthaler and Professor Thomas Hills in the Department of Psychology analysed 5000 randomly selected words, and showed them to over 800 people online - asking them to rate from one to five how humourous they found each word.

The funniest words - those which had been scored highly by the most people, and given the highest mean humour rating - were (in order):

Booty
Tit
Booby
Hooter
Nitwit
Twit
Waddle
Tinkle
Bebop
Egghead
Ass
Twerp

-phys.org

I have a feeling the sample pool here is from England not the US. Something about 'twit'.

Post Script
Sound Symbolism and Universal Language
Limbic Signal 2017