The best and worst smells in the world according to scientists (2024)

When you think about your favourite smell, what comes to mind? Is it chocolate, lavender or maybe your favourite bubble bath or lip balm?

Well, a team of scientists from the University of Oxford think they've worked out the best and worst smells in the world.

According to their study, the best smell is vanilla and the worst smell is sweaty feet.

The results show that people share favourite smells regardless of where they come from in the world.

What are your favourite and least favourite smells? Do you agree with the findings of this study? Let us know in the comments section below.

The researchers studied nine groups of people with very different lifestyles, in order to test whether a person's smell choices were linked to their culture.

The study included 235 people, who were asked to rank smells on a scale of pleasant to unpleasant.

The top two ranked smells were vanilla and peaches. The least pleasant smells were cheese, soy milk, apple juice and foot sweat.

According to Dr Arshamian, one of the authors of the study, a possible reason why people like and dislike the same smells is because being able to sniff out bad odours was useful as humans evolved.

For example, being able to smell if food, such as meat, is dangerous to eat because it has started to decay.

Dr Arshamian said: "The next step is to study why this is so by linking this knowledge to what happens in the brain when we smell a particular odour."

Now let us know your favourite smells in the comments!