Can eyes smell? cross-modal correspondences between color hue-tone and fragrance family

Color can facilitate the identification of odor quality and influence the perception of odor intensity. To deliver coherent sensory messages of perfumes effectively, this research investigated whether people experience cross‐modal interactions between color hue–tone and fragrance family and how consistent these cross‐modal interactions are. Two experimental tasks were conducted with eight commercial perfumes in four typical fragrance families (floral, oriental, fresh, and woody): direct fragrance–color matching and degree of similarity judgement between color and fragrance. These tasks revealed that fragrances were nonrandomly, consistently matched with colors. The correspondences between the fragrance families and colors were influenced by the hue (warm–cool color images) and tone (especially, lightness property) dimensions. In addition, gender differences in the color–fragrance correspondences were partially revealed for the four fragrance families. On the other hand, there were no significant differences between the degrees of familiarity with the fragrance families and the color–fragrance correspondences. These findings confirm the robust existence of cross‐modal correspondences between vision and olfaction in perfumery. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2013