The Smell of White

Combine everything and you get a unique sensory outcome we call "white." With light, all colors together create white light. With sound, all different frequencies combine to make white sound. Now, scientists have created olfactory white.

To create this indescribable smell, they chose 86 different odor molecules and diluted them to the same intensity. Then they combined them in different configurations. They found that when the mixtures included 30 or more of the compounds, they began to smell alike, regardless of which odor molecules were in the mixture and even if they shared no odor molecules in common.

The neutralization comes about because no one odor is dominant and the smells range over the range of scents humans can detect, effectively canceling each other out. This even distribution of smells is highly unlikely to occur in nature, but scientists are hoping that like white noise and white light, olfactory white can be used in the study of olfaction.