To facilitate communication about fragrances, one can use the colours people tend to associate with their smells. We investigated to what extent odour–colour correspondences for fine fragrances can be accounted for by underlying emotional associations. Odour–colour matches and degree-of-fit judgments revealed that odours were matched to colours non-randomly. Matching colours differed mainly on blackness (brightness), and less on chromaticness (saturation) and hue. Furthermore, we found a consistent negative relationship between odour–colour degree-of-fit ratings and the difference between the odour scores and the colour scores on one of the emotion dimensions (pleasure). This suggests that emotional associations may partly underlie odour–colour correspondences.
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