Meet Laurax, a not-very-bold, not-that-exciting new fragrance. According to a panel of sniffers, it’s neither appealing nor revolting. It’s “intermediately pleasant”. People almost trip over themselves to describe it in non-descript terms—“fragrant”, “chemical” and “perfumery”.
Laurax isn’t going to set the perfume world ablaze in the near future, but its scientific implications are fascinating. This bizarre scent is actually a set of completely different fragrances that all smell roughly the same. It’s the odour version of “white”.
— Read more at The smell of white – mixtures of many distinct scents end up smelling the same at Discover Magazine.
Only comment is that the color white isn’t the visual equivalent of neutral. Maybe Laurex is the olfactory equivalent of the (25%?) gray that printers set the background of their monitor to so that they can perceive the colors on their workspace properly. I mean this is Discover magazine and all.
Well in terms of signal processing I think they’re analogies were actually all right… “White noise” is an auditory neutral, but what it really is is a combination of many different signals that leads to a flat frequency spectrum (whatever ingredients — frequencies — you add in). The distribution of the color white is similarly flat — since all wavelengths are present.
So what they’re trying to say about this “white smell” is that when you add many scents, you start to get a flat distribution of the different “scent frequencies” and it starts to smell something like a “white noise” equivalent to neutral. But the comparison with the color white is mostly in terms of having flat distribution (where all frequencies or wavelengths are present).