IT IS A MYSTERY WHY HUMANS take such delight in the aromas of flowers. We’re not pollinators like bees, so why did evolution give us scent receptors that can pick up floral aromas? Why are our brains wired to find many of these chemicals so enticing? Unlike other attractive smells—good food, the aroma of our mates and children—flower aromas seemingly have little direct bearing on our survival and procreation. Yet, we bring fragrant blooms into our gardens and homes, cultivate and bottle floral scents, and spray the aromas of flowers onto our bodies. Strangely, we know more about floral biochemistry than we do about the origins of our own fascination with the smells of flowers.

It is not all floral aromas that we find pleasing. Flowers like the corpse flower and other arums that mimic carrion or feces are disgusting to us, but irresistible to many flies and beetles. Others, like the orchids that offer love perfumes for male bees, smell to our noses sharp and funky, like mothballs mixed with engine oil, sometimes with a tinge of citrus and buttery vanilla, not the kind of aroma typically sought out by human perfumers. The flowers in the garden at Grasse in France and in perfume bottles worldwide are a small selection of global diversity in flower aroma. What accounts for the allure of these few?

Our cultures teach us some of the meaning of smells. By watching adults and through years of experience, infants come to understand the significance and valence of aromas. If you grow up in Southeast Asia, durian fruit smells wonderful, but the sulfurous aroma is off‑putting to many others. Cheeses and other fermented foods smell delightful to those familiar with them but appalling to people not accustomed to the stench of bacteria‑ and fungus‑matured milk or cabbage. Similar cultural influences affect our reactions to floral aromas. Jasmine and violet were considered masculine scents in medieval Islamic cultures, and jasmine was the scent of lords in Iran, yet men in contemporary northern Europe generally shun jasmine as too feminine. Likewise, roses are considered feminine in most European perfumes, but both masculine and feminine in the Middle East, where rose water has been used since at least Assyrian times, over three thousand years ago. The musky and even fecal aromas present in some European perfumes are considered distasteful in Japan, where the majority of perfume is floral. In the womb, we learn to associate aroma with pleasure. Dissolved in mothers’ blood, aroma molecules from vegetables like carrots and seasonings like anise flow through the placenta to fetuses. Once born, infants remember which plant volatiles are rewarding. Whether we learn before birth the aromas of flowers and floral perfumes is so far unknown. If your mother wore rosy perfume when she was pregnant, does your subconscious somehow remember this and give you a special affinity for roses?

The meanings of aromas also change through time within cultures. For example, when Ernest Beaux created Chanel No. 5, using jasmine from Grasse, the perfume was a hit among young fashionistas of the 1920s. Later in the century it seemed dated, an “old lady perfume.” Now, the perfume’s reputation has been revived as a “classic.” Continual change is the point of fashion, allowing those in vogue to signal their social standing, aesthetic acumen, and wealth.

If your mother wore rosy perfume when she was pregnant, does your subconscious somehow remember this and give you a special affinity for roses?

Perfume is a perfect vehicle for fashion culture: Billions of combinations of volatiles are possible—an endless palette for change—and many, but not all, ingredients are expensive, creating a seamless gradation in prices from affordable to outrageous. None of this is new. Writing in the first century, the Roman writer Pliny recounts dozens of changes in aromatic fashions: “Perfume of iris, from Corinth, was long held in the highest esteem, till that of Cyzicus came into fashion . . . after which perfume of œnanthe, from Cyprus . . . and then that of Egypt was preferred . . . then was supplanted by unguent of marjoram, from Cos, which in its turn was superseded by quince blossom.” Two thousand years later, he reads like a contemporary fashion reporter, tracking every new release from perfumery houses around the Mediterranean. In Pliny’s time, too, some perfumes were cheap enough to be used in soldiers’ camps, but others were eye‑wateringly expensive, used for “luxurious gratification,” pleasures that, unlike jewels and clothes, “die away the very hour they are used.”

Not all our attraction to flower aromas is culturally learned, though. Humans worldwide find floral scents enticing. Underneath the ever‑changing churn of culture and fashion, a question still lingers. What might be the biological basis of our attraction?

We smell using receptors deep in the nasal cavity, buried in the skull under our eyeballs. There, aroma molecules from the air dissolve into a thin layer of mucus where carrier molecules ferry the aromas to waiting receptor nerves. These nerves bristle with proteins that pick up specific aroma molecules, one protein type per nerve. From the nasal cavity, the nerves run directly to a processing center in our brain. We have about four hundred different receptor types, more than twice as many as honeybees (and far more than the paltry three color receptors in our eyes). Combinations among these are what our brain translates into the conscious experience of aroma. No wonder smell is so multifarious.

We each differ in the sensitivity of our aroma receptors. The experience of smell is therefore highly personal. Quite how many different aromas the average human nose can distinguish is controversial. Some scientific studies claim that humans could theoretically discriminate up to a trillion different aromas, but others say that we can pick out just ten thousand variations. The disagreement stems from just how far we can extrapolate from the results of a small number of carefully controlled laboratory studies. All modern studies agree, though, that the nineteenth‑century idea that humans have a poor sense of smell is a myth. Most of us have up to twenty million aroma‑sensitive nerves in our noses. In theory, we can sniff traces of almost all volatile molecules. Like all senses, there is wide variation among individuals in the acuity of the sense of smell, partly caused by genetic quirks and partly by nerve damage or degeneration.

The fact that many of us respond so strongly to floral aromas is partly due to the need to find food. At first, this seems preposterous. We might eat an occasional nasturtium bloom in a salad, but we’re not a flower‑eating species. But deep in our nervous system, our ancestors whisper to us. Floral aromas, for them, could signal food. Before our ancestors evolved into grass apes, they spent about fifty million years as tree‑living primates where the smells of flowers and leaves were vitally important guides to food.

Humans worldwide find floral scents enticing. Underneath the ever‑changing churn of culture and fashion, a question still lingers. What might be the biological basis of our attraction?

Among primates that still live in the forest, flowers are a seasonally important food, and primates from all families except the insect‑eating tarsiers munch flowers. White‑faced capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica eat more than a dozen different flowers, gorging themselves when favored flowers like night‑blooming mallows come into season. In African and American tropical forests, many species of monkey feast on the red, succulent flowers of boarwood trees. These flowers release their pollen in oil, anointing visiting birds to ensure pollination, so the unctuous pollen‑bearing anthers make rich meals for monkeys. Chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, also occasionally eat flowers. Although they mostly eat fruit and foliage, blooms can make up about 2 percent of their diets. These apes eat flowers even when fruit is abundant, suggesting that they actively seek out floral snacks. We modern humans have lost the taste for eating flowers, but we still have most of the smell receptors that guided our ancestors. Our love of floral perfume is partly a gastronomic atavism.

Floral aromas also guide us to good habitats. Many of the aromatic chemicals in flowers are the same as those found in foliage and fruit, presented in concentrated form by the flower. Linalool, for example, has a spicy, slightly lemony smell and is found in the aromas of many flowers. It is also abundant inside many leaves. Methyl jasmonate is an essential part of the internal communication network of many plants and also a common floral volatile, smelling like jasmine. Our nerves and brain pleasure centers delight in botanical language, perhaps because leafy places are good habitats for humans. A woodland, glade, or meadow filled with vigorously growing plants is more likely to sustain us than deserts, rocky outcrops, or swamps. Aromas guide us home.

Flowers release huge gusts of plant volatiles from a relatively small space. This makes them bewitching, creating illusions of botanical abundance. Sniffing a flower delivers dozens, sometimes hundreds, of aromatic plant molecules in one huff. Inhaling the aromas of a flower, we get microbursts of connection to plants. Manufactured perfumes further ramp up the intensity, packing the aroma of many blooms into a single drop of essence. We don’t just bathe in plant aroma, we plunge.

It is perhaps no accident that manufactured perfumes are especially popular in urbanized and industrialized cultures. People worldwide use aromatic plants to perfume the body, yet it is in cities that perfumery trade is briskest. As we lose everyday contact with plants, we hunger for reconnection. Walk into the perfume section of a department store and you’re in the aromatic presence of hundreds of plants. Perfume, then, is perhaps an antidote to ecological loneliness. We dab and spritz memories of the forest and meadow onto our bodies, wrapping ourselves in the embrace of green kin. In this view, perfume creates illusion, the scent of healthy flowers and plants where few exist. Or, from a more upbeat perspective, perfumes remind us that, for all our technological sophistication, we are still a species that thrives in community with plants.

As we lose everyday contact with plants, we hunger for reconnection… Perfume, then, is perhaps an antidote to ecological loneliness.

PERFUMES MADE OF FLOWERS evoke feelings of beauty and desire in others, with an undercurrent of illusion. This is exactly what flower aromas do in the wild with pollinators, and so our perfumes carry not only the material presence of flowers into the human realm, but some of the flowers’ ways of being. There are no perfumes made of unmodified human scent, declaring to the nose, This is who I am. Instead, we present to the world a more complicated aromatic story, one that merges our identity with that of flowers and other more‑than‑human aromas. This is who we are.

Perfume tells the world that we are made from relationship, we are living communities. We transcend the “self,” not as a metaphor or a mystical experience, but as a reality experienced in our bodies. There is a paradox here. To more fully express our humanity, we reach for plants. To be “me,” human, I need “you,” plant. This ability to create interbeing is part of the original genius of flowering plants, one reason for their wild success over more than one hundred million years. By creating experiences of beauty, flowers stitch creatures that were separate or only loosely connected into tight, intimate, and creative relationships.

When we give a scented flower, bring blooms to a grave, or dab perfume onto our skin, we are not enacting arbitrary, merely symbolic rituals. Rather, we invoke the relationships with flowering plants from which the ecology of the planet is made, and which created and sustain human life. No wonder we mark every major transition in our lives with flowers. A bouquet or perfume bottle invokes our creators.

Bring home your copy of How Flowers Made Our World today.

Excerpted from How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David Geroge Haskell, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by David George Haskell.

This piece contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, a retailer that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, Orion earns a small commission when you click through and make a purchase there.