: Re: How do I define smells I have never experienced? I am a lifelong writer, who was also born without an ability to smell. I have been trained to engage the reader by applying the five senses,

@Ogunnowo420

A couple of answers above have alluded to the nostalgia or emotion factors. Personally, I would recommend you focus on this more than trying to come up with lots of description.

A lot of the time - to me at least - smell is inconsequential, unless it’s particularly strong or unpleasant, but every so often, I do find a smell has a very specific association and I instantly make the connection. This might be just me, but I suspect it’s more because we don’t have ways of easily categorising / describing smells and our brains find other ways to recall them.

To give you an example, I’ve smelled the fragrance of an obscure cleaning product that I didn’t even know existed and could immediately say, with absolute certainty, that I smelled it in my grandmother’s house as a toddler decades ago.

Slightly more commonplace experiences would be familiar smells that you recognise and encounter more frequently, say a perfume someone often wears, where you know they’ve entered the room without looking, or a familiar cooking smell on entering a kitchen means you already know what you’ll be eating.

My advice would be not to overdo the smell references. If you do it in every description, I think it will appear forced and overdone, but the occasional reference with an association could be quite effective.

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