How do you describe smells if you've never had a sense of smell?

“How should I describe smells/scents if I, myself, have never had a real sense of smell? I can distinguish ‘good smell’ and ‘bad smell’ if it’s strong enough but not individual smells. I’d really want to use smells in my writing to have the full sensory arsenal, but it’s so hard to describe something I’ve never felt. Any advice?”

We always get told to be descriptive in our writing, but not having a full suite of the senses can often feel like a hindrance, but believe me, it doesn’t have to be. The thing about writing descriptively is that you’re not usually describing the actual thing. What you’re describing is a feeling that the thing evokes, and that’s a completely learnable skill.

Describing smells isn't really about scent

When you describe a smell to a reader, you’re not really asking them to understand the olfactory processes. What you’re actually asking them to do is to come on a journey with you that can take them through memory, mood, and association. The framing is what’s important, not the smell itself.

Our experience of smells is often incredibly subjective, so it would be impossible to create a universal constant when you describe the way something smells. But you can use the idea of the smell to evoke a sense of something else.

If we take the smell of rain as an example; if you’re being direct, then this doesn’t have to be described. Everyone has their own experience of what it smells like, and just knowing that it’s what you mean is enough. No further description (or personal experience) is necessary. But if you’re talking about the scent of rain on context, then the smell could conjure anything from childhood memories to feelings of relief or dread, depending on your framing. We use senses to do emotional work in your narrative rather than purely sensory.

What this means is that your job isn't to reproduce an scent, it's to reproduce the effect it has on a character. Once you shift that focus there, you’ll soon realise that you don't need firsthand experience of the smell itself.

Borrow from other writers

You don't have to invent vocabulary from scratch in order to describe a scent. Other writers have spent a very long time doing that work for you, and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to descriptions of senses.

Some scents have long-established descriptions attached to them, but there are more out-of-the-box ways you can draw inspiration too. Looking over wine tasting notes, perfume reviews, and food writing and be a treasure-trove of descriptions that, while not directly applicable, can show you how professionals build a smell profile from comparison.

Professional scent reviewers don’t use smell comparisons to actively try and build a scent profile. They combine other, more familiar things to make the unfamiliar feel familiar. A wine that someone describes as smelling like leather, smoke, green apple, and wet stone doesn’t literally smell like those things. Those items act almost like an analogy to how the smell should make you feel and what it should remind you of.

You can adopt these analogies in your own writing. A “sharp” smell versus a “soft” one would use different comparisons. A smell that's “green,” “warm,” or “metallic” would conjure different moods. You can borrow words from touch, taste, and even colour, and readers will accept them instantly because that's how we actually process scent language.

Lean on your other senses

This is probably the most useful shortcut available to you because senses never operate in isolation. Our senses rely on each other, which means you can often use descriptions borrowed from other senses to fill in the gaps in your own experiences.

Taste and smell overlap

Most of what we think we taste is actually smell. Your tongue can only detect sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savoury; everything else, the difference between a strawberry and a raspberry, coffee and tea etc, comes from your nose sensing molecules through the back of your throat as you chew and swallow. It's called retronasal olfaction, and it means taste and smell are basically the same neurological event, sorted into two labelled boxes we've been taught to keep separate.

Practically, if you can taste, you already have a functioning library of smell-adjacent sensations, even if you can't name individual smells in isolation. When you're stuck describing how something smells, think about tastes that you associate with it. For instance, a bakery might smell of yeast, butter, with a hint of sugar, or a fruit tea might smell like roses and honey.

Recruit texture and temperature too

Smell also borrows heavily from touch. A “sharp” smell and a “sharp” pain use the same word for a reason: both describe something sudden and piercing. A “heavy” smell, like old smoke in curtains, shares its emotional weight with something weighty or a heavy silence. Temperature works the same way; a “cold” smell (metal, rain, hospital corridors) versus a “warm” one (bread, skin, candle wax) gives your reader an instant emotional temperature to work with.

Describe the reaction, not just the sensation

When in doubt, write a character’s physical response to a smell. A character wrinkling their nose, stepping back, or feeling their stomach turn tells your reader that a smell is bad more vividly than any description. A character closing their eyes, breathing in slowly, or being flooded with a memory tells a reader that a smell is good (or at least meaningful) and does it with more narrative weight.

It’s ok to borrow when you write about something you haven't personally experienced, whether that's a setting, an era, or a sensation.  Focus on the universal, observable truth of how people respond, rather than the specifics you can't verify firsthand.

A few things to avoid

• Don't reach for the same three smell words (musty, sweet, acrid) every time. If you're borrowing language, borrow a variety of it.
• Don't over-explain a smell with a paragraph of analysis. One well-placed detail does more than five stacked together; this is as true for smell as it is for any other lyrical, sensory prose.
• Don't assume every scene needs a smell. If it's not doing emotional or narrative work, it's just filler.