Smell Lemons, Feel Slimmer?

Recent headlines claim that smelling lemons can make you feel slimmer. Is there truth to this claim, or is it just a bunch of sour…lemons?

The original research examined how smell affects ‘body image perception’.¹

In study one, 14 young adults (mostly men), were exposed to lemon and vanilla scents, and then asked to rate the perceived scent on a line, where a thin body silhouette anchored one side, and a thick body silhouette on the other.

When exposed to vanilla, participants rated more toward the thick body, about 0.65, on a 0 to 1 scale. When smelling lemon, they perceived the scent to be more toward the thin body image, with a mean score of 0.35. 

It is from this result the headlines staked their claims — 0.3 units on a 0 to 1 scale of how participants visualized a scent, but participants did not rate their own bodies.

However, in study two, they did, and found little difference in how much they felt they weighed after smelling lemon or vanilla on a scale from ‘light' to ‘heavy’. There were also able to adjust the chest, waist and hips of a 3D body visualizer, after each scent, but no differences were found.

So, while this study was an admirable one, despite headline claims, smelling lemon is unlikely to have a meaningful effect on how slim you feel.

Sorry to end on such a sour note.

 References

1. Brianza, G., Tajadura-Jiménez, A., Maggioni, E., Pittera, D., Bianchi-Berthouze, N., & Obrist, M. (2019, September). As light as your scent: effects of smell and sound on body image perception. In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 179-202). Springer, Cham.