Why some people love disgusting smells

A corpse flower smells like a heady mix of rotten fish, sewage, and dead bodies. It’s a stench the flower uses to draw flies, but just as surely, it draws tourists. The stinky blooms have become so popular that news reports alert eager sniffers to the impending stench of each new bloom.

In fact, the demand to see and smell a corpse flower is so great that botanical gardens vie to own one. Gardeners lavish them with care, hoping to force more stinky blooms from a plant whose scent is so rare (up to a decade between flowerings) and so fleeting (36 hours or less) that visitors are often disappointed to miss peak stench.

In June 2024, no fewer than three public gardens—in Chicago, London, and Boston—put out notices to alert visitors of a flowering. That’s a rare confluence, since corpse flowers are famously unpredictable. Unlike most flowering plants that bloom annually, a corpse flower blooms only after its big underground stem, or corm, has stored enough energy.

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But why do people want to smell these flowers? The reaction is usually the same: the anticipation, the tentative sniff, then the classic scrunched-up face of disgust. And yet everyone seems happy to be there.

It turns out there’s a name for this: benign masochism.

Psychologist Paul Rozin described the effect in 2013 in a paper titled “Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism.” His team found 29 examples of activities that some people enjoyed even though, by all logic, they shouldn’t. Many were common pleasures: the fear of a scary movie, the burn of chili pepper, the pain of a firm massage. And some were disgusting, like popping pimples or looking at a gross medical exhibit.

The key is for the experience to be a “safe threat.”

“A roller coaster is the best example,” Rozin says. “You are in fact fine and you know it, but your body doesn’t, and that’s the pleasure.” Smelling a corpse flower is exactly the same kind of thrill, he says.

The psychology of disgust

This thrill-seeking is a bit like kids playing war games, disgust researcher Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told National Geographic in 2015. “The ‘play’ motive leads humans (and most mammals, especially young ones) to try out experiences in relative safety, so as to be better equipped to deal with them when they meet them for real,” she says.

So by smelling a corpse flower, she said, we’re taking our emotions for a test ride. “We are motivated to find out what a corpse smells like and see how we’d react if we met one.”

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Our sense of disgust, after all, serves a purpose. According Curtis’ theory of disgust, outlined in her insightful book “Don’t Look, Don’t Touch, Don’t Eat,” the things most universally found disgusting are those that can make us sick. You know, things like a rotting corpse.

Yet our sense of disgust can be particular. People, it seems, are basically fine with the smell of their own farts (but not someone else’s). Disgust tends to protect us from the threat of others, while we feel fine about our own grossness.

Likewise, the same scent compound can elicit different reactions. Some smells are good only in small doses, as perfumers know well. Musk, for instance, is the base note of many perfumes but is considered foul in high concentrations. Likewise for indole, a molecule that adds lovely floral notes to perfumes but is described as “somewhat fecal and repulsive to people at higher concentrations.”

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There’s no corpse flower perfume (though you can try on an indole brew in “Charogne,” which translates to “Carrion,” by Etat Libre d’Orange), but it’s conceivable. There’s an entire field of perfumery—called headspace technology, it was pioneered by fragrance chemist Roman Kaiser in the 1970s—that’s dedicated to capturing a flower’s fragrance in a glass vial and then re-creating the molecular mix chemically. So in theory, someone could give eau de corpse flower a whirl, if only they can find a headspace vial large enough.

The stench of the flower, after all, comes from a mix of compounds that can be identified, including indole and sweet-smelling benzyl alcohol in addition to nasties like trimethylamine, found in rotting fish.

Nostalgia for stinky smells

There’s another reason we might sometimes long for unpleasant smells, a pull that also comes from deep in our brains: nostalgia. The same way that freshly mown grass can evoke the feeling of childhood summers, for some of us, cigarette smoke smells like grandma. Smell is often said to be the sense most closely linked to memory.

Scientists have a name for this phenomenon: the Proust effect. In the celebrated author’s novel In Search of Lost Time, the smell of freshly baked madeleines steeped in tea triggers a flood of vivid memories of the narrator’s childhood. Neuroscientists have suggested that this effect is the result of activity in the brain’s olfactory bulb, which processes odors. As it happens, the olfactory bulb is directly connected to the hippocampus and the amygdala, parts of the brain involved in memory and emotion.

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Some experiments have supported this link; a 2011 study by Utrecht University researchers demonstrated that smells triggered more intense and detailed memories than sounds did, in particular for unpleasant recollections. Likewise, a 2016 review in Brain Sciences concluded that odors that trigger good personal memories can boost positive emotions and reduce the physiological effects of stress, such as inflammation.

So perhaps occasionally, we might learn to associate a bad smell with a happy experience, like a trip to the botanical garden to smell a corpse flower. After all, a picture may be worth a thousand words—but one whiff can hold a lifetime of memories.