Table 2.

Summary of the most popular explanations that have been put forward to explain the crossmodal influence of olfaction on visual judgments of a person's facial attractiveness (and other attributes of person perception

Mood-induced changes	Rotton (1983) and Kirk-Smith and Booth (1990)
People look better/worse when we are in a good/bad mood
Crossmodal affective priming	Demattè et al. (2007), Li et al. (2007) and Cook et al. (2015, 2018)
The valence associated with an olfactory prime can bias people's judgment of the attractiveness/likeability of a subsequently presented visual face
Crossmodal semantic priming	Hirsch (2006)
A familiar scent may be associated with someone of a certain age, and this form of semantic priming may bias judgments of a person's age
Crossmodal gender congruence	Capparuccini et al. (2010), Marinova and Moss (2014) and Risso et al. (2021)
The presentation of a gender-congruent (pleasant) fragrance may sometimes boost attractiveness, as a result of semantic priming and/or based on crossmodal correspondences
Halo-dumping	Demattè et al. (2007)
People may rate photos as more attractive in presence of pleasant olfactory stimulus only because they have no way to indicate what they think about the olfactory stimulus. (This account ultimately rejected.)
Olfactorily induced change in arousal	Bensafi et al. (2002), Hirsch (2006) and Risso et al. (2021)
Olfactory stimuli may influence a person's level of (sexual) arousal, and this, in turn, may influence their rating of other people