Philosophers of aesthetics universally agree that visual and auditory stimuli may be considered beautiful. Divergently, controversy greets the question "Can olfactory or gustatory experiences be conceptualized as beautiful?" In Study 1 participants inhaled Joy® perfume applied to a cotton pad for 30 s and immediately completed the AESTHEMOS (Schindler et al., 2017), a scale measuring aesthetic emotions. Results indicated stronger prototypical (feeling of beauty and liking, fascination, being moved, and awe), pleasing (joy, humor, vitality, energy, and relaxation), and epistemic (surprise, interest, intellectual challenge, and insight) aesthetic emotions, and fewer negative aesthetic emotions (feeling of ugliness, boredom, confusion, anger, uneasiness, and sadness), were elicited by the perfume compared with a no-scent control condition. Results showed 36% of participants found some beauty in the perfume experience. Study 2 showed significantly higher prototypical and pleasing aesthetic emotions, and less negative aesthetic emotions were stimulated by a Werther's caramel candy compared with a control condition (an unflavored sugar cube); and 45% of participants found some beauty in the taste. In both studies the findings were unrelated to participants' levels of trait appreciation of beauty, as measured by the Engagement with Beauty Scale-Revised (EBS-R; Diessner, Pohling, Stacy, & Güsewell, 2018). In Study 3 we found that when the EBS-R predicted the response to an artwork, it did not predict gustatory beauty; and when the EBS-R predicted olfactory beauty, it did not predict the beauty of an artwork. Thus, the general trait of appreciating beauty, as measured by the EBS-R, may not extend to olfactory or gustatory beauty. The results are discussed in the context of philosophical approaches and empirical aesthetic research.

Few studies have examined aesthetic emotional responses to ecologically valid beauty stimuli, and even fewer have done so with a comprehensive measure of a full range of possible aesthetic emotions. Study 1 examines beauty appreciators’ (N = 41) aesthetic emotional reactions to a wide range of stimuli (wild nature; Nez Perce Tribal artifacts; moral beauty of human elders; and slides of architecture, paintings, and nature). All stimuli evoked significantly higher levels of prototypical, pleasing, and epistemic aesthetic emotions and lower negative aesthetic emotions than those in a comparison condition (an unadorned hallway). The more ecologically valid the beauty experiences were, the higher the levels of reported aesthetic emotions. Trait levels of appreciation of beauty (AoB) significantly, but weakly, predicted levels of aesthetic emotions with some of the beauty stimuli. A subset of this sample (n = 14) indicated that slides of Art Nouveau and Art Deco architecture arouse similar levels of aesthetic emotion, with a trend toward Art Nouveau stimulating higher levels of epistemic aesthetic emotions. In Study 2, participants (N = 124) were randomly assigned to observe either a hand-carved painted antique Chinese temple altar in an exhibit room of a gallery or in an unadorned room of similar size. Results indicated much higher levels of aesthetic emotions experienced in the altar room than in the plain room. The levels of aesthetic emotions were mildly but significantly predicted by levels of trait AoB. General discussion included recognizing moral beauty as bona fide stimuli for aesthetic emotions.