Why does honey smell more like perfume than sugar?
Honey's sweetness is a taste — its aroma is something else entirely. The volatile chemistry skews sharply floral, driven by a terpene more associated with lavender fields than beehives.
Honey reads as floral because linalool — the same terpene that defines lavender and coriander — dominates at an OAV that dwarfs the other volatiles. The cheesy and urine-adjacent acids are real, but linalool simply outshouts them.
See exactly how far over the detection threshold each compound is — the part of the chemistry that explains why this pairing works. Plus the full ranked list for any ingredient, compound index, and Compare tool.
OAV (Odor Activity Value) = concentration ÷ detection threshold. Numbers above 1 mean the compound contributes detectably to aroma.