Smells constantly swirl around us. They are the olfactory transcriptions of the intrinsic chemical compositions of objects. For us humans, olfaction has long been seen as a ‘mute’ sense ‘of extremely slight service, if any’ (Darwin, 1871). Recent work by CHEN Kepu and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing argues against this view and shows that olfaction is directly integrated with visual computation, creating a multimodal saliency map that robustly guides attention. Without mental effort, a smell naturally attracts us to the corresponding object by making it more conspicuous, be it a blooming rose or a freshly baked pizza in crowded scenes. So ‘follow your nose’.