The question of whether human smells can influence our social lives is ranked among the 125 most compelling multidisciplinary scientific challenges of this century. Sensory testing has already shown excellent human smell skills, including social communication. There is abundant psychological and neural evidence for the chemical communication of fear, mainly from Western Caucasian samples. Because it is still unclear which molecules are primarily driving this effect, we combined psychological experiments with a chemical analytical approach (GC-MS). To test generalizability, we examined effects of a single- nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) 538G → A on the ABCC11 gene known to reduce body odor found in only 0-3% of Western Caucasians. First, we effectively induced a fearful and neutral state in two groups of senders (N = 36: ABCC11-AA vs. ABCC11-GG/GA) based on subjective experience and galvanic skin responses. By using part of the samples for chemical analysis and the remainder for a psychological study that employed a face morph classification task, we could map the chemically identified compounds on receivers’ responses. The combined results indicate that the “non-odorous” ABCC11-gene variant AA does not abolish the capacity to chemically communicate fear, leaving open the possibility of a species-wide fear odor.​ This research was supported by a Veni Innovational Research grant (NWO-016.Veni.195.116) awarded to J.H.B. de Groot.