Odors are often considered to be powerful cues of memory. However, early olfactory paired-associates studies showed that odors are not particularly effective associative cues, or are effective only for the first associated target. This led to the belief that proactive interference is particularly strong in odor-associative memory. Interestingly, research with other modalities has found that semantic similarity between stimuli in a paired-associate caused retroactive interference. In Study 1, we explored the efficiency of odors as cues in a paired-associates paradigm in comparison to verbal and auditory stimuli when they were semantically congruent vs incongruent with the target. In Study 2, we measured proactive and retroactive memory interference in paired-associate memory to odors versus verbal and auditory stimuli. The results of both studies will be discussed in light of previous research on paired-associated memory and assumptions of unique olfactory associative memory.