Are you my Smellmate?
Last week while clearing my office drawer, realised I had 3 shawls. Deciding to take two home, I took a sniff so I could keep the freshest one.
Hmmm strange, I took second sniff… and a third. It smelt like a natural scent, and it could only possibly be MY natural scent. But why am I able to smell it now and never in the past 27 years?
I’ve always known you can smell someone else’s but not your own.
Curious as I was, I then decided to google and read up about natural scents and the human sense of smell. Here’s some interesting facts!
Everyone has a unique odour identity or smellprint. Like your fingerprint, how you smell is unique. No two people have the exact same odour identity or “smellprint”, except for identical twins. Your smell print is determined by a number of factors including genes, the environment, diet, medicines, your emotional state, your skin type, and even the weather.
Our sense of smell is weakest in the morning, and the ability to perceive odours increases throughout the day.
Approximately 80% of what we taste is actually attributed to our sense of smell. Our sense of taste is limited to five distinct sensations: salty, sweet, bitter, sour and savoury. All the flavours we taste are actually determined by our sense of smell. That’s the reason why our food tastes bland during a cold for example.
Our sense of smell and taste naturally declines as we age. Our sense of smell peaks when we are in our late teens and then begins a gradual decline. People who have an impaired ability to smell, and therefore taste, tend to follow diets that are less healthy.
Prolonged exposure to foul smells can impair your ability to smell. If you are exposed to noxious odours (such as cleaning solutions or petroleum products) on a prolonged basis, wear a mask over your nose and mouth to filter out the smell.
A woman’s sense of smell is much stronger than a man’s. Her sense of smell is also more sensitive in the first half of the menstrual cycle and reaches its peak when she is most fertile and sexually responsive. Scent plays a critical role in our sexual function.
When it comes to sex, your sense of smell may be the most important sensory organ. Decades of research demonstrates that in our mating behaviour, humans tend to follow their noses. Odours can accelerate puberty, attract our mates, control menstrual cycles, affect our sex drive, alter men’s hormone levels and even influence sexual orientation.
Smell has a powerfully link to memory. The sense of smell is quite primitive in brain terms and feeds into the emotional areas of the brain much more directly than our other senses.
Our sense of smell is strongest in the spring and summer. This is probably due to the additional moisture in the air. For the same reason, it is also stronger after exercise, which also increases the moisture in the nasal passage.
No two people smell the same scent in exactly the same way. This just might mean that there is one person (and one smell) for everyone a smell mate instead of a soul mate?
