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Home / SmellyBlog / Tagged: Sense of Smell

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Project VL


Dr Zhivago, originally uploaded by RobH3.

Strange project I've been mulling over for quite some time... Admittedly, at first the concept kinda weirded me out a bit and I almost turned it down. Than I got sucked into it, probably just in the same way that most virtual love affairs take their victims by surprise.

At one of my events, I'm approached by a young gal, probably in her 20's. She's uber enthusiastic about scents and the conversation, like at times happens with perfume lovers (who seem to often have a passionate personality), turns into love and relationships.

As it turns out, she is tortured by an unfulfilled love. She's had this virtual lover for 3 years now. They have never met in person. She wants to meet him, but he's very far away and she'd broken her heart enough times to know better than travel the globe for a fickle virtual love affair and the empty promises it might deliver. And of course, the few friends she confided in to tell her tormenting tale urge her to run for the hills and forget all about it.

But logic aside - she is also scared of ruining the fantasy. A fantasy that at first seemed very real, supported by whatever gestures of love made possible by emoticons and webcam conversations. And the fantasy only seemed to grow out of proportion the more vague and ambiguous his gestures are. Come to think of it, now he is acting all mysterious and only gives of himself about tenth of what she puts into this virtual relationship.

Like many modern lovers, they communicate through the internet. They have never spoken on the phone. She has never even heard his voice. But she can hear it in her head. Sometimes she'll wake up in the middle of a dream after she's heard him call her name...

In short - these two love birds have been communicating with webcam and texting (or - is it now called sexting?!) on and off for the past 3 years and she's equally tormented and pleasured by this distant intimacy, also giving her a semi-legitimate excuse to not date any "real" men in her vicinity.

So what does all this have to do with scent, than? The woman has never smelled her lover and that is the most painful thing for her about this mostly un-fulfilled love. When she asked him to send her a sweaty t-shirt of his he conveniently ignored her request and just kept going about his merry visual and text methods of communications.

So I promised this young lady to help her create a scent that will make her think of her virtual lover. He may not be generous enough to send her sweaty t-shirts, but that does not mean that she can't have a connection between him and a scent (besides that uber-erotic scent of a laptop keyboard, of course, and the exciting tone she assigned to his text messages, that always make her heart race).

On return for this olfactory favour, I will be telling the tales of this tremulous love story. A tale that many people might be able to relate to, but are too shy to talk about...

The Perfect-T


U p s e t, originally uploaded by cool_A.

Have you ever found yourself smelling someone's clothes when they're not around? Apparently, you are not alone.

“It was almost like a presence” said Melanie Shoup, the lead of a study about people smelling clothing articles of loved ones to feel closer to them, even after they've died; which makes the notion of the scent of things as their ether, essence or spirit almost literal.

This is not a typical topic of conversation, but I will admit I've done it on more than one occasion. The scent of loved ones - and not necessarily romantic partners - is part of how we experience them in our life. It is an invisible presence that seem to take on its own existence and in a way, we have a relationship with it, not just with the person who exudes it.

Smells Don't Lie

Growing up vegetarian from birth, I was quite alarmed when one day, fish was brought to the house by none other than my mother, and was pan-fried for a feast as if to advertise the alarming fact by amplifying the scent. There was a good reason for the fish – my baby brother was extremely anemic and needed that extra nutritional boost to get him back on track. I had no intentions of standing in his way of growing up, but to me it seemed like an excuse for frequent fish-feasts throughout that summer and onwards. My distaste for the aroma of frying fish was not something I tried to hide. It was well advertised just like the scent itself, elevated from a frying pan by the gas flames and filling out the tiny hut in the heat of the summer. And like any good mother, mine tried to hide the fact by covering it up with white lies. I’d come back from school, to find the frying pan cleaner than ever or in the sink, and the house filled with a scent that would not embarrass a fisherman’s house. There is only one thing that can explain her embarrassed surprise when hearing my loud cry: “you fried fish again?!”. My mom has acquired anosmia sometime in her later adulthood.

While the fried fish is something anyone (except anosmiacs, of course), even without an acute sense of smell, would be able to pick up on immediately, I was able to tell when food went bad way before anyone else in the family did. Living without refrigerator (and with an anosmiac mother) made this skill particularly handy. But while most of my family could enjoy a day-old dish, even after I made it very clear the food is already deteriorating, I just sat there and watched them, puzzled…

To this day, I go through my day heavily relying on my sense of smell to assess my environment, and I can often guess what my partner had done in the house before I came in just by the smell in the house. My favourite thing ever though was guessing which shampoo he used by sniffing his head… The scent of the shampoo changes on the skin and hair, so that makes the game a bit challenging sometimes.

I get particularly excited whenever the sense of smell is acknowledged by people in a surprising way. So I was particularly excited when last night, when I watched an episode of Monk with David, the murder mystery was solved as the detective’s assistant Natalie recognized an after-taste of Aqua-Velva in her wine. The body of the victim (well, to be precise, the almost victim as he really died of a heart-attack before the murderer had a chance to get him) was hidden in a barrel. He doused himself with the aftershave the night before.

Did you ever find out something a person wanted to hide from you thanks to your sense of smell? Which mysteries did your nose solve for you? Share your stores and enter to win a miniature of Roses et Chocolat, my new limited edition for Valentine’s Day!
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