How Good Is Your Sense Of Smell?

I've been into fragrances for a while but since I became vegan many scents became very cheap to my nose. It's like I have a super nose. Gave almost all my fragrances away because so many scents smell cheap or poor blended. Now with my new sense of smell some of the notes I loved, now I hate. Anyone doing anything to retain or get a better sense of smell?

Nice post Daniel. Diet definitely sharpens the senses, if you go on a raw vegan diet you will find even more acuteness to your sense, the reason for this is two fold, a. The surface of your scent sensors are clean free from the heavy fats that are part of heavy cooking. Many of us forget that smelling item 1 will have a direct affect on what is smelt after it both physically as residues of the scent compounds remain on our senses, and also from a perception perspective. This is very true for what we eat and passively smell.

The second contribution of diet to smell is having an over all healthy system results in an overall better response from all our faculties, not only do we identify notes and scents better with our receptors and sensors, we also process them better, as our mind is not foggy and over saturated .

I think mine's terrible after smoking most of my adult life (have quit for a year and half though, yay)

I have been fortunate enough to have a very acute sense of smell from my early childhood. Smells that I didn't like but now I love are oud (Subcontinent varieties), common jasmine, champaca, betel leaf, clary sage, Zdravetz, Geranium, smoke tree, jade wood and some animalics - some of which I only like in blends (for obvious reason).

To train my nose, I have been buying single oils. I apply each neat on my skin (with a few exceptions) and then write down as much as possible about it. It is easier for me to recall them if I write things down. I regularly visit them to refresh my memory, and in the process I detect more nuances (& those go into my notes). Sometimes, I even draw graphs when I acquire similar oils from different cultivars!

Not a vegetarian. But I'm quite picky. I still cannot stand the smell of dry fish (locally we call them shutki), jackfruit (our national fruit), Hilsa Ilisha (our national fish), cow stomach (the whole family love it) which will be very popular after Eid Al Adjha, and few more 'special' dishes! A very close friend of mine wonders if I'm really a Bangladeshi!

I have no idea, but it seems better than most common people. On a few occasions when I asked people to smell spoiled food, they sensed nothing, and would happily eat it, while for me the odour was terrible and not acceptable, even inducing vomiting reflexes, I knew it was spoiled.
And since I’ve got into natural perfumes learning I think it might have either improved or I have better understanding of what I smell.

The more you smell, the more you can smell. I read some where, maybe The Emperor of Scent, that people who repeatedly smell certain materials over time develop the ability to detect nuances / substances that would otherwise be undetectable.

Synthetic musks were used as an obvious example. Some people start anosmic to certain synthetic musks (this is a common phenomenon) but over time they gain the ability to smell them.

I don’t recall the hypothesized mechanism - maybe cognitive priming (like recognizing frequently used words and names more easily than rare ones)or maybe the olfactory receptors adapt to novel molecules and learn to detect them with repeatedly exposure. This is unrelated to the olfactory fatigue phenomenon that is more of a short-term change in sensitivity.

In a nutshell- spend lots of time smelling lots of things and you will have a super-charged olfactory system.

What is 'fatigue', which seems to be a shared experience among this community? Is excessive smelling always helpful, or it may cause 'fatigue as well?

Rai Munir said:

What is 'fatigue', which seems to be a shared experience among this community? Is excessive smelling always helpful, or it may cause 'fatigue as well?

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It's getting accustomed to a smell from exposure to it Say, you walked into a sewer. At first it'll probably be horrible but if you're down there for an hour (!) then you'd get accustomed to it and wouldn't notice it so much.
Or how smelly people are unaware of their smell. Or their clothes. Or their house

I used to get it a lot with my fragrance sprays that I wear, but since quitting smoking and also not spraying the sides of my neck I notice my own scents a lot longer.