but I don't think I should complain. Do you think there is such a thing as "smell blindness"?Recently I was on a train and sat behind this chick who I thought smelled so sweet and very much like Frangipani. The other night Dave, Judo and I were coming back from the Meat and Wine Co and I could smell frangipani in Judo's car. Judo said that he had recently had the car cleaned so I thought that the smell was from some fragrance the cleaners may have put in the car. This smell, to me was strong. Very strong. But, both Judo and Dave couldn't smell it. I seriously thought they were just pulling my leg and pretending they couldn't smell it. We got out of the car, the smell went... until I got upstairs and sat at my computer. "I can still smell frangipani, Dave. Can you?" No.
I couldn't quite pinpoint where the smell was coming from, but as I bent down to take off my shoes I got a distinct whiff of frangipani again. This re-occurring smell was driving me insane... The next morning, as I went to put my shoes on for the walk to work, there it was. Frangipani. I'm now suspecting it's my shoes. My running shoes. My sweaty, rain soaked joggers were smelling sweet. How wrong is that?! I'm now convinced that my smell receptors have gone nuts.
Yesterday walking home past a construction site I got a distinct smell of chocolate coated honeycomb. Guess what it was... A big heap of excavated clay and soil. Dirt. Coffee still smells like coffee. Pepper still smells like pepper, but some smells don't smell like they SHOULD.
To finally test my theory that I've suddenly become "smell blind" (or mad) I walked up the the frangipani tree in my front yard and took a big sniff. What did I smell? Nothin'. Neutral. No sweet frangipani. Ah well, I guess it I should be happy that the flowers didn't smell like stinky shoes.
4 comments:
Anosmia (odour insensitivity) is quite common actually, and may apply to specific odours. Temporary cases may arise from a respiratory tract infection, polyps or a head trauma.
The sense of smell is quite interesting (I did an essay on it once) and the ability of individuals to detect certain odours varies by a factor of something like 20000 just in the human population.
That actually sounds like it's real, so you're not mad. I found this on the web:
"Test subjects sniffed isobutyric acid, which smells like dirty socks or an unclean goat to most people. But there were two testers who sensed the isobutryic acid had a "very pleasant fruity odor - like apples." Experiments later revealed that the wayward individuals had a specific anosmia to isobutyric acid, and the fruity smell they detected were the byproducts and impurities usually found in commercial samples of the acid."
smelly shoes = "dirty socks"
frangipani = "very pleasant fruity odor"
Here's the full article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000331094350.htm
Check out this link too:
http://fragrancebouquet.blogspot.com/2007/10/smelly-facts-glance-at-anosmia.html
Whatever it is Muz, it sounds like the unpleasant smells have been converted into pleasant smells...so it all sounds good to me! :-)
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