He was talking to me. 
Both of you need to stop the sniping at each other and take any beef you may have to the Pit. Don’t snipe at each other this way outside of there again.
There are some adhesives that smell much like that - could be for carpeting, could be for paneling.
There have been stores that I barely got in the door. Some of these places are so heavily scented I get a headache in short order from it, but the people I am with often say “really? I didn’t notice”. I tend to adapt to natural unpleasant smells more easily than manufactured fragrances. I had to sit next to a co-worker for half an hour who had laid it on so heavy, I could taste it on my tongue (it had a talcy/metalicy texture) and I ended up getting a cold because of it.
On the other hand, another co-worker wears a lot of something with a sort of sour base to it, but I have been able to adapt to it because I am quite fond of her. Not sure how that works.
My reaction to perfume-type scents is eye-watering, nose irritating, throat clenching allergy-like stuff.*
Most everyday bad smells don’t cause that type of reaction. Just “Ugh, phewee!”, etc.
- Which makes the heavily perfumed workers at the allergist’s office my favorite people of all time.
[QUOTE=Bill Door]
“…suggesting that the mechanism of action is not specific to the chemical itself and might be related to expectations and prior beliefs.”
[/QUOTE]
Yup.
My take is that a lot of this relates to how you were raised as a child. If you’re taught that strong odors/fragrances are something suspect or outright bad, you’ll carry that belief into adulthood.
I feel sorry for people that can’t enjoy fragrances, especially if they’re gardeners.
That might be true in some cases, but how do you account for instances of getting a strong aversive reaction when you have no idea that you’re being exposed to the substance?
For example, when I lived in my old house, I would get a reaction, and start looking around to find that my next-door neighbor was cleaning her patio furniture with straight Mr. Clean. The houses were close together and her table was on the side closest to my house so it wasn’t surprising that I could smell it. It dissipated quickly enough so I didn’t ever say anything about it to her.
I was definitely not raised with any thoughts of strong odors being bad. I wouldn’t have gotten away with claiming a sensitivity I did not actually have. I only became sensitive after an exposure incident when I was 21, anyway. As I said
Aren’t you a doctor, Jackmanii? You may be falling into the trap of assuming that a condition isn’t “real” if we don’t understand exactly why it happens. It wasn’t that long ago that we thought infections spread by bad humours in the air…
Most of the people sensitive to perfume/cologne that I’ve known (I am not one myself) dislike it not because it’s aesthetically unpleasant, but because it’s actively burny/prickly/sneezy to their nasal passages. They think of it as a completely separate experience from smelling BO or dog shit.
Do you honestly not understand that smelling a floral fragance in its natural, low-dose concentration is a very different experience than having it crammed into your nostrils in a sustained fashion at super high concentrations?
I love fragrances. I like the smell of perfume. I even like some “chemical” smells that would drive other people bonkers. But once I had the worst headache after doing some field work next to a fragance factory off the NJ Turnpike. It was just way too many aldehydes and alkenes all at once. What awful child-rearing do you think I had to cause this to happen?
There’s an annoying stink of, “I’m better than people who are different from me!” coming from this thread. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that certain folks on this board have problems with basic empathy.
Or that what you’re smelling when you smell an actual apple isn’t the same chemical mixture as when someone gives you a wooden gizmo drenched in what you instantly identify as diethyl adipate (it’s the product used as “apple scent” and also one I had to ID in one of my chemistry labs, back in 1991; the so-called car air-freshener went directly to the trash). Different apples don’t even smell the same.
I spent a week “visiting” my hospital’s lab at its mistress’s behest; the sub-tech I shadowed and I found it hilarious that we were bothered by different smells and worried about accidentally touching different things (she was bothered by acetic acid, HCl and sulphuric acid; I was bothered by feces and urine). There evidently was a training factor at work, but not in which things we’d been trained to be bothered by, but in which ones we’d been trained not to be bothered by.
IANAD. I just wanted to point out that “psychosomatic” != “not real” - it is not a synonym for “hypochondria”. It just means the origin of the issue is mental as opposed to physical. IOW, the effects are real and can have physical manifestations, but are not derived from the physical interaction of the airborne chemicals with the body. A physically based allergen reacts with the body to produce a physical (and possibly mental) response - whether the person is awake or alseep, concious or unconcious. A psychosomatic allergen reacts with the brain to produce a mental (and possibly physical) response. I can’t find any studies online but I would bet that a psychosomatic allergy, while it may produce an identical physical reponse while the patient is concious, probably would not produce symptoms if the person is deeply asleep or unconcious.
The common cold is a viral infection. Your cold was unlikely to be caused by smelling perfume.
“Similar intensity” doesn’t account for the entire experience. Hypersensitivity varies by person, and in the case of fragrances, it more likely has to do with the chemicals used. I’m not sure how convenience can even be attributed to this, other than not wanting to be around something you don’t like…which to me seems reasonable.
Many experiences are mental, that’s certainly true. On the flip-side, many are legitimate and lesser understood physical hyper reactions. As I said before, you can actually like a particular scent and still have a reaction to it-- it’s not exclusive to disliking anything, though its understandable how a person would draw a connection.
As to it being less work, that doesn’t really make sense. If a stimuli doesn’t make you feel good, you withdraw from it. There’s little to nothing gained from trying to force mind over matter, for the sake of inhaling non-desirable scents and fragrances, especially if they don’t provide some otherwise significant benefit.
I’m saying some people are hypersensitive in that stuff will bother them, but rather than learn to cope or adapt they’ll simply conclude they cannot tolerate the stimuli whatsoever and chalk it up to some involuntary reaction. That way at, say, a luncheon, they can commit microagressions toward other guests “You’re perfume is too strong, can you sit somewhere else?” There was a thread on the SDMB about it some time ago.
It is, indeed, but it seems to be pretty pervasive. Most of the time, I seem to be pretty resistant to it, but the intensity of the perfume and the extended period that I was breathing (not merely smelling) it led to a weakening of my resistance – I was also pretty tired at the time.
I remember that thread. The woman was a rude asshole.
But a person who endures a headache or watery eyes without saying a word is a different type of person than someone acts like a rude asshole. There are way more people who are like the former than the latter. Are these people also the result of poor parenting?
If I were wearing strong perfume and someone tapped me on the shoulder and politely asked if I could move downwind, I would have no problem accomodating them. In fact, I’d feel guilty and a bit embarrassed that my smell had offended them. It would be no different than if I had bad BO and someone asked if I could move my funk elsewhere. Do you think stinky people should be able to spread their funk without dealing with any negative fall-out?
My baby sister was hypersensitive to perfumes and such, but she didn’t seem unusually bothered by, say, baby poop; she’d just right in there to change her nieces and nephews.
I would appreciate your explaining the “coping/adapting” mechanism you keep spewing; If you’re suggesting I go into a room full of Pall Mall fumes and “tough it out” or “man up,” like that’s going to “cure my sinus infection problems,” well, that’s just thoughtless and irresponsible.
Further, where do you get off implying that some person has more of a right to infect the local environment with massive amounts of perfume–say, affecting five other people at a table–than the person that has a legitimate health concern has a right to breath in decent air? My not being able to tolerate most perfumes doesn’t affect the health of someone told to not wear the stench (churches are taking that position more and more), but someone’s cloud of chemicals can seriously mess up my head and that seems just as “microaggressive” (if not more) than my saying take your miasma somewhere else. Sorry (not really), but my health trumps your affectation.
Some people are looking to get into interpersonal drama. If it weren’t perfume, it would have been something else. She was just a rude jerk. Why on earth would any sane person LOOK for opportunities to commit microagressions?
I assure you that for every person who you hear say something, there are plenty of others who are finding ways to cope.
See my anecdote about my next-door neighbor above. I could have asked her to use another cleaning product but I didn’t because I could cope with that one. If I did have to ask her, I would have, and she would have gladly changed cleaners because she’s a nice person who wouldn’t want to make me feel ill over something so easily avoidable. Here’s another example from years back when I was more sensitive to things and was trying to find a way to cope with a minimum of fuss.
We all know that there are some people who will claim they have certain afflictions for the attention, and there are some people who like causing interpersonal problems. They are often the same people.
But what does that have to do with all the people who have genuine sensitivities to one degree or another and who are just trying to go about their business and only say something when they have to?
Maybe you could just admit that you’re wrong?
The scent of perfumes and that of flowers like roses and daphne are two entirely different things.
Some flowers do reek (to me), however. E.g., FtGKid1 got MrsFtG a bouquet of lilies. I can barely stand to be in the same room with them. But that is more of a “something’s starting to rot” smell and not snot inducing.