Ok, I got REALLY bored last night and there was nothing on but Freinds reruns and porn. Being the young lady that I am, I turned almost immedietly to the Freinds. It was the one where Joey and Chandler were in the cab, and Joey had a sandwich, and Chandler smelt it and Joey told him not to, he might smell all the smell.
Well… Is that possible? I mean, If I were to squirt some perfume on my wrist and sniff it like a bloodhound for an hour, will the smell go away? Will it be used up?
Not the hardest question in the world, but I’m jsut curious…
I would say its possible to suck up so many of the particles that there are few left in the air, only the ones stuck to your skin would remain. In which case you wouldn’t smell it that much.
On a semi-related note, it should be pointed out that particles of what ever is intended to be smelt must be sucked directly up the nose in order to notice it. So when you walk into a public bathroom right after someone took a shit and it reeks, relish in the fact that a stranger’s colon residue is depositing itself along your nasal passages. :eek:
Recent biography about biochemist Luca Turin who (possibly) cracked the secret of smell: “The Emperor of Scent.” It details the longrunning fight between the supporters of the molecule-shape-detector idea and the supporters of molecule-resonance-detector idea. The author sides with the latter.
If smell is based on energy levels in molecules, then your nose probably has hundreds if not thousands of separate “color channels” for odors. A strong smell could temporarily wipe out a particular set of channels. That would prevent you from detecting that particular scent, and it might distort other smells.
At one point the author notes that smell is similar to vision: we can only detect changes. Walk into a bakery and you smell the baking bread, but this only happens for a few minutes before it seemingly goes away.
Huh. Maybe if you had a perfume that strongly stimulated ALL the smell channels, then it would make you temporarily smell-blind.
Miss Magic8ball, to smell all the smell of something, I think you’d have to inhale all, or a huge portion, of the particles. Noses are pretty sensitive - you don’t really need to inhale a lot of something to smell it - so I think that’d be really hard to do. Besides, you’d become acclimated to the scent long before that happened, so you’d probably quit, thinking you’d “smelled it up,” long before it really happened.