I have always asserted that I can smell when someone has been sneezing a lot in a room but friends and family tell me that sneezes have no smell at all.
Have I gone crazy or can some of you smell other people’s sneezes as well? It is particularly noticable if someone with a cold has been in the room, the smell is hard to describe but it isn’t very pleasant and I seem to be the only one who can smell anything.
Most sneezes smell like nothing. Others do smell, though. I know I hate it when *my own * smell, too. yuck.
When my own smell, I know I’m about to be very, very miserable for the next week. It’s always a sickly sweet “infection” smell which is soon followed by very thick colored mucus.
My husband’s sneezes smell terrible–oddly chemical (his breath is fine, I don’t know what the deal is), but I’ve never been able to smell anyone else’s sneezes.
Yes, I can smell sneezes. And I can smell my own when I’ve got an infection, as WhyNot describes.
Yeah, sneezes have a distinctive smell to me. I used to have a roommate who refused to cover her mouth when she sneezed and I also smelled that nasty smell ><
I can smell “sick” sneezes, as described above - given I’m not sick myself - though no one else in my family can. But then, they can’t tell when the peanut butter’s gone off, and don’t quite believe that I can smell when some people are really upset (especially my sister).
Come to think of it, my mom used to have a hanging potted plant, I think she said it was a Jacob’s Tears, that smelled like a sick sneeze. I haven’t smelled that plant directly for twenty years, but I can bring its smell to mind instantly - unlike many smells I’d LIKE to bring to mind that elude me. I’m guessing it had some kind of soil fungus. Mom thinks I’m a little crazy on the subject.
This is one time I’m glad that my nose isn’t as sensitive as yours. I’ve never smelled a sneeze, a fact for which I’m grateful. Frankly, until now I didn’t know that anyone could smell a sneeze.
I can smell it when people have a sinus infection or head cold. My boyfriend had one a few weeks ago and I knew he was sick because of that smell. I don’t think of it as a sneeze smell per se, but I bet a sneeze will spray that smell all over the room. Gross.
Oh, yeah! Seriously, Ruby, those of us who can, wish we couldn’t - some of us folks can smell all kinds of things that put us off our feed, and if there was any way to fix us so’s not to, we’d go for it. I actually french-exhaled clove cigarrettes for six months in my youth, trying to dull the stink monitor, only to find that tobacco-stained kleenex are nastier by far than the smells I was trying to kill. It’s like having a good ear for pitch: it’s sort of a blessing in theory, but in practice, it mostly makes life less enjoyable.
I taught in a classroom that stank terribly of flop-sweat from the course before mine (probabilty modeling?), but most of my students couldn’t smell it.
I once had to stop living in an apartment because the men in the apartment below me had such bad breath that I couldn’t sleep.
Do you cover your mouth when you sneezed? because I read in a book that:
“When a person refuses to cover their mouth when they sneeze, about over 10,000 infectious droplets come out of their mouth. The droplets contain: old saliva, bacteria and mucous. When ever saliva is expelled into the air, it often smells musty and someone would smell it 2 meters away. So when ever you want to sneeze, make sure you cover your mouth.”