I am going to have to be the contrarian again. I absolutely love all high quality perfume and cologne even on men. I have a large collection of it and am constantly looking for the top rated ones to add. Most people like it but I have gotten the occasional comment that I smell like a French whorehouse. Vintage Polo cologne brings me back to my 1980’s youth. Egoist Platinum by Chanel is a great winter scent and I am going to buy Creed Irish Tweed soon although it is very expensive. Summer scents are lighter and cheaper but I don’t like them as much because they tend not to last that long. I am very smell oriented and and most of the good ones invoke strong, good memories.
No whoosh intended, at least not by me.
Agree with you that any given nose “tunes out” any given scent after continuous exposure of minutes or hours.
My point was more chronic than acute. After weeks or months or years or decades of wearing the same scent every day, folks will lose sensitivity to that scent. So their perception of the scent strength after they apply their 2 drops in the morning is much lower than it was. So they apply 2 teaspoons instead to get back that initial perception of scent surge they think of as necessary to get through the day still smellin’ fine.
Then, as you say, within a few minutes they can’t smell that either. So maybe they re-apply.
Lather rinse repeat until they smell stronger than a pig farm. Maybe different than a pig farm, but equally eye-watering. Idjits.
The level of perfumes and other fragrances some people exude is beyond bizarre. If I can smell you coming a few seconds before you pass my office door, you’ve overdone it.
Some people have such a sensitivity to strong odors that they may exhibit physical symptoms. Common sense and courtesy dictate that if you work with such folk, you refrain from dumping the entire contents of the perfume/after shave lotion bottle on yourself.
Where things go overboard in my opinion is when anything scented (no matter what the level) is banned due to claims of allergy or other dire symptomatology, because of perceived “toxicity”.
I am sensitive to scent, but worn lightly, it can be nice. To me, the right amount is if I have to stand very close to the wearer to notice it.
I went for allergy testing once. There was a notice before the appointment that clearly stated it was a no scent environment. No scented deodorant, no perfume, no scented soap, fabric softener on clothes, etc. As I’m waiting, a woman comes in with her son and sits next to me. She had a full face of makeup, her hair was styled and immaculate. She may not have been wearing perfume, but she still reeked of cosmetics and hair product. I really wanted to say something, but I just got up and moved. Earned me a dirty look from her, but FFS, what part of scent free did she miss?
But see, maybe it doesn’t smell that way to them. Maybe five years ago it wouldn’t have smelled that way to you.
Yes. I totally understand that. I guess my point was that what’s flowery and sweet to some people smells like a vile poison to others.
We don’t all perceive scents in the same way. We all don’t see colours in exactly the same way either.
As we’ve seen from the cilantro threads, taste is also a variable.
Most women’s perfume indeed smells like “Off” or something to me: not pleasant in the least.
So, keep this in mind.
That’s remarkable. I have the most sedentary life possible and I still need deodorant. How does sweat not smell after a while?
Don’t go into our Jo-Ann Fabric. Between the outer door and the inner doors lies the funk that is scented pine cones. I like it in moderation and open air, but built up in a closed space? It’s got to repel customers.
A good way to express/explain it is this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdgT9ThSMLk 1:40 to 2:00 and for one to use their humanity to understand. and #metoo
I don’t mind it, except for one thing. I live in an apartment building and the laundry room is on my floor, and if someone uses it, it smells like they simply dumped out the whole bottle on the floor for hours afterwards. :mad: Whose idea was it to do something like this, anyway?
I used to work with a woman who got some body cream that smelled like chocolate chip cookies :eek: , and that got old really fast. She had to be told by management not to use it at work again. :rolleyes:
I don’t know. don 't think sweat has any smell of its own, but when it perspires out of the pores, it moisturizes other substances it comes into contact with, such as old residues left on your skin or in your clothing. That is what smells when activated by sweat.
Also, your body exudes more than just sweat, and a person’s smell can be influenced by fear, nervous tension, etc., as hormones are released. What you think is sweat smell could be a comples of emotional triggers that other nearby can read. The way dogs (and some people) can smell your fear, anger, aggression, etc. Maybe we are masking those cues by dipping ourselves in scents, and it has become culturally universal.
Well, not to worry. You’re miles away.
Deodorants, or anti-perspirants don’t just mask scents – in fact many of them are unscented. They also destroy the bacteria that causes B.O.
A lot of people are noticing a change in their sense of smell and starting to object to personal scent application in ways they never did before. There is a scientific reason for this and it has to do with all the efforts we have a de to clean up our air. When nearly everyone smoked and pollution was at its highest rate, few people complained the fragrance bothered them. The air was so full of irritants that the particular irritant that came in well below the top two was barely a blip on most people’s radar. Add to that the fact that most scents prior to the 20th century were made with mostly natural ingredients to which humans had fewer sensitivities.
As the air quality has improved and far fewer of the places we go allow smoking, our bodies have been successfully cleaning these irritants out of our lungs, leaving room for us to ‘notice’ perfumes as irritants. As fewer and fewer fragrances are made with any natural ingredients whatsoever, and the synthetics replacing those natural ingredients are irritants in and of themselves, you can see the reas on our perceptions of irritation via scent are increasing.
The fragrance industry itself is self-policing, ha ING banned certain ingredients from use in fragrance due to their irritation factor. There are also other reasons for bans, but the biggest one is sensitivity.
Lots of us, myself definitely included, enjoy wearing fragrance and don’t want to give up doing so. But in deference to otgers, I have begun wearing more natural perfumes. They do not have the lasting power and odor heft of commercial fragrances and have none of the synthetics that are often the reason for irritation.
If you have a friend or coworker whose scent is bothering you, perhaps you could gift them with some natural perfume and kindly ask them to please use it when around you due to your sensitivity, rather than insult them by telling them not to wear scent at all.
I am unable to look up cites for you at the moment, but there have been numerous articles in Scientific American, fashion leaders such as Vogue, and in the fragrance industry trade journals such as that of IFRA (International Fragrance Association)
And Gain??? Oh that stuff is nasty! That scent will still be clinging to the planet when humans are gone and cockroaches rule the world.
I think some people have bad odor and don’t necessarily know the best way to get rid of it, even if they’re doing things right like showering every day and using anti-perspirant. They could be using the wrong soap or body wash.
I found sallux cloth (basically a wire brush that is long enough to wipe the whole body) and Head & Shoulders works for me. Yes, that’s a product for head hair not being used on the head. (I thought the idea was so dumb, I felt like I lost actual IQ points when I read it. But I had some anyway so why not try it? It worked so well! The detergent is much stronger than in body wash. I’m awaiting the study that says it causes cancer or Alzheimer’s or something though, because it seems too good to be true.)
Apocrine sweat (from armpits and the genital regions) contains fatty substances that don’t smell much by themselves. Unfortunately bacteria break these down and those products smell terrible. (There’s anti-bacterial deodorants, but that just promotes antibiotic resistance, so the problem will come back incurably.)
The person you’re quoted might not want to offend any particular ethnicity.
But did it start with an F?
You’ll have to ask the man who wrote it. Who wasn’t me. I have my suspicions but I ain’t talkin’. Wouldn’t be fair.
I have been in several different JoAnns. The store itself is mostly more tolerable than some of the other craft-type stores, which have lagoons of stank here and there. The foyer of the local grocery store has some very strong cinnamony smell, but I am not doing business in the foyer and can get through it, usually, in two or three seconds.
And how a store smells is, not surprisingly, a subject of study and strategy.
*… in one study (it was) found that in a local clothing store, when “feminine scents” like vanilla were used, sales of women’s clothes doubled. They found a similar result with men’s clothing when scents like “rose maroc” were used.… “Men don’t like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don’t linger in a store if it smells masculine.”
Though there’s different ways scent is incorporated into retailer’s marketing efforts, the kind I’m referring to are the ambient scents in a retail environment, which have also been studied and proved to affect people’s purchasing habits and determining whether they will return to a store or not. There are actually entire consultancy firms, like ScentAir, who specialize in nothing other than helping brands from a number of industries leverage scent marketing to their advantage.*
I know that a store that smells musty or dirty is not going to get so much business. But if a bookstore smells like something other than books (and maybe coffee), how would that work?
I love the smell of some perfumes on women. I don’t currently and haven’t for a long time, had a woman in my life but one of the things I really miss is the feminine fragrances. Sometimes I find myself behind some of my female coworkers walking to the building in the morning and I really enjoy the scents some of them trail behind. Not sure it’s always perfume, more likely it’s body wash or shampoo that’s scented for a female. Love it and miss it.
I’ve worked for Jo-Ann’s before. Many years ago (decades, actually) they carried dried eucalyptus bunches. The first day they were in the store my (at the time, undiagnosed) asthma was so bad I wanted to quit. I managed to survive, and my boss was kind enough to ask someone else to deal with them if they needed to be straightened up. I was also lucky(ish) enough to get a teaching job somewhere else. I’ve never seen strongly fragrant eucalyptus in stores since then. The cinnamon cones in the foyer were nothing compared to the eucalyptus.
Dude’s in his 80s, blind and eats garbage. I wouldn’t trust his sense of smell.
I love scents as long as they aren’t heavy or cloying. I sometimes put a small spritz on my wrist to enjoy while I’m dressing, I doubt if it is very noticeable by the time I get to where I’m going. Usually scents don’t bother me although I do remember that being stuck in the car as a child with my mother and 3 aunts all wearing White Linen was a bit much. I also sometimes have to limit how long we have scented candles burning, I like them but they bother my sinuses after awhile.