I brought a bunch of peonies from my yard to the office the other day. One of the people who stopped to sniff them, asked me a question that I’d never thought of, but figure someone here can answer.
Does repeated smelling of flowers make them lose their scent faster?
Supposing that a cut flower won’t generate/grow new scent-causing whatever, there ought to be a finite amount of “scent molecules” in/around the flower. If enough people walk by, take a sniff and walk off with some of the scent, will that cause the flower to stop smelling like a flower sooner that it would if nobody smelled it?
Flowers release scent molecules (called essential oils) at a rate determined by numerous factors. Yes, those molecules sitting free, or nearly so on the petal surface MAY be sucked up by a vacuum…like a nose…, but those not ready for release cannot.
Does the OP mean that if one person smells a flower for an extended period of time, that a subesequent person who goes over to smell it, won’t smell anything?
Or does the OP mean that if you smell a flower for an extended period, the first person won’t smell it as strongly because his/her nose will have gotten used to the scent?
I was under the impression that human noses tended to get used to particular scents after a time.
If the smelly chemicals in a plant are just sitting on the surface, then smelling it would “use it up faster”, since the diffusion into the air would depend on the local concentration of the chemical in the immediate area (less in the air = faster diffusion). How this interacts with the scent molecules not at the surface, as tcburnett mentioned, I don’t know. If it doesn’t have any affect on them, you wouldn’t decrease the overall time the flower smelled, but you’d get brief decreases in the scent after you sniffed it until new scent molecules were brought to the surface.
A slight breeze would probably have much more of an affect than someone smelling the flower, though.