Looking Like Your Mother

The Nose Knows Revisited

A reader's comment led me to her site which contained a post about her daughter's loss of smell. 

Today the NYTimes had an article on one man's experience with such a loss, parts of which I am reproducing here.  The man had been hit by a truck and was a bit hurt by the experience.

"'The taste buds can only detect sweet, sour, salty and bitter - the full symphony of flavor comes from the nose,' said Dr. Charles P. Kimmelman, a Manhattan anosmia specialist. 'But when your brain is hit really hard, it wiggles like Jell-O, and the little fibers going from the smell nerve endings up to the brain are stretched taut. Some of them get torn, injured or bruised.'
. . .

Anosmia may be caused not only by head trauma but also by upper respiratory infection, nasal or sinus disease and exposure to toxins. Some people are born with the condition. People from all these camps usually find their way to a Yahoo anosmia message board (health.groups.yahoo.com/group/anosmia)  that has emerged as a popular support group.
. . .

<>

Another common complaint: dealing with the frequent perception that compared with other disabilities, anosmia is no big deal. 'Most people treat me like a circus oddity,' said Maria Topper, a school science coordinator from Oceanside, Calif., who became anosmic about two years ago, apparently because of allergies. 'They do not realize how much of a life-changing experience it is to lose these senses.'"

In addition to the impact on the joy of eating, the entire purpose of of going to a restaurant or social gatherings centered around food, the article also pointed out the dangers, such as an inability to smell things burning or things that are spoiled or gas leaks.  My decision to post on this, however, came after reading this information by the poor truck accident vicitm:

"Thai, Japanese and fruit were O.K., but almost anything else tasted off," he said. "Anything with a sauce or a melding of flavors tasted muddy and schmaltzy. Processed foods like candy, soda and toothpaste were very chemical-y, almost astringent."

This might be worth knowing if that someone in your life with a loss of smell is a child.  A parent - or anyone attempting to serve the child food - should be aware of this and offer the best tasting food options available.

Or at least not the worst.

Products

Note to Self:  Buy Vera Wang perfume.  Pour contents into steam iron. 

Satsuma

It is a Japanese citrus scent, like an orange only much better.  We fell in love with the scent as a body lotion from The Body Shop.  The girls would put it on in the morning before school and the entire upstairs would smell fresh and clean.  I would put the lotion on my arms, in my hair even.  I could never get the scent to last. 

I asked a friend if she knew of a place where I could get someone to make me a perfume that smelled like the lotion. 

"Well, yes. I do know of those places.  But why don't you just buy the satsuma perfume oil from the same store?" 

Like I have time to know everything.   So I picked one up tonight.  It was right there next to the patchouli oil, which to anyone who was ever in the seventh grade in the 70's would clearly understand.  I didn't care.  I loved this scent.  Now the problem is, how much do I put on?  I am the world's worst perfume wearer. I haven't a clue.  If I can smell it is it too much?  If I like it, does that mean others will?  How does this work anyway?

The iVillage Fragrance Guide
offers "The best way to make your fragrance linger all day is to layer your scents. Indulge in a foaming scented bubble bath and use the complementary scented soap (if it isn't available, use a non-scented variety so that you don't wind up with a clash of odours). Afterwards, use lavish amounts of the matching body lotion and follow up with a spritz or dab of your chosen scent. Your skin will absorb the fragrance molecules over the complete surface of your body."

Excellent marketing strategy. I wonder if it actually works that way.  The site gives a nice Fragrance 101 page (which every boy should read so he is prepared for later life), and lots of tips on making your clothes and house smell good. The bit diluting perfume oil in a water spritzer bottle and misting your clothes before ironing sounds like it has the potential for stain disaster at my house. Cool. I will try it this weekend.  The Body Shop had a Magnolia scent that might be clear enough to not stain.  I have never ironed a bed sheet in my life.  This might be worth it, although the author recommends Rose scent if it is for love. 

I will go with what doesn't stain, such is my station in life.

Then I found Buying and Using Perfume

It explains why we may wish to consider wearing scent:

Smell is one of our most powerful senses, evoking the most distant of memories. We have 10 million nasal cells that enable us to smell. As infants, we call upon this sense to help recognise our mothers, while many experts claim it plays a vital role in the science of sexual attraction.

So I guess the trick is, if your love had a decenst relationship with his or her parent, then you should figure out, what, exactly, did that parent smell like, wear, cook, etc. when your latest love was a babe.

Start snooping. 

A Flower By Any Other Name

Ubiquitous ad campaigns for FlowerBomb, the "antidote to reality" have forced me to comment.  The fact that it had its name before anyone started blending oils and essences seems, somehow, wrong.  Backwards. Corporate.  Contrived.  Everything a perfume should not be.  It puts it right up there on the shelf with all the Hollywood fragrances and bottles that look like bodies. 

A perfume should be nurtured, just as a flower or a plant.  Once it exists - and only then - we move on to the Lineas treatment.  Anything else cheapens the process.

Antidote to reality, please.  Was its undercover, work in progress name "Michael Jackson"?

The Nose Remembers

I keep trying to imagine what it looked like, those elephants and other animals running inland before the tsunami hit in Indonesia.  A CNN reporter explained something like, "Animals have a sense of hearing we cannot even imagine."  The same is true of their sense of smell. If you think of how intricately our eyes function - the detail and the distance, think of how amazing it would be if our ears were that developed, or our sense of smell. 

Little is still known of our sense of smell. I believe it is more sensitive in some people than others and that a decent schnoz may be one ingredient necessary to make a decent chef.  I remember my second born, the one more inclined to believe in less than concrete things, could walk into any kitchen as a child, and detect a certain food on the stove that escaped my own detection.

Certain, subtle odors wreak more havoc than we have previously believed.  The Shultzes' dog (part 1 of this series) was not sensing ghosts or an incredibly bad attitude that the new owners suspected continued to reside there long after the moving out van had left.  He was smelling something unfamiliar and strong, or familiarly bad.  So were the Shultzes, only it was much more subtle, triggering vague unsettling olfactory memories or, more likely, instinctive reactions.  There is a lot that we do that is linked to our earlier, more primate days, when instinct and self-preservation ruled and nothing would be debated around the campfire for tens of thousands of years.   

The nose knows. Or at least it knows what it doesn't know.  I now believe that there was something in the lingering scent of animal carcass that triggered my anxiety.  It could just have well as been sickly mold, rotten wood, or a scent that I was smelling as a child when I was left too long in a bed at a relative's house and became frightened.  These explanations sure fit my world view a whole lot better than anything else my wild imagination has directed me towards, and is scientifically based.   

Perhaps the burning of sage and the like really does work by masking or cleaning out the odors so offensive to a particular person's olfactory system.  Towards that end, they should be used.  Perhaps certain people get a real emotional benefit to ritual that involves deep breathing, pleasant smells, and a reminder to be good and to focus on what is important to them in life. Towards that end, proceed.  Much more than that, however, is playing with fire.

Anything is dangerous if it encourages false assumptions, bigotry, naivete, prejudice and hysteria.  Jacqueline Shultz did not hesitate to tell the reporter that maybe the bad vibes were a result of some illegal activity of the previous owners.  That, to me, is the danger here, the part of the story that gives me the creeps.  And as far as I know, there has been no smudging invented to date that keeps stupid thought processes at bay. 

I still don't know about that dragon and my computer or how feng shui figures into all this blabbing about the sense of smell.  I can say that once I got the ghosts out of my cranium, it made it easier for me to just accept that as I yelled at the screen I probably also pounded the desk or made some other physical motion that made a difference, or the timing was simply a coincidence. The dragons, like ghosts and bad karma, are kept alive to encourage conformity.  I think that maybe remembering the golden rule and giving the sense of smell its due is all that I need to do right now.  Sorry, PT.  Catch me on something else.

Can You Say Olfactory?

It was the bit about the dog that started the turbines spinning, and connected up these three experiences:

1.  I got into the elevator, along with a man a good head taller than I. He looked to be in his mid-60's.  He knew the other people on the ride, and they talked.  I stared up at him in wonderment. He smelled exactly like my grandfather. I had not detected that scent in - it had to be decades.  The aroma brought complete peace over me, and a sense of excitement as if my own grandfather had boarded.  I wanted to ask, "What are you wearing?" but I let the moment pass.  He and the other men on the elevator ribbed each other with locker room tenacity. I knew the inquiry would turn into an inquest of me.  He must have used the same combination of bath soap and aftershave, and his wife perhaps used the same laundry detergent as my grandmother had. It was startling. 

2.  I have been in two homes I thought were haunted.  Years ago I rented an old farmhouse while on temporary assignment in the midwest.  I wanted to spend some time experiencing life on the plains.  I had other roommates, but I was the first to arrive. I spent several days in the house alone.  I enjoyed the house, the land, and the view, but the minute I started up the stairs to the second floor, my heart began to race and I became completely frightened.  If I used the upstairs bathroom, I always expected to see a ghost in the mirror over the sink whenever I picked my head up from spitting out toothpaste. I took a bath up there once. Afraid I would be held under by a cold, invisible hand, I left the door open and talked loudly.  Once I entered the staircase or the threshold of one small room in the downstairs, I became completely irrational and terrified.

Never one who has held much faith in an afterlife, this house forced me to carve out a little niche for ghosts.  I learned that one particular room upstairs had actually been a hanging area for slaughtered animals, to drain the blood  (and the house configuration seemed to allow for such a use) but that was not unusual, and did not explain the stairway, the bathroom, and the downstairs frontroom fear.  More recently, while looking for a new home in my current city, I toured a spectacular turn of the century townhouse. The first two floors were perfect.  While looking at the extra bedrooms on the third floor, however, that same sense of panic came over me.  I never mentioned this concern to my husband, who loved the house. "I am sorry honey, but I think it has ghosts," was never passing my lips.  I even threw my second born into the third floor - she was sensitive to odd things.  I asked, nonchallantly, "So, how did it feel?  Pretty mellow? Felt ok? No, um, ghosts or strange senses?" She looked at me askew.  It turned out that the window frames were completely rotted and the house would not pass inspection without major overhaul.  "Oh, what a shame," I said. "Next!"

3.  I toured the rivers in Hong Kong. When we saw skyscrapers that were designed with large holes through them, the locals would explain that it was feng shui. The holes were designed so that the evil dragons could come out of the mountains behind the buildings and pass clear through to the river and not get caught up in the apartments of the building residents, wreaking havoc as they tried to simply get down to the water. I had never heard the phrase before this trip; it was not a hip decorating tip yet.  I thought it was ridiculous, spending millions on increased construction cost and lost space to those multistory holes. Then again, every culture has its peculiarities, so I listened.

I had been home one week when my computer froze.  I was still operating in DOS, so freezes were not so common. I punched keys. I called an office mate for suggestions.  Finally, I sat staring at the monitor and yelled as the Chinese did, "Dragon be gone!" and the damn thing started right up.  My house, oddly enough, sat on a hill that led directly to a large creek.  This part of the house where the computer sat was actually underground. Maybe a dragon needed to get down to the creek and the electronics blocked its way.

Stupid coincidences. I hate them.    

Thank god for the dog and the way my Grandfather smelled. 

con't.

 

Soap Dish

I found a intensely fresh smelling soap from Appa Kappa, White Moss. It is another in a line of clean smells I am exploring. Trouble is, after my shower, I cannot tell is the scent is still there.  I have taken to rubbing the bar of soap along the underside of my arm, all the way up, when the bar of soap is almost dry.

More sophisticated folks call this concept p e r f u m e.

Is it worth it to use anything other than Ivory in the shower? Do all these lovely scents just go down the drain, right behind my money?  I cannot ask my spouse. He is conditioned to lie.  I could spend the day driving a manure spreader and he would say, "Lovely, honey. You smell just lovely."

Clean

I posted on the Clean perfume a while back. InStyle highlights it in the November issue.  Funny, when we did the testing at my office and out running errands, none of the women seemed to care for Clean Ultimate.  Yes, I dropped it on folks and asked them to comment.  The preferred scent was Clean Provence, hands down.  However, the guys comment favorably when I wear Ultimate, so . . .

InStyle also reported on two scents I must try.  Pure, by Jil Sander, whose clothing I have always adored from afar, picks up on the just scrubbed smell.  (The link seems quiet.)  Also Marc Jacobs produces Blush.  I really enjoy walking by a woman who is wearing a great scent. I have been know to grab an arm and say, "What are you wearing?"   But on me, it has to be light or the scent haunts me all day.   Drop a note if you are familiar with either; I will try them myself and let you know.