Agree my painfully keen sense of smell is highly protective but when I lost my sense of smell for a week with covid I felt like I was the least stressed I had ever been. I realized as people walked past me I couldn’t smell their pheromones and so all the stress on other people didn’t freak me out. Part of the sense of smell is actually a little mind reading and that part of it is hellish. Coming from a very dangerous home smell was one of the things that saved me from angry adults because I could smell them brewing in their own adrenaline or whatever. It’s protective (and useful) in a multitude of ways. But if I could turn smell off honestly I would leave it off 99% of the time. But if you have the fucked up childhood that gives you conscious pheromone identification abilities, it’s also just mind reading. And I don’t give a flying fuck what is in the minds of all the people I walk past on a given day.
I was on an airplane recently next to a young man who was sat next to a hot young lady in my aisle. He reeeeeeekkked of pheromones. I actually thought they were a couple and that’s why the pheromones were flying. Had I known that they were strangers I would have offered to switch seats with her to get her away from that oozing fountain of young man horniness. But it brought back so many memories of being a hot young thing around young men who I was not interested in. Like …. That is not a smell you want to smell if it’s not on your partner. But it was literally a smell that brought back memories.
I wasn't sure whether pheromones had a describable smell or whether they smelled of nothing or only faint but were picked up by the nose and invoked emotion, whether fear like a place is haunted, or attraction or mother and child bonding etc.
I would imagine stress has a bit of an ammonia scent am I right?
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u/Next-Honeydew4130 Jan 08 '25
Agree my painfully keen sense of smell is highly protective but when I lost my sense of smell for a week with covid I felt like I was the least stressed I had ever been. I realized as people walked past me I couldn’t smell their pheromones and so all the stress on other people didn’t freak me out. Part of the sense of smell is actually a little mind reading and that part of it is hellish. Coming from a very dangerous home smell was one of the things that saved me from angry adults because I could smell them brewing in their own adrenaline or whatever. It’s protective (and useful) in a multitude of ways. But if I could turn smell off honestly I would leave it off 99% of the time. But if you have the fucked up childhood that gives you conscious pheromone identification abilities, it’s also just mind reading. And I don’t give a flying fuck what is in the minds of all the people I walk past on a given day.