Your sense of smell is crazy.
When you ask people about their favorite smells, you get a wide variety of different responses. People say things like fresh coffee, baking cookies, gasoline, the airport, freshly cut grass, flowers, their partners, and people they’re attracted to.
When we close our eyes and just smell something we enjoy, a flood of memories washes over us, hijacking our brains and transporting us to another world.
The sense of smell, or olfaction, is by far the oldest of all the senses. We believe this to be true because almost every single creature alive today can smell stuff.
Smell helps animals, large and small, find food and avoid being eaten by predators. The sense of smell is so deeply rooted in organisms that when we are stressed or anxious, the whole world smells worse.
Everyone knows how a smell can unlock old, long-forgotten memories in an instant.
But what most people don’t know is that smell is a chemical process. Smell is an organism's most direct access to chemicals. Until 2014, we thought that humans had a very poor sense of smell, only able to identify about 10,000 different scents.
But research from Rockefeller University flipped this on its head when a research team discovered humans can identify more than a trillion different smells.
For reference, we can see between 2.3 million and 7.5 million colors, and we can hear only about 340,000 different tones. This means that, by and large, our sense of smell is both our most powerful and least utilized.
We quirky humans tend to rely on sight for virtually everything we do, neglecting the other senses in the process.
Making Scents of Human Pheromones
You’ve probably heard by now that when it comes to physical attraction, there’s much more than just the optics going on. For a long time, we’ve “known” that human pheromones can lure someone into our grasp like a spider’s web catches an innocent insect. I’m sure you’ve heard how effective pheromones are as secondary sex characteristics.
Pheromones are chemicals that are released by animal bodies that can affect the behavior of others. They’re like an invisible force that can make people feel drawn to each other.
There’s only one problem. Humans don’t have pheromones.
Or at least they haven’t been discovered in humans.
After decades of research, scientists haven’t discovered pheromones in humans. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that another process may be at work.
Because your sense of smell is so complex, it’s also the least understood.
But here’s what we do know…
Scents and Sensibility
Considering you see 3–7.5 million colors and hear about 350,000 (possibly up to 500,000) tones, your sense of smell is more fine-tuned than your senses of sight and hearing combined.
In a 2009 study of human olfactory senses, researchers noted:
The olfactory sense could have unbelievable attributes if we consider its capacity to modulate human behaviors. It has determinant roles in the evolution of human habitat, in the way of preparing food and, most important of all, in social behavior.
Sense of smell can influence behaviors—it just doesn’t use pheromones to achieve this goal.
When choosing a sexual partner, we’re frequently magnetized to those who smell the best (to us). But have you ever wondered why some people smell great to you and others not so much? It turns out that the science of smell is more complex (and fascinating) than you might think.
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a cluster of genes in our immune system. MHC genes are responsible for the smell of someone’s skin, hair, and even sweat.
MHC genes are essential for the immune system to function properly. They are also responsible for the body’s ability to differentiate between self and non-self. When MHC genes aren’t working properly, the body is more susceptible to disease and infections.
Thanks to our sense of smell, MHC genes also play a role in mate selection.
Remember, genes are chemicals. When we smell a partner or potential partner, we can secretly detect their genetic makeup—especially their immune system. This helps us unconsciously detect how good of a match they are.
When we say “we have chemistry” with someone, we aren’t lying.
It’s why we catch a whiff of something utterly intoxicating and that something is called hormones. As you stand there, mesmerized by that person’s smell, your hormones are reacting to their hormones; your genes are reacting to their genes.
The Link Between Smell & Sexuality
I’ve said for a long time that we need to stop focusing so much on using our visual systems during sex, and we need to bask in the wonders of the other senses. We were given the senses of taste and smell, sound and touch, and it pains me to think how seldom we use them in sensual experiences.
New research published last month in Archives of Sexual Behavior shows that the importance we place on our sense of smell is linked to our sexual desire.
Hopefully, this doesn’t make you scrunch your nose in disgust, but the cross-cultural study assessed participants in the United States, China, and India and concluded that people who placed more value on their sense of smell in romantic encounters consistently had a stronger sexual desire for their partners.
Researchers also linked people who smelled themselves with higher sexual desire. It seems people who are more in tune with their senses are more sensual in the bedroom too.
As the study authors said:
In conclusion, our study confirmed that people who placed more value on olfactory function or engaged more in body odor sniffing showed stronger sexual desire. These correlations were consistent for both sexes and across different cultures, further indicating the importance of olfaction in sexuality.
This is obviously very useful information. If you’re not the type who gives your other senses besides sight much consideration, this might be your cue to take a few minutes a day and focus on smelling things you enjoy.
Whether it’s taking a moment to smell your food before you eat it or stopping to smell your partner while spending time together cuddling, life provides us plenty of opportunities to find smells we enjoy and bask in them.
Carpe diem, amici mei.