17 December 2009

j'aime le parfum d'odeur, j'aime l'odeur de parfum

  • Air, effluvium, efflux, essence, flavor, graveolent, musk, noctuolent, osmagogue, perfume, redolence, scenting, scenty, snuff, stink, tincture...

  • Space smells funny. Astronauts have struggled to describe the smell of space: "burnt gunpowder or the ozone smell of electrical equipment." This I find far from satisfying. So I'm trying to imagine what it might smell like based on, well, what it's made of. Which brings happy strings of thought and consequent anticipation of proper, lovely fluffy blanketed & pajama'd sleep.

  • No one else smells like you.

  • I love a good underarm as much as the next gal, but perhaps not piped through a monstrous dental apparatus. An exhibit I'd travel to see, nonetheless.

  • Schizophrenic sense of smell. There did seem to be a smells-are-weird theme among the late night schizophrenic hotline callers. Unrelated or not, people with certain flavors of schizophrenia may have deficits in smell identification.

  • My cat's breath smells like cat food. We demonstrate for the first time that most women, and some men, deliberately smell their partners' clothing when they are apart. [McBurney, M.L., Shoup, S.A. & Streeter, D.H. (2006). Olfactory Comfort and Attachment Within Relationships. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 2954-2963. doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00420.x]

  • More interesting (and not so patent that one wonders why bother collect data at all), though no one could successfully feign surprise here: The ladies possess superior sniffers. Furthermore (despite suspicion about methodology & interpretation), who could deny the chin-stroking "hmmmm" factor of a positive correlation between emotional sensitivity and sense of smell?

  • If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all.

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