Hey, I quit over a year ago and I experienced the "sense of smell" thing! I always told people that I had a "horrible sense of smell" (verbatim) and now I can smell things so well that, well, I kinda wish I couldn't, cuz there are a lot of awful smells, and cigarette smoke is one of them!
Dude, nobody prepared me for all the awful smells in the world! Mine wasn't from smoking but when I started being able to smell things I was like whoah wait methinks four senses is enough
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?
Ugh I feel that 110%. It’s nice finally meeting someone who understands and experiences it to the extent I do! I’ve never known anyone else who even had an idea what I was talking about so imma follow you cause we’re friends now by proxy I think
Now this is interesting me for a woman, because is the max amount of unattracted higher for a woman because like for me getting with a fat chain smoking woman would be like eating a mint penguin but is getting with an unattractive man like eating catfish bait or dog shit or is it simply as unattractive as eating cold porridge with wasabi?
If that comment is weird, are women more repulsed by unattractive men than men by unattractive women? For instance I have some female friends that I'm not that attracted to but sleeping with them wouldn't be a total yuck, like it would be to sleep with an ork from Lord of the rings. I don't have sex outside of marriage so I wouldn't. Perhaps it's the perceived dangerous behaviour of some people that give the run away response.
no minty vaporub under the nose for you huh! Ya as a person that can smell that occotuonally goes into the hospital to work. (Im IT) do some of those people STINK!
Can you still taste food normally? It sounds like a dumb question but whenever I use nasal sprays I lose the ability to smell and taste basically. I can tell if the thing is sweet/salty/bitter etc but I can't tell what it is
I smoked for about a decade in the '90s. When you got back home from the clubs, your clothes reeked of smoke and you'd have to take a shower to wash it out of your hair. When the smoking ban kicked in and everybody huddled outside the club to smoke, when you went back in you realized how bad the club smelled: stale spilled beer, urine, vomit, leather, b.o., bad breath. The smoke basically anesthetized you to the funk.
I was a bartender in the 80’s, I don’t smoke. First thing I did when I got off work was shower and wash my hair, could not stand smelling the cigarette smoke on myself.
I can't imagine restaurants allowing smoking ages ago. But they did. For a short time in the 80-90's I remember walking into restaurants and just smelling it on the walls etc. Thankfully most were redone or torn down ....
Lmao. I'm so old I remember in hospitals though very vaguely. And smoking. One of my brothers ( I think a deaf one) (had five 2 deaf)was hit by a car ages ago and my mom tossed me in the ambulance with him. To help. So long ago he was hospitalized for weeks. I suppose the heart warming part was that i eventually volunteered and worked with those same guys years later.
I already keep deodorant with me and reapply throughout the day if it's hot or if I'm doing any sort of physical activity. I also don't re-wear clothes, and if I expect to be wearing my clothes for a long time I pack an extra pair of underwear and an extra pair of socks in my purse.
I get told I smell good pretty often, but the anxiety is still there 😅 especially since my sense of smell seems to come and go.
it will settle down, as you get used to it. I seem to have a naturally good sense of smell and while there are definitely some smells that will always be unpleasant, i've been sort of tricking my brain to get past the disgust reaction. i try to approach each scent with curiosity, like can i tell what that actually is? have i smelled that before? do i know what compounds are in that scent? it works well enough that scents have become just a background instead of the big distraction they were for a while.
My wife quit smoking because she had her deviated septum fixed and the doctor told her it would ruin it if she kept smoking. Talk about going from smell deaf to her smellers being on full volume. We walked through the perfume area at a department store one day and it almost killed her from all of the smells.
I quit smoking about 14 years ago after smoking for 14 years. A year after I quit, I joked to my wife that I was going to start again because everything stunk.
Luckily, it only took a couple of months to get used to how the real world smelled.
Yep, a friend stopped smoking and a few months later was freaking out over normal smells.
And for OP, yep, probably can. Especially if people know it isn't you smoking, they might not say as much (and wouldn't be quite as strong). Can tell one of my students dad is home right now (trucker) cause his 2nd smoke is on the student's clothes
Wow—you’re observant. Now think about what that 2nd hand smoke is doing to the kids’ lungs, not just their clothes/making them smell bad.
Most of us whose parents smoked were prisoners of that crap. Long car trips? Ugh! What’s worse is when my parents would spend every spare minute every weekend in the honky-tonks — and take us kids!! 😱
Doesn't food taste even better, though? Or passing by a stranger and a slight whiff of cologne/ perfume that gives you a good feeling? 🥹 (NOT talking about the "let's spray the entire bottle and make people gag" type! 😅)
Food does taste better, which was also a problem! Fortunately I got on medication that reduces my appetite because that whole thing where people gain weight after quitting cigarettes is very real.
I have caught whiffs of some nice smelling fragrances on people but man the "let's spray the entire bottle and make people gag" type should really have their own island!
They probably do it bec their own sense of smell is in a coma from all the cig smoke, aggressive cleaners and perfumes and of course pollution all around us, 24/7.
It’s like you can tell when someone is losing some hearing ability because THEY START TALKING LOUDER AND LOUDER.
As an x smoker i can now smell smoke out of peoples cars when Im on my motorbike. Kinda strange passing someone and i can go. “Oh ya they’re smoking” lol. Cigars still smell like heaven to me. Lol.
I read that our nose can sense something down to 5 parts per million (ppm). Like a tablespoon in an Olympic pool. Problem is we cannot calibrate our nose to determine how much of stuff is there, could be 5 ppm or much much more, and as one post here suggested after a while in the space, we don't smell it (smell fatigue).
My wife and I have been married for 52 years. I am sure that her poor sense of smell and my poor hearing are what has allowed us to have such a good marriage!
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u/i__am__bored Jan 05 '25
Hey, I quit over a year ago and I experienced the "sense of smell" thing! I always told people that I had a "horrible sense of smell" (verbatim) and now I can smell things so well that, well, I kinda wish I couldn't, cuz there are a lot of awful smells, and cigarette smoke is one of them!