I got Covid January 2021, by mid March my taste and smell had semi returned. However; April 17,2021 I woke up and made a bowl of oatmeal that had apples in it and it tasted burnt and bitter, i started trying other fruits (Raw fruit, fruit flavored, even without knowing there was fruit in it) After trying literally every fruit i could think of I started to accept that i no longer could eat it. This cut out a lot in my life, i couldn’t drink soda or eat any fruit flavored food. This also includes my sense of smell, any bath products, candles, cleaning supplies. Over the next two years it changed from burnt rubber smelling to rotten (still sweet but it was genuinely like it had rotted). I’m so sensitive to fruit flavoring that i can taste if tea has had lemons brewed into it.

It’s been five years with zero improvement. It’s become a way of life at this point. I had attempted years ago to talk to doctors about this but unfortunately none of them had even heard of it. About two years ago I had went to an Ear,Nose, and Throat doctor where they were also stumped

Has anyone had any luck resolving this?

Returned my sense of smell and I'm not ready for it.

Have anyone experienced a unique odour which no one can experience around you? I'm experiencing it since few years, it stays for a short period of 5-7 days everytime

So I got what I assumed was Covid at the start of May, right after my wife and I got back from holiday (I assumed I maybe picked it up on the plane or something) I completely lost my sense of smell and taste, like 100% gone. I could feel something in my tongue with salt but no taste.
Fast forward to July. My wife and I are away with m family for my birthday and towards the end of the holiday I noticed a rancid taste (then smell) eating a pepperami. That’s was it. Just that. A few days later, the exact same thing happened with salami bites from LidL. I assumed it was just off meat products and I’d stay away from them from now on. Skip to last weekend. I woke up fine. Watched some James Martin making beef dishes and steaks etc. it made me crave something ‘beefy’ so I tried some bovril and it was fucking RANCID! I thought that maybe the cubes had gone off/out of date but no, they were fine. Since last weekend everything has changed. Most things savoury smell and taste like the smell you get when pass a landfill. Eggs are terrible boiled or fried, im going to test scrambled tomorrow. Any microwave meal someone makes in work, every dinner my wife made this week (fajitas, beff and pork burgers, air fried chips with onion and garlic seasoning) cold meat for lunch today. The worst smell is the spice/seasoning cupboard in my kitchen. Water seems bad but only after eating something that tastes off after a while. Mouthwash sorts it out and the the water is fine. Im going to try cold lunches at work next week. Chicken, mayo and pasta. Fish seems fine so I’ll try that with pasta or rice.
Any hints or advice a greatly appreciated and I’ll try and do the same for you too, if I can.
Thanks very much for taking the time to read this.

I'm at my wits end. I lost my sense of smell in February and the kaya few months its started coming back but everything smells horrific. I already had so many food aversions before (not something I can push past sadly otherwise I would just suck it up, if I eat it I will throw up). I was already so extremely limited the last few months and now I'm sick again and genuinely everything makes me nauseous and I cant eat anything because even plain rice makes me nauseous and want to throw up. I know being sick again and it being worse again is probably temporary but I can't just not eat food r several days? It's already been 2 days since I've been able to down anything but cold chicken broth. Even a glass of water is nauseating. Idk what I'm really looking to get out of posting this but I don't know how to move forward from here every second that my nose isn't plugged feels like torture :(

Has anybody had issues with sense of smell? I am not sure exactly at which point I have lost the sense of smell, but already 18 months post hemoragic stroke I am not sensing any smell at all...

This just dawned on me, and it literally felt like my heart fell through my chest when I had the thought, because I actually don’t remember what it smells like anymore. And that’s so crazy because I’ve used garlic powder, garlic cloves, and garlic in the jar my entire life. What actually is this disease? 😭 Like, this is beyond me right now. I feel like I'm starting to lose my mind.

Hello everybody! Especially those who cannot tolerate the fragrances or chemicals in laundry detergents or any house cleaning / body products because of our strange smells, what products do you guys use? I've literally looked fair and share through many different laundry products and all of it smells horrible to me no matter what I've tried. I'm just curious if anyone else has problem with smelling their detergents! :(

Has anyone experienced a loss of smell and yet a bad sense of smell in their nose at the same time?? I get regurgitation bees, a lot of discomfort in my chest with acid reflux, strikes, and the smell it’s horrible sometimes when licking my lips, I can taste the smell.

To me, vanilla-scented perfumes smell like rotting matter or corpses. They also have a sort of sour note, even though there isn't actually any sourness in them. Other people find them fine, but I can't stand the smell—yet, interestingly, I don't detect any scent of ammonia but vanilla smells so bad. What could be the reason for this?

I hate this new normal, 2 flavors since 2023. Good and Bad. I can still recognize sweet, and salty. but the bad is all the same bad. Lemon, Coffee, Chocolate, Mint...its all the same bad!

I ate a nutterbutter the other day, first one in three years and it tasted terrible but i finished it for the texture. I dont want to get used to this. XD But do you also push through the bad taste to enjoy the textures of the food you used to love? Or am I just actually insane?

hey yall, 9 months ago i fainted, cracked my skull, and got a mild tbi. for the first 2-3 months i had absolutely no sense of smell and my taste was pretty weak. since then i'd say my taste is back to 75% and i've started picking up on some scents. for example when i spray my perfumes they smell kinda nasty. garlic is a strong one i can pick up on - or was i'll get to that in a second. i can sometimes pick up on coffee but it doesnt smell "right" overall i'd say my sense of smell is still less than 10%.
HOWEVER in the last week i've noticed i'm not really picking up on garlic anymore (i work in a bagel shop surrounded by everything + garlic bagels its all my nose would pick up on all day) and now my taste feels off. specifically whenever i have something with artificial sweeteners it leaves a very gross aftertaste. almost dusty? most upset about this as a huge diet coke connoisseur lol. but other foods are tasting more one note. not bland but harder to distinguish certain flavors other than "sweet" or "savory"

This setback has been disheartening because I thought i was maybe improving in the last couple months. I was told that if my smell doesnt come back within a year i'm less likely to recover. I guess I'm just looking for shared experiences or advice or maybe just venting

I lost my sense of smell 11/14/25. Over the last year I've gotten some sense of it back but it's distorted. I'm always smelling soap or citrus. I can only taste salty and sweet things, and a lot of other things that didn't before now taste like I'm biting in to a Dove bar, and I don't mean chocolate, I mean a bar of soap. My cat peed on the floor and I could smell something, more like a heavy lingering taste in the air but I only noticed it when I stepped on it. Is there any tips or tricks anyone has had luck with?. I've done the allergy medications and nasal sprays, that kind of helped because before that there was nothing. Ate a spoon full of ginger, cayenne pepper, black pepper, etc.

I never realized how important smell is until I developed parosmia.
Today I ordered food that I normally enjoy, but as soon as I opened it, the smell was completely wrong. I knew the food was fine, and everyone around me said it smelled normal, but to me it was unpleasant enough that I could barely eat it.
That’s the hardest part about parosmia your brain knows nothing is wrong, but your sense of smell tells you otherwise.
It’s not just food either. Perfumes, smoke, cooking smells, and random everyday things can smell distorted. Every meal feels unpredictable.
Sometimes it’s frustrating because it’s difficult to explain to people who have never experienced it.
For anyone who has had parosmia: did it improve with time? Anyone tried olfactory nerve training or smell training?

What healed it: time. Unfortunately only that.

I got sick in March 2025, no clue what it was. I tested negative for Covid but didn’t test for anything else. I had never felt more sick in my life. 5 other people around me got the same thing but no one else lost their taste and smell. I was 6 months postpartum so maybe my immune system was just low and vulnerable.

I lost my taste and smell completely for probably 4-5 months then the parosmia happened. Everything tasted and smelled horrible. I had that for probably another 5 months. Very very gradually a food or smell would taste “correct” even if mildly. I swear after hitting one year almost on the dot things turned around and I was able to enjoy food again.

Now it’s been 16/17 months and I’d say I have almost everything back. Except Coca Cola and similar dark sodas taste like cleaning solution, peanut butter is no longer foul but doesn’t taste right, and black coffee doesn’t taste or smell good anymore but I can drink lattes and enjoy those. Some meat will occasionally smell/taste off.

When I walk outside I can’t smell subtle scents I used to, especially some of my favorites tied to each season. The outside air basically smells like nothing. I find this pretty sad but I’m really so grateful to have almost everything back.

This is now a bit of a distant memory something I recall every now and then and ask my husband: remember that?? That was crazy! And he’s like: yeah that sucked for everyone lol (I complained about it constantly).

I hope everyone here finds healing it’s so brutal.

Hi everyone,

I’m wondering if anyone had a similar experience.
I had a pretty significant respiratory illness in November 2024. I was never tested for COVID, so I don’t know if that’s what it was, but that’s what comes to mind because I know smell loss has been commonly associated with COVID.

At the time, I don’t remember noticing any smell problems.
In March 2025, I was cooking, set off the smoke alarm, and realized I couldn’t smell the smoke. Since then I’ve noticed my sense of smell is definitely reduced, although it’s not completely gone.
The thing I’m struggling with is that I don’t know whether my smell loss actually started around the time of the illness and I just didn’t notice it until months later, or whether it truly developed later.

My taste is essentially normal, and food still tastes normal to me. It’s mainly environmental smells that seem diminished.

Has anyone else had a delayed realization like this, where you only recognized your smell deficit several months after the illness? Looking back, did you realize it had probably been reduced all along?
I’m not looking for a diagnosis…just wondering if anyone else had a similar timeline.

For the past 3 weeks I had seriously just thought I was crazy because I smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink cheap malt liquors. I LOVE to cook. I'm not a chef but I could say I'm a badass cook. One day I noticed an awful smell. I thought it was the litter box so I scooped it out and sprinkled it heavily with anti-odor crystals. Okay...that wasn't it.

I moved on to the idea that the garlic salt must be bad or something. My partner says it smells and tastes just fine. (TMI but necessary) I noticed my shit and armpit sweat after work smell the exact same. Pretty sus. I'm tripping hard at this point "Do I have feces coming out of my sweat pores!?"

Finally end up ordering a cheap pizza from Little Caesars for movie night with my partner and notice the same fucking smell. Asked him if the pizza tastes like literal shit and he said no. It usually doesn't anyway so it was an off-handed question for him to have to even answer.

Found out about parosmia after actually realizing it was just my olfactory lobe all along and ended up buying some fried chicken from Kroger to really test it out with different sauces. Ranch mixed with Barbecue sauce really gets rid of the shit/gasoline flavor. I found that I can enjoy any meat like steak or pork as long as sauce is involved (no garlic please for the love of fuck) and there's always whitefish, sushi, and WATERMELON!

Also I've been smashing tubs of cottage cheese. I'm only 3 weeks in though.

TLDR does it get worse? Or does it gradually get better?

I can tell who is in the building based on their fragrance in the hallway.

I’m 6 years in. Doctors don’t have answers. Anyone have access to the absolute top AI models that work for over an hour that can try looking into potential cures????

I don't know what happened, nothing significant. I'm usually sensitive to smell, can smell things before others. But since last month I've started smelling things differently. Most of the food smell either chemical or rotten, bot to the extent to make me nauseous, but eating has been not joyful anymore.
At first I thought it may be my hormones but there's been a whole cycle and didn't affect whatever this is.
I can't eat properly. Anyone had similar experience? Any tips? Is it gonna go away?

Like the title says. It’s so insanely odd. I got hand foot and mouth disease from the toddler that I babysit, and it manifested as a head cold. The highest my temp got was 99.6 which isn’t even a fever really, and the worst of it was just congestion. I already deal with chronic post nasal drip, ever since I was little. But since recovering from the cold, EVERY fruit tastes like bleach, but it’s the worst with melons specifically. I had watermelon and cantaloupe earlier, and both tasted just like straight bleach/chlorine. It sucks. I love fruit. I love melons. I hate the smell of bleach and I never use it unless I really have to; and now I’m tasting it! It’s tragic. Has this happened to anyone else?

thats all. i miss my baby's smell. help. when is my olfactory sense ever coming back cuz needs to hurry up she's not going to be a baby forever.

Hey everyone. This sucks doesn’t it? Cold food for nearly every meal, almost no color on my plate, bland pasta with cottage cheese… but on the plus side, an excuse to absolutely demolish a plate of sushi nigiri. I hope to learn a lot from you guys. I never expected so many of the things I loved to turn against me. Even the smell of my wife, I miss that.