anosmia: 3 posts

Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540? Oh yes, it’s everywhere. You can smell it in elevators, cafés, and occasionally on buses that really shouldn’t be carrying anything so expensive. Except some people swear they smell…nothing. They sniff, they spray, they press their wrist to their nose—and all they get is disappointment. Meanwhile, the rest of us are quietly choking on what feels like a candyfloss thundercloud.

So, what’s going on? Baccarat Rouge 540 leans heavily on ambroxan (amber-woody), Veltol/maltol (cotton candy), and other woody synthetics. These are all potent materials. They’re also molecules that many people simply can’t smell.

It’s called selective anosmia. Up to 20% of the population is “blind” to certain musks, ambers, or woods. If your olfactory receptors don’t recognize ambroxan, you’ll get nothing.

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You have found a perfume that seems perfect – the first few moments post-application are enjoyable but then, over the course of the day, you find the scent has disappeared. You might as well not have worn anything. Fragrance that doesn’t last is one of the most frustrating occurrences for a perfume lover, and I’m often asked to explain why it happens. And that’s what I do in my FT column, The Long and The Short of It: making perfume last.

I explain why some fragrances have a fleeting presence, how to test for it, how to correct for it and give examples of perfumes with different types of presence. You can also read my article, One Perfume, Four Ways to Wear It, with other tips on making perfumes last.

One of the reasons a perfume doesn’t last is because of our physiology. To put it another way, your perfume is still present, but you stop smelling it and hence it seems as if it has disappeared. This phenomenon is called olfactory fatigue, or olfactory adaptation, and it happens when odour receptors are saturated with an aroma to the point that they stop sending a signal to the brain about it. If you wear the same perfume every day, such an olfactory adaptation is likely to happen. Also, some materials are more likely to cause an olfactory fatigue, such as ambers, sandalwood and other heavy, enveloping woods. To continue reading, please click here.

As I was writing the article, I became curious to find out from you if longevity is the most important characteristic in a perfume? If you find a perfume you love but that doesn’t last, will you still buy it?

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

Whenever I read about hackneyed surveys asking, “which sense would you give up,” and see respondents blithely give up their sense of smell as “the least useful”, I get a cold shiver down my spine. Anosmia is the condition of having no sense of smell, usually as a result of trauma, and it has few cures. It leaches color, texture and pleasure out of life, even more than the loss of hearing or sight does.

Anosmia, like many other subjects related to brain and olfaction, is still poorly understood, but what’s without doubt is the suffering it causes. “The biggest shock of my life was tasting chocolate after my accident and discovering that it was the most vile thing ever. Sticky, bitter, pasty,” commented a friend who lost his sense of smell after a motorcycle crash. He also complained that making love was not the same when you couldn’t smell someone’s skin. Everything that brought joy previously now seemed blander, duller, poorer.

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