I Have No Sense of Smell

When it comes to scent, I’m basically blind. I can tell broad strokes – petrol from wine, for example (you don’t really tend to get those two confused more than once), or mint from chocolate. Not a problem. But ask me to identify a particular fruit by smell alone and you’ll just get a shrug. I can tell when something smells fruity, but that’s where my ability to distinguish scent hits its limit.

Despite this near-anosmia, I really enjoy the various scents of the people I’m intimate with.

Perhaps it’s because my sense of smell is otherwise so weak that a lover’s scent can have such a significant effect on me. To properly smell someone I need to basically have my nose against their skin. I need to be touching them, inhaling them, drinking in tiny molecules of their body, their breath, their sweat.

For me, that’s not something I do with most people I meet on a day to day basis. Smelling someone is an involved, ludicrously intimate activity. And it’s a rewarding one. Because, while people might sometimes look alike or sound alike, no two people I have ever slept with have had the same scent.

One lover in particular comes to mind. The smell of her hair the first time we slept together was dizzyingly strong. During our subsequent relationship I came to know that this was something that happened whenever her hair was wet – perhaps a product of the dye or conditioner she used. Whatever it was, it would be most distinct when she had recently stepped from a shower, just as she had when we first fucked. Even the memory of that scent evokes the feeling of her wet hair against my skin.

Another lover had a particular scent that was stronger after we’d fucked. I always thought it was perfume, but when I asked she said she didn’t wear any. This struck me. The scent was so complex, so rich and layered, with elements that were flowery and elements that were bitter and elements that were unidentifiable entirely to me. That something so layered could be an incidental product of her body felt vaguely incredible.

There was another who would sweat profusely whenever we fucked, to the point that our skin was left slippery with it after we were done. Her smell lingered on me after we fucked. You would think that the smell of sweat would be unpleasant, but when it’s fresh (and when your brain is addled by the chemicals that accompany a very good fuck) it is anything but. It is a musk rather than the stale, ripe odour that haunts changing rooms. It is wonderful.

I do sometimes ask lovers if I have a detectable scent of any kind. Something that is uniquely mine. In response I’ve often been told that I have a slight scent of olive oil. Not unpleasant, everyone hastens to add, whenever they tell me this.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? We all too often only think of smells as being offensive, overpowering, undesirable. But I’ll take someone’s scent – their breath, their hair after a shower, their sweat after we fuck, their skin in the morning. I’ll breathe it in. I’ll be grateful for it, for being able to know that landscape of them.