Scents
If you are the average American, I can tell you are coming a hundred yards or more before you have any chance of knowing I’m in your path.
I can choose to let you pass without incident. Or I can select to ‘greet’ you.
If you’re me, that is optimal. I would not want to be in your shoes.
But I can teach you how to be in my shoes. In fact, you can learn the skills before you finish reading this 2-part post. The only thing I ask in return is that you buy some food, either at the grocery store or on from a link on this website, and get some storable water, and put both away in case of an emergency. Could be as little as one can of beans and a six-pack of soda. Anything. Then you will have made this blog worthwhile for both of us. Of course more is better.
Okay. The Secret.
I can smell you. And you can’t smell me. Even if it occurs to you to make use of that sense.
Most of the time it’s pretty easy to know you’re coming. Aftershave. Cologne. Perfume. Those are the obvious ones.
Not so obvious are underarm deodorant. Toothpaste. Mouthwash. Lipstick and other cosmetics.
Breath mints create scent, perhaps covering mouth odor and perhaps more pleasant, but replacing it with a big smell of it’s own. Of course smoking gives you a scent that is perceivable long before you appear.
And I smell not only you. I smell your clothes. Almost all laundry detergent has substantial amounts of perfume, and those dryer sheets… oh my… using those can increase your scentability by a few hundred more yards. Those things are incredible!
One more category: cultural food scents. These are usually more subtle. Non-asians tend to smell like the milk they drink. Some other peoples have garlic odor. These can be very pleasant or unnoticed within that cultural group, but outside that group, whoo-eee! I remember being in Paris many years ago, and a man walking past me on the street on the right bank of the Seine. He literally stopped me in my tracks for a moment. He had been eating food with lots of garlic, and had obviously just smoked on of those peculiarly strong French Gauloise cigarettes. I can still recall the depth of that experience. And I like garlic, and at that time I smoked like most people of that era.
There are other sources of scent, but you get it. We put lots and lots and lots of scents on our bodies daily, and we rarely consider how a person who is unused to those scents might perceive us.
Next time: how to deal with scents successfully.
