Apparently I am very sensitive to smells and can smell stink from miles away (like tar and burning plastic and electrical wires frying and cat pee) when other people can’t smell it at all. But I can also smell garlic bread baking in a house way down the street and the scent of sage wafting up out of the canyon or barbecue sizzling up from the next neighborhood over. So the good smells smell way better to me than they do to other people too. I guess I’m kind of a super-smeller. I also tend to smell water, like the ocean and lakes, when no one else smells it.
I used to work in an office where there were a lot of senior citizen ladies who would come in doused in White Shoulders and Chantilly Lace and Rose scented lotion. It was almost too much for me to take. It was really bad if you happened to find yourself in the ladies room with these gals. There would be clouds of perfume and fart gas mixed together!
I can’t stand the smell of most colognes and perfumes, but women’s scents seem to be much worse because they’re often sickly sweet and cloying. Even some of the scented deoderants are way too strong.
Irish Spring Soap and Old Spice Deoderants are extremely strong to me. But then again, I think I have an exceptionally strong sense of smell. A few of my friends seem to have a chronic case of a stopped up nose and can never smell anything good or bad. Ironically, these are not the folks who shower in perfume.
If I go to the mall, I have to actively avoid going through the perfume sections in the department stores. For me, that’s like a toxic cloud that I fear might explode at any moment.
On the other hand, when I go camping and smell the pine trees blowing in the wind mixed with the scent of bacon frying and coffee boiling, it’s like an orgasm in my nose.