autistic sense of smell?

lmao :)

it varies across autistic people. But like mentioned some people wearing perfume i can smell at 100 yards, same with non filtered cigarette smokers.

but i grew up in a very clean environment so i dont knpw what effect that had on my development.  Put another way i remember when i moved to a city for first time and the whole place stank of smoke and fumes all the time to me, "how do these people live here ?".

you can also train your smelling,  and tune it into certain smells, so it isnt static either

I didn't say they COULDN'T have all of them, I said they didn't HAVE to have all of them. 

Oh it’s mind blowing how cigarette smoke is illegal but the chemicals in perfumes are not.

I have lost count of the number of times I have had to get off a bus at a random stop, just because someone's perfume was completely unendurable. Do some people bathe in the stuff? There is one variety of perfume that I just cannot stand in any amount, its like an industrial solvent gone wrong. I don't know what it is but I can certainly recognise it>

Untoward said:

For me, perfumes are the smell equivalent of someone shouting

So true!! 

At some point this drove me to dig further. 99% (my estimate) of what’s on the market are made with chemicals. Plain organic tobacco is a completely different burning scent than cigarettes with added chemicals. and ones brain should be able to send signals as to what is toxic to the lungs or other parts of your biology  

It can be worth while engaging your sense of smell to begin to learn to “sniff out” what contains harmful ingredients. 

They actually CAN have all of them! Many do and don’t realise. 

Heightened sensory experience would’ve been a normal human evolutionary trait - these “tools of calculation” are for safety. 

I always thought I had a super-human sense of smell, because I could smell things others couldn't, or smell things before others noticed them. I get bothered by smells all the time.

It was only after realising I might have autism that it made sense. I'm not superhuman I'm just overly sensitive. And certain smells are intolerable for me, especially perfumes and cigarette smoke. I can tell when someone smoked five minutes ago 100 metres away outside, and other people have no idea what I'm talking about. But I hate it.

And when it comes to perfumes, deodorants and body sprays, I have yet to smell one that I like. They are all so overpowering. I can smell them from great distances and for a long time after the person has left, and they make me feel so awful. It's like an assault and just want to get away and breathe clean air. For me, perfumes are the smell equivalent of someone shouting.

Weirdly I have never had an issue with natural smells. Flowers, the smells of nature, cut grass, forests, the sea, even people's armpit smells, I don't mind. It seems to me that artificial scents used in soaps, perfumes, cleaning agents etc are cut with some kind of very strong delivery mechanism that makes them intolerable and inescapable, whereas other smells I only smell if I choose to sniff them. It's the "volume" of the smell that I struggle with.

I've got visions of your dad coming downstairs, reeking of albas oil - and everyone else gagging.

It's just checking sensory issues. Some autistic people have problems with being overly sensitive to certain aromas, causing nausea, headaches etc. Some have an acutely heightened sense of smell so could, for example, tell if a smoker had been in someones house, even if they hadn't actually smoked in there. Not all autistic people will have the same sensory issues. Some will have issues with smell, others won't have any problems at all. All autistic people will have some sort of sensory issue, be that with smell, light, touch, noise, but they don't have to have all of them. 

not really.... i think its individual thing.

my mum for example has absolutely no sense of smell at all. everyones sense of smell varies regardless of on the spectrum or not.

my dad has a supposed strong sense of smell or so he claims and gets nit picky about smelling things... but yet he overly uses albus oil in the morning to the point it ruins breakfast for everyone else as everyone else can taste the albus oil in our food due to how badly that stuff smells but hes alright with putting it all over his face and shirt or wherever he puts it so if he tolerates that stuff he clearly doesnt have as good a sense of smell as he claims he does. so all own to individual and what they think, they may think they have a good sense of smell but thinking is a totally different thing to reality. i guess its subjective, and totally based on individual preference.