Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm filling in an online assessment form for autism and quite a few of the questions are about smell, i'm not sure my sense of smell is that extreme, but in general is it the idea that autistic people's sense of smell is more or less accute than your average man in the street?
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.
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.
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>
Oh it’s mind blowing how cigarette smoke is illegal but the chemicals in perfumes are not.