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Freshly cut grass, rain after a warm day, new books, your morning coffee. Some of life’s simplest pleasures involve just taking a deep breath.
Even if you’re secretly into the smell of sharpies or nail polish (no judgment!), noses provide a sensation that’s hard to really quantify and describe, that can be so distinct and personal to us. That’s why it’s a little hard to imagine life without it.
But for a growing number of people, a loss or distortion of smell has become an everyday reality.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic came around, an estimated 3% of Americans had no or minimal sense of smell. Not being able to smell anything at all is a condition called anosmia, while a reduced ability to detect odors and smell things is called hyposmia. Anosmia and hyposmia can be caused by a variety of things — from allergies and the flu, to smoking and even head injuries.
With the rise of COVID-19, however, more and more people have found that their sense of smell hasn’t just disappeared. For many experiencing long COVID, or symptoms months after the initial illness has passed, their sense of smell has become drastically distorted.
This is a condition known as parosmia. If you are one of the estimated 20 million people who have it, food, water, and even air might smell like garbage — affecting everything from our sense of taste to our relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
Though the conversations about COVID-19 have largely revolved around life and death (after all, the global death toll is equivalent to wiping out the entire population of countries like Finland, or even states like Oregon and South Carolina), the devastating impact of the disease on those who do survive it is only beginning to come to light.
As this kind of invisible disability becomes more talked about, more and more people are paying attention to what researchers have been saying for quite some time now: Our sense of smell has a profound impact on our day-to-day lives, in ways that we’re still exploring.
How Smell Works
But first, let’s take a trip down the olfactory system, or elementary science class memory lane.
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Our sense of smell exists thanks to the teamwork of our nose and brain, which make sense of tiny, invisible particles floating in the air. When we inhale or sniff, these molecules make their way to the roof of the nostrils, where olfactory neurons, which have a protein called an olfactory receptor, recognize what those molecules mean in a strip of tissue known as the olfactory epithelium.
The exact process is a bit complicated, but imagine that the molecules in the air are like keys, and the olfactory receptors serve as locks. Once the right molecule key finds the right olfactory lock, they bind and send electrical signals to the neurons in the olfactory bulb, which is found in the bottom portion of the brain, and this information is then passed on to other areas of our brain.
This is how we know that what we’re smelling is a freshly sliced orange or a friend’s vanilla shampoo.
How we pick up on smells is different from how we absorb sights or sounds. Our other senses first have to go through the thalamus, or the brain’s communication hub, before being processed. In contrast, smell goes directly to the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory, which can explain why losing it can be a traumatic experience.
Also, a fun fact: Because we have two nostrils, we’re more able to detect small differences in how many and what kind of molecules enter each one. This allows us to follow a smell trail — though not as efficiently as other animals can.
Still, our sense of smell is pretty powerful. With over 400 olfactory receptors in our noses, we can detect around 1 trillion kinds of smells — a number that scientists estimated to be only at 10,000 not too long ago.
But with growing research over the past couple of decades, we’re learning more about our sense of smell, and the invisible ways it shapes us.
Why Smell Matters
In recent months, people have found poor reviews of Yankee Candles — known for their aggressively strong scents — to be indicators of COVID-19 case levels. But even without a pandemic, our sense of smell quietly shapes much of how we experience the world.
For Taste and Flavor
For starters, our sense of smell helps us experience flavor — which is different from taste. When we eat, our mouth tastes the food, and odors from the food travel up to the nose for our olfactory neurons to detect flavor.
Because eating is fundamental to our survival, the sense of smell plays a role in ensuring we eat well. Interestingly, recent research has found that while our sense of smell affects diet, the opposite is also true: What we eat has a subtle effect on what we smell. Scientists posit that we evolved to smell food we just ate differently than other foods we haven’t eaten as a way to ensure a diverse diet.
For Perceiving Others
It’s not just food that our sense of smell shapes our perception of. It’s true for people, too. After all, people have worn some form of fragrance for millennia to mask body odor and seem more attractive. Ancient Egypt’s Cleopatra, for instance, was said to have used a rose-scented perfume to attract her Roman lovers.
But research from the last couple of decades has uncovered how scents — whether our own or our perfumes — affect how we perceive each other. Scents have been found to play a role in attractiveness (one study, for instance, suggested grapefruit as a de-aging scent), level of health, ovulation, certain areas of our personality, and even emotions like fear and anxiety. Findings even suggest that we subconsciously reject incompatible romantic partners by scent.
For Children and Family
You know that irresistible baby smell we can’t get enough of? Research by German, Canadian, and Swedish scientists tells us that it plays a role in increasing attention when smelled by new moms. However, even among non-mothers, that newborn scent activates the brain’s reward system.
Moreover, a 1983 study found that new moms can even identify their babies by smell alone, distinguishing them from two other newborns as soon as six hours after birth. This relationship works the other way around, too.
Lastly, a 2007 study also highlights how we can pretty much tell between family and strangers through scent alone — and a stranger’s body odor activates the parts of our brain that respond to danger.
For Memory
Though most of us tend to rely on our sense of sight to get through our day-to-day lives, our memories are so much more powerfully triggered by the sense of smell. A major reason for this is the architecture of the brain: Electrical signals for smell go right to the brain’s emotional center, which is also in charge of memory.
Studies have also shown that we remember scents much more accurately than we remember visuals, and for much longer. How we remember places, people, and experiences are more closely tied to what we smell. A whiff of perfume, for example, might take you back to the first day of kindergarten, and how your teacher had worn the same one, even if you can’t remember her name or face.
Of course, the same scent can trigger different things for different people, depending on what we’ve come to associate with them. For example, the smell of a specific dish you enjoyed in childhood might mean warmth and positive emotions for you, but reawaken past trauma in others.
Interestingly, our ability to remember scents has led to scientists researching the possibility of nosewitness identification. In a 2016 study, they found that there is a pretty good chance we can identify assailants we couldn’t see — but we could smell — out of a police lineup.
For Safety
Our sense of smell can also help us identify danger in the present. Scientists have described it as “our most rapid warning system,” as our brains are able to flag smells associated with hazards rapidly and unconsciously.
In fact, a large portion of the scents we are able to identify are related to survival. It’s why, for example, we can quickly tell and react to rotten food or strong chemicals. The electrical signals our noses send about these types of potentially harmful stimuli make it to the brain much faster than non-harmful scents.
For Mood and Mental Ability
Smell can also be used to help us feel good.
Of course, there is a wealth of reports on aromatherapy largely conducted or commissioned by fragrance production companies (like this one), so I’d take those with a grain or two of salt. However, there have been some independent studies suggesting that there really is a connection there.
For instance, linalool, the compound found in lavender, mint, thyme, coriander, and basil scents, has been studied for its stress-reducing effects. Moreover, scientists have also found that the smell of rosemary can help with memory and mental arithmetic.
What Smell Means for Us
In 2011, a global survey of 7,000 teenagers found that 53% would rather lose their sense of smell than give up technology. In the decade since, it’s become an oft-cited statistic to frame Millennials in that odd, pearl-clutching way the media tends to.
But with the internet now becoming recognized as a human right, along with the general lack of understanding about our sense of smell, it’s hard to blame teenagers. Laptops and cellphones, after all, are so crucial to everyday life now — and the researchers might’ve just been asking the wrong types of questions. Why would we have to choose between tech and smell?
However, the survey does capture one truth: Our ability to smell is hard to appreciate until it’s gone.
Losing our sense of smell can not only be disorienting, but given all we’ve discussed here, it can also affect safety, memory, diet, and our relationships with others and with ourselves. A 2020 study found that losing one’s sense of smell — a condition that not too many people were concerned about back in those sweet pre-pandemic years — affects just about every part of our lives.
Where the smell of gas or smoke might alert you to danger, where mealtimes bring out a sense of joy and belonging, where people might bond with their baby or know if their diaper needs changing — these people will smell and feel nothing or worse, smell garbage. In the case of new moms, they might feel like failures for something they can’t help. Many talk about not even being able to smell themselves, which causes anxiety and embarrassment.
People with anosmia, hyposmia, or parosmia have also lost that ability to link certain scents to happy memories, many of which can’t be accessed through sight and sound. Where triggers from smells related to these memories flood our brains with feel-good hormones, these people will feel nothing.
Because of all this, people who’ve lost their sense of smell have higher chances of developing depression and anxiety. The loneliness of the condition also means that they often feel isolated from others.
For those who suffered from losing their sense of smell even before the pandemic, our growing awareness of and concern over these conditions represent new hope for further research into a branch of science that has long been overlooked.
“All this attention and research will potentially lead to some better understanding,” explains Dr. Andrew Lane, director of the Johns Hopkins Sinus Center.
Though there are treatments available, such as smell retraining therapy, there are no guarantees that they work. And a couple of years into the pandemic, there hasn’t been enough research on COVID-related anosmia to have any definitive answers.
Meanwhile, for those suffering from COVID-related parosmia, the call is clear: Wear a mask, get vaccinated, and follow health protocols. Though these won’t 100% guarantee that you won’t get sick, it does significantly lessen the chances you’ll develop life-threatening symptoms — and help protect others from a life without smell, too.
After all, there is a world of sensation, of feeling, and of memory to lose.
