Why can’t I smell my own perfume? Why you stop noticing your fragrance

You put it on in the morning and notice it as you button your coat. By the time you reach the station it has gone, as far as you can tell. Then someone beside you mentions that you smell nice. If you have ever asked “why can’t I smell my own perfume when other people can?”, the answer is usually not that it has worn off. It is that your nose has quietly stopped reporting it. The effect has a name, olfactory adaptation, and it is one of the most ordinary things the sense of smell does.

Why can’t I smell my own perfume?

Because your sense of smell is built to notice change, not to keep telling you about something that stays the same. A smell that arrives and then stays, like a fragrance on your own skin, soon fades from your attention, even though it has not gone anywhere.

The researcher Pamela Dalton, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, summed up the science in a review in the journal Chemical Senses in 2000. Repeated or prolonged exposure to a smell typically leads to a drop in sensitivity to that particular smell, and the sensitivity comes back with time once the exposure stops. How strong the effect is, and how quickly it comes and goes, depends on how concentrated the smell is and how long you have been in it.

Adaptation is useful. It lets you live in a house, a stable yard or a kitchen without being distracted by it all day, while still letting you notice when something new appears, such as a burning smell from the kitchen.

It starts in the nose

Part of the effect happens at the very first stage, in the nerve cells that detect smell at the top of the nose. A review by Frank Zufall and Trese Leinders-Zufall, in the same issue of Chemical Senses, described, from laboratory studies of receptor cells in animals such as salamanders, at least two rapid forms of adaptation and one more persistent form, each with its own timing and, at least in part, its own chemistry, including the movement of calcium into the cell.

And carries on in the brain

Part of it happens further along, in the brain. Dalton’s review points to studies in which smelling something through one nostril reduced sensitivity in the other nostril as well, though less strongly. That suggests some of the adaptation is taking place after the signals from both sides meet. Other studies found that people’s sense of how strong a smell was dropped a good deal more than the response in the nose itself did.

It is specific

Adaptation is largely specific to the smell you have been exposed to. Very similar smells can be dulled too, but unrelated ones are barely affected. That is why you can stop noticing your fragrance and still smell the coffee at breakfast, the rain on the pavement and the woodsmoke on a November evening perfectly well. Nothing is wrong with your nose. It has simply filed one smell as old news.

Why other people can still smell it

The person who sits down beside you has not been breathing your fragrance for the past hour. To them it is new, so their nose reports it in full. The same is true of you, in reverse: walk into a friend’s house and you notice its smell at once, while they may no longer notice it.

Why a fragrance worn every day seems to fade

Adaptation can also be surprisingly long-lasting. In a 1996 study, Dalton and Charles Wysocki asked a small group of volunteers to live with one of two smells in their homes, continuously, for two weeks. Afterwards, the volunteers were less sensitive to that smell than before, and for most of them the reduced sensitivity was still there up to two weeks after the exposure ended.

That study was about a smell in the home, not a perfume, so it would be wrong to stretch it too far. But it does help to explain a common experience: the fragrance you wear every day can seem fainter to you over weeks and months, even when everyone else can smell it as well as ever.

The coffee-bean habit, answered honestly

Many perfume counters keep a little jar of coffee beans, and invite you to sniff it between fragrances to “reset” your nose. It is a charming ritual. Is there anything in it?

One published test of the idea was a short, exploratory study. In 2011 Alexis Grosofsky, of Beloit College in Wisconsin, and two colleagues asked students to smell three fragrances several times and rate them. The students then sniffed coffee beans, lemon slices or plain air, and were asked to pick out which of four fragrances they had not smelled before. As their published summary puts it, coffee beans did not give better results than lemon slices or air.

One small study with students does not settle the matter for ever, and nobody has shown that the beans do harm. But there is no good evidence that they help either. If you enjoy the smell of coffee, by all means sniff it. Just do not rely on it.

What does help

• Time. Sensitivity comes back when the exposure stops, so the simplest reset is a break. Step outside, or try the next fragrance later.
• Fewer at once. The more fragrances you smell in a row, the harder it tends to become to tell them apart. Two or three at a sitting is plenty.
• A whole day each. A fragrance changes over the hours, and the best way to know one is to wear it, on skin, for a day.

That last point is why our Discovery Set asks you to wear one of the six each day for a week, a single spray at the inside of the wrist, rather than smelling all six at once. It opens with our first pre-orders, at £38, and the cost is credited in full against your first full bottle.

What it means for how you wear fragrance

The practical lesson is a reassuring one. Not being able to smell your fragrance is not, on its own, a sign that it has gone. The people standing near you may well be smelling it perfectly clearly.

So resist the urge to spray again because you have lost track of it. It is the easiest way to go from a fragrance that is noticed to one that is announced. We suggest two sprays as ample: one at the base of the throat and one at the inside of the wrist, and no rubbing of wrists together. For Racing Green, our green chypre, both go at the base of the throat. We made the longer case for restraint in The Case for Wearing Less, and there is more on where to apply it in how to make perfume last longer.

If you would like to know whether your fragrance is still there, ask someone you trust, or notice it on your scarf when you put it on the next morning, after a night away from it. Wool tends to hold a scent well, and your nose will have had time to recover.

And if you are looking for a fragrance you will be glad to wear long enough to stop noticing it, take the Consultation: four quiet questions, and the House will suggest two of our six to begin with.