Rupture of Senses

“In a room full of business people, one would get information about which individuals were important, which were confident, which were sexually receptive, which in conflict, all through smell. The difference is that we don’t have a trigger response. We’re aware of smell, but we don’t automatically react in certain ways because of it, as most animals would.”

–Apparently something that words alone could not exactly describe, smell envelopes us in a way that it appears to be a sort of aura that we produce around us. In a room where people of different personalities, status, and position are thrown together, the difference in smell could be used to identify who is who.

A rich person might smell of a very delicate and expensive fragrance whereas a commoner would have the natural bodily scent, unaltered by colognes or perfumes.

“When a man gets involved with a woman for any length of time, his facial hair starts to grow faster than it did before. Women who are cloistered away from men (in a boarding school, say), enter puberty later than women who are around men.

Mothers recognize the odor of their newborn children, and vice versa, so some doctors are experimenting with giving children bursts of their mothers’ odor, along with the anesthetic, during operations. Babies can smell their mother entering a room, even if they can’t see her.” (29)

–Smell is always accompanied by much stronger pheromones that all members of the animal kingdom have. These pheromones are not only valuable for marking territories and leaving traces for other animals to find but it is also quite significant for humans. While human pheromones are not yet exactly identified, subconsciously, people can guess at the origin of a certain scent.

This is particularly obvious when it concerns mother and child. It may be attributed to the fact that they spent nine months attached to each other that they have established such a strong bond. But smell is something that pretty resembles a fingerprint. And this certain “print” is what attract babies to their mothers and vice versa.

Men, on the other hand, naturally find a female at certain points of their life. Having a woman or being involved with a woman perhaps increases or intensifies the effects of pheromones that it increases the production of hormones, in effect having the facial hairs grow more rapidly than usual.