Scent of a human

People say humans have a poor sense of smell. i say people have a poor sense of when to smell. To catch the scent of a human, the timing to which you inhale is the crux.

i have found, that to effectively capture the scent of a passing human, short of pressing your nose to their neck, or sinking it into their armpits, is to inhale half a second after they have brushed past you. As you would have realised, we do not have the luxury of obtaining permission to press or sink the nose into any stranger like a dog would, this half-a-second-later whiff is a good method of collecting additional personal information.

The passing wake behind a person carries with it the richest odourous information, very much due to the fluid dynamics of air and all volatile chemicals. The draft created by a person's motion causes disturbances in airflow, which are formed as eddy currents. These eddy currents picks up volatile cues off a person's body, concentrate it by swirling motions and traps it in the region just behind a person's body. That waft of air contains the mixture of the chemical signature of the person, nicely blended with the chemical dressing of his/her choice, be it deodorant, perfume, cologne, sweat, dirt, oil, etc.

Try this method out the next time you step out of the house. On the bus, sit on the aisle seat so you can catch the wafting scents of every passenger passing you. On the walkway, every pedestrian walking past you. At the park, every jogger or stroller. i can assure you that you will develop a new diversity of smell associated with people! Then the next trick is the discerning anticipation, followed by holding your breath for the 2 second after a selected person has brushed past you. This will apply most often to acrid sour smelling students, chain-smoked old-men, and other foul-smelling candidates (mostly guys).

Sometimes the half-a-second rule need not apply. This is in the presence of people (usually middle-age tai-tais) who generously pour on perfumes like trying to douse a fire, of which their hairstyle resembles, or had aspiring dreams once of becoming a fire-extinguisher-toting fire-fighter. In these cases the concentration of chemical molecules are so dense that by sheer Brownian motion and convectional current, the pungency hits you way before you realise the need to hold the breath.

So yes, it is a difficult skill to master, but once you attain it, the added dimension of smell into your world, especially when checking the opposite sex out, makes it all the more exciting to the senses.