How to learn to smell your odour

Q&AHow to learn to smell your odour
Bignose asked 2 years ago

Hello. In case this will help anyone - this is how I learned to smell my armpit odour. For years, I couldn\'t smell anything at all when my family and friends would tell me I stunk really bad. Occasionally I got a tangy taste at the back of my tongue (tangy like orange juice) when I was sweating a lot, but still I couldn\'t smell anything. Later I learned that your nose can become \'noseblind\' to frequent smells. This happens because they must useful way the smell sense works is for new/changes in smells because this shows a change in the environment that we might need to know about. For frequent smells or for smells that last longer than about 45 minutes, our brains can \'switch off\' to this smell as it is no longer useful to know about it. So, when I started using antibacterial products in the shower (eg antibacterial soap, panoxyl) I would smell my armpits immediately after using when still in the shower to \'train\' my nose to what a clean armpit smelled like - like almost nothing. This I think helped to reset my nose to my armpit smell. Then, I would check during the day by rubbing my fingers to the armpit and smelling them (this works better for me than just smelling my armpit for some reason). At first it was very subtle, I could just smell \'something\' but even from that I knew I had BO because it was NOT the clean neutral smell in the shower. Slowly slowly I began to smell my BO more sensitively, and now I notice that it has different smells when I use different antiperspirants and my nose detects the smell much better. This is a big helpful because I found it powerful to know when I was smelling bad so I can immediately wash my armpits. Hope this helps someone in their nose training journey :) 

1 Answers
drarmpit Staff answered 11 months ago

Thank you for sharing this with us!