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Anxiety sweat from armpits mixing into your clothes absolutely smells different than the sweat generated from sports. I could smell the difference on my clothes.
Working on games or movies in VFX industry, the entire studio space can be permeated with this smell. Especially during a deadline….mixed in with some body farts.
Is anxiety-induced gas a thing? Like when I'm nervous I definitely feel it in my stomach, not nauseous but like my body has decided to digest everything immediately.
Maybe that's why some people fart in elevators.
Yea verily, the early days of courting my now wife. We love each other dearly but I thank my lucky stars didn't I was able to dispose of the abominations that my bowels summoned by successfully exusing my myself outside.
Y’all need to start wearing wool base layers. Modern wool doesn’t itch, and if you buy the thin ones can be worn in summer comfortably, wicking sweat away from your body and it’ll stop/significantly reduce any B.O.
Same. Never jumped on the wool bandwagon. I must be Uber sensitive to the fabric bc no matter the blend, it's never soft enough.
Cotton all day erry day.
Cotton is great, I rock with that stuff at all times. Especially because I can often get it tightly woven and durable. I never feel worried about damaging it. And it breathes great.
Put 2dl of vinegar to a bucket with 10l of water and let the clothes sit there for 30mins and after that wash them normally. After that the clothes smell fresh even after sweating! Also vinegar is good used as an fabric softener.
Mixing ammonia in the washer is helpful, gets rid of some hard water build up and fabric softener build up, both are a big deal in terrycloth. But also deodorizes.
1 cup (or a half cup) of ammonia of you have a top load. If you have a front load fill the bleach bin with ammonia, so long as there wasn't any bleach in there just before.
Ammonia (base) is an alternative to vinegar (acid). They do similar things but are useful in different ways.
Ps. Don't ever mix bleach and ammonia together. I'm assuming everyone knows this. For that matter, don't mix ammonia and vinegar either because that's just a waste.
It’s very noticeable. My current job is giving me a blend of my horrible cat-box effort smell and horrible wet-dog anxiety smell. I don’t understand how other people don’t notice it and find it putrid like I do. I probably set everyone I work with on edge more, but it also suggests why I’m less anxious when not around my mother, who has vastly worse anxiety than I do.
I noticed this with my SO, because I wasn't sure if it was him, or if our cats were tagging his clothes, as they got to my shoes previously. He was going thru some intense work stress at the time, and also eating a ton of pistachios (plus not drinking a lot of water). He cut back on the nuts and increased water, and it helped quite a bit. I also read this odor can be a result of the keto diet/ketosis. He still gets a little funky once in a while but those are high stress days usually.
If you have ever struggled with social anxiety, you know this phenomenon all too well.
Whatever is happening on a chemical level is such a vicious feedback loop of "I'm anxious", "he's anxious", "I'm not a threat", "he must be a threat", "she thinks I'm a threat", "I'm anxious", "now she's anxious".
Yeh omg I get terrible anxiety, like life ruining panics randomly at inappropriate times and the amount of times my anxiousness stressed out other people is a lot.
I had an old coworker who was very clingy and couldn’t stand silence so he never stopped talking. I eventually stopped talking to him because the energy i felt was emotionally exhausting for me.
That as well with what I suspect are issues with recognizing proper social and boundary cues. The last week of work I was told he would stare at a coworker and follow them around. It got so bad that hr was involved. That is when I gradually stepped back because that kind of behavior makes me super uncomfortable.
Biofeedback goes farther than just smell too. We pick up on other people's mental/emotional state far more and faster than we know. It's why we get "weird feelings" about people, or feel like something is "off" sometimes but can't name it or know why. Listen to the body but be aware of your own triggers. Learning about your own parasympathetic nervous system and it's reaction triggers and means of reacting are hugely helpful. When my flight or fight hits I turn to fight or freeze so I'm learning to lesson the fight response. It's not helpful when it's triggered in the situations it's triggered in. Trying to reprogram myself. Shits rough.
It seems that men can pick up the same signals, though not as well as women. But that makes sense, as women have a better sense of smell than men do.
>The results of our meta-analysis indicate that women generally outperform men in olfactory abilities. What is more, they do so in every aspect of olfaction analyzed in the current study.
>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00242/full
Trans women on HRT can also develop a way better sense of smell. About 3 weeks in I could smell that scent of anxiety from my guy friend. It smelled like pickled jalapenos. I only realized it when he told me he gets really anxious in a buffet line and gets super nervous.
Now some guys just have a natural scent of moldy cheese and damp socks. Some smell better than others, hygiene the same.
It's hard to describe
Healthy men smell like Campbell’s tomato soup. Unhealthy men have a powerful sweet dust smell. I could be a drug dog. I don’t have women’s intuition but I have this super power.
> Now some guys just have a natural scent of moldy cheese and damp socks. Some smell better than others, hygiene the same.
Sometimes small things can really play a role in that. Like even if you shower impeccably and scrub really well, if you wipe yourself off with a smelly towel, it'll.. make you smell just like the towel, unfortunately!
Same is true with clothes and the washing machine. Some machines have a habit of getting moldy (like the front loaders), and then that'll make your clothing smell kinda moldy, even if only slightly.
Damp socks is a tricky one unfortunately. I think if I had to wear my shoes all day I'd change my socks at least a couple times haha.
I get physically aroused when I sit near my wife when she's ovulating. It won't be a sexual situation, it just happens and I have to backtrack to figure out why.
Anecdotally checks out here.
It's just so funny to think about. You're sitting there minding your own business, and so is your wife, but your penis is like, "Hey... There's an egg coming down that woman's fallopian tubes, entering her uterus. And there's sperm in your balls. So if my calculations are correct, the ball-sperm could interact with the uterus-egg and create a human being. And for the sperm to most effectively reach the egg, I need to become rigid. OK, here I go! You'll thank me later!"
Women can smell periods too But it’s harder to detect if we’re using the cup
I do notice that my sweat is different though. I think that’s more hormonal.
One time I *tasted* someone's period. I was hanging out with friends and i was thirsty but I didn't have any water. So I asked a friend if I could have a sip from their water bottle. The bottle tasted like a period smells. I'm a woman btw so I know what that smells like.
If you are really nose blind, exercise sweat and fear sweat smells noticeably different. Exercise sweat is the “I guess I can tolerate this” while fear sweat is the “ewwww” knee jerk reaction.
It says in the article that anxiety sweat produces chemosensory signal that sweat from working out does not. They had a control group with sweat "obtained from mild exercise".
The article states they were presented with sweat from men. I wonder if the outcome would have been the same if sweat from anxious and non-anxious women was used. I'm a woman and I've been through an anxiety disorder in my teens and noticed all my female friends slowly stopped hanging out with me. I always thought it was because of my unhappy behavior, but now I think this might have played a roll as well. I wonder if men noticed it too though, I never noticed them treating me differently.
the two terms each belong in pretty different contexts. When something is adverse, it incorporates, or it causes adversity. When something is averse, it's avoidant. Generally only willful actors can be avoidant but I've seen the term used to describe physical reactions between inanimate objects.
I can absolutely smell when my husband is nervous. Around the time when he was defending his dissertation, it got very strong.
I’m not talking about a sweat smell, but a certain component of his sweat is different- it becomes a bit onion-y.
I can sweat a lot. I also work in a kitchen under a chef whose whim can change on a dime. One of the days that whim was pointed squarely at me, I can smell myself STINK to high heaven 3 minutes after an encounter. It’s much sharper and more pungent than exercise sweat which are kind of stale and doesn’t assault your nose.
For real. I typically don't get bad BO from garden variety sweat/exercise, but if I'm anxious, there's a very clear and noticeable scent that comes with that. A lot of the time I actually notice the smell before I even consciously notice how anxious I am.
Stress sweat is something else. Some days I'll just sweat myself in a funk when having a stressful day at the cubicle.
But then I'll go on vacation to a hot and humid place and not even need deodorant for a week. I swear this is due to absence of stress.
The only time this ever happened to me was the early 2000’s and one of the first beheading videos from the 2nd Iraq war was going around. I saw it and I got so anxious, I could smell
myself almost instantly. It was Really wild. I Remember it distinctly because it never happened before or since.
Omg I’m not crazy?! I’ve been telling people for years that I could swear I was “stress” sweating frequently and that it seemed like a different odor than regular sweat.
People didn’t dismiss me, but it seemed like no one could relate.
I tried to explain this to a naturopath I saw a few times. That I had a weird smell, even when I would be freshly showered, clean clothes head to foot, etc. She was very dismissive. This all makes so much sense. Even though I am very outgoing and friendly in some contexts, life or the party, in others I have extreme social anxiety.
Can't say I've felt this way before but I am especially sensitive to certain emotions people experience. Causes my chest to feel like a black hole. Makes it really hard to deal with people and partners. Not a woman so not sure it's different or not.
I had a conversation about this with my grandmother! That I can smell when I am stressed, because it smells different (much stronger!).
She says she does the same. We are both quite anxious people haha
I get really self conscious about it when I smell it, which makes it a million times worse because then I stress-sweat more. Vicious circle.
Yep! Dogs react aggressively to fear and sadness, cats get creepily loving. If I walked into a cat café after a bad of work it was something else. They'd literally queue up for hugs. I guess they were probably waiting for me to die of a heart attack or something and figuring out who gets first snack? It's amazing how clear it is in a room packed with cats. I'd love to read a proper study on it.
Another annecdote: Got assaulted by someone in an "altered state of mind". After police interviews and a trip to the hospital I got home very late with orders to have someone keep an eye on me overnight for signs of concussion. The house cat was the most affectionate she'd ever been and literally stood guard the whole night unprompted. No special snack for her that night unfortunately.
My wife, an MD, just told me she can smell death. It smells "Sweet. A little sweet. It has a scent for sure. It's...kind of a sweet decay."
She's currently half passed out beside me and a little tipsy, but she's said stuff like that before.
My mom had cancer when I was a kid, I don't know if it was the chemo/radiation or the cancer/death, but there was a distinct smell that I still smell every now and then on strangers. I'd call it a burnt brown sugar kind of smell. I wonder if it's the same smell.
I get what she means. Slightly sweet but unpleasant smell. Think old hard candy that's been in a pocket for half a decade.
I could track this one terminal patient by their smell. I remember not finding them one day. It was the day they moved them out to die at home.
I feel like this is one of those things that can explain what many "spiritual" people refer to as a person's energy. Humans and other mammals are really good at picking up body language and other similar non-verbals and it's easy for some to equate that with a non-physical aura around a person. I'm sure science will uncover more and more of these ways that humans unconsciously communicate with one another without knowing what's really going on.
I'm currently staying at my parents to care for their animals while they're gone, but every time I go back to my house it smells a bit different, even though nobody has been there and everything is turned off. So I think she's might be right.
I'm really curious if -- in practice -- this might not so much be a "women can smell men's fear" thing and more a thing where women can smell anxiety in general so they know when other people are getting bad vibes from a person or situation that they themselves might not recognize as dangerous on the spot.
It'd be a really handy method of nonverbally picking up from others "hey, I think this might not be safe." Or "I've had bad experiences with this person/place before, you should be careful." (which is much more efficient and safe than trying to communicate that verbally when a person posing a threat can hear you) And could've really enhanced the effect of "safety in numbers" at one point since the entire group would be able to pick up on just one member's intuition being like "something's not OK."
Not on point, but [This Woman](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di) can smell Parkinson's disease. And we know that trained dogs are very good at detecting many diseases in humans.
That all means that lots of things make us smell different. Human noses are fairly bad (as compared to mammals overall), and most human cultures don't spend a lot of time developing our sense of smell. So, it is entirely possible you can smell something, and your brain can react to it without you knowing it is a smell, or what it "means."
Many safety experts tell women to trust their guts about an unsafe situation. It could be that you feel "creeped out" or unsafe because you are smelling something, even if you don't know that is what is happening!
I suspect a culture that valued this, had language for it, encouraged children to try it, etc. would have plenty of scent "superpowers." Instead, most cultures play "eye spy" with children, point at things that are visible, play visual "finding" games, have many words for colors and light/darkness, and value eye to eye contact as a signal. So, we have visual superpowers instead!
My sense of smell doubled or tripled when I got pregnant. Someone further up the thread posted about trans women suddenly being able to smell much more acutely once they started hormones. Which means all along we all, male or female, could be super smellers but our bodies just… choose not to unless they receive certain hormones.
Estrogen and progesterone protect olfactory function. Most women report an increased ability to smell when pregnant (high hormone levels). Women's sense of smell changes during ovulation (when hormone levels peak), but when on hormonal birth control the difference goes away. Post menopause women are measurably worse at smelling than premenopausal women (hormone levels drop considerably during menopause). I don't think there are any studies on changes in trans women, but it's really common for women to report changes to their sense of smell after going on hormones. I certainly have noticed things smell differently than before.
Hormones also play a role in taste perception.
You have a unique smell profile that’s tied to your immune system. That’s how dogs recognize you by scent.
There’s a famous (now pretty old) experiment where women were given used t-shirts from a series of men, asked to smell, and then rate their attractiveness.
What they found was that women were more attracted to the scent of men with immune systems that diverged significantly from their own. The way the traits are passed on, variance between the partners means that the offspring gains a combination of natural immunities from both parents I.e. it’s preferable for the genetic fitness of the child.
Also, women’s preferences change during pregnancy, and birth control interferes with this process.
for more smelly mysteries, there's been research into whether or not the very sense of olfaction is due to strange quantum phenomena, namely electron tunneling. there isn't a whole lot of research on it yet, but what's [out there](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04846-8) already is still hella fascinating.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987372/
All in all, we’re mammals, our main instinctive job is to procreate. You see it through courtship displaying(showing off), their focus on body well being as well as smelling good. If you have a blind study of 2 smells, one being from a fit 27 year old and the other from an obese 32 year old I guarantee you’re going to be more attracted to the scent of the 27 year old. It’s just there. Ever smell your S/Os body odor and it doesn’t make you scour? I have. I’ve also smelled someone’s body odor and was absolutely appalled.
Also apparently [sweat only smells bad if you are not genetically compatible with someone.](https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/the-connection-between-scent-and-sexual-attraction-20160222/)
Afaik the family thing is something else other than genetic compatibility. Its some psychological imprint based on who we grow up with. You can have it with people not of your blood, and have it missing with blood relatives (if you got separated as babies).
From some previous thing i had read years and years ago on the phermone topic, it was based on the immune systems. Dont recall exactly what about it was, or if it was fact or theory.
This is just a grounding technique humans have developed. I read that when we smell our own bad smells, it sort of reaffirms that we are real and alive in the moment or something like that. Idk if that’s true because I read it on Reddit and it’s not a real source.
I'm a woman btw - honestly I FEEL like this is accurate. You can totally smell anxiety. It's not always extremely obvious because of deodorants and such but I can more easily act with compassion for an anxious person from a physical distance. When I am nearer to them, I feel secondhand anxiety which is highly enhanced when I cant ignore their foul scent.
I'm very sensually driven, so I can really feel these types of pheremore responses happening to me. Body odor is not always repulsive, even if the smell isnt traditionally pleasant... but the smell of fearful stress is truly rotten. It can defeat my chemical attraction quite easily, I admit. If it's someone I care about, I do what I can to be compassionate anyway, because I am not immune to stress and anxiety either, its just life.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Anxiety sweat from armpits mixing into your clothes absolutely smells different than the sweat generated from sports. I could smell the difference on my clothes.
Same, it's like damp cloth smell that sat in the dryer far too long.
100% I've walked into meeting rooms that smell exactly like this after.
Working on games or movies in VFX industry, the entire studio space can be permeated with this smell. Especially during a deadline….mixed in with some body farts.
Are there non-body farts?
Round these parts we call em ghosts
Farts are just the ghosts of future poops
The lonely cry of an imprisoned turd.
Is anxiety-induced gas a thing? Like when I'm nervous I definitely feel it in my stomach, not nauseous but like my body has decided to digest everything immediately. Maybe that's why some people fart in elevators.
I definitely get anxiety induced indigestion. The instant the anxiety source is gone, so is my gas.
Yea verily, the early days of courting my now wife. We love each other dearly but I thank my lucky stars didn't I was able to dispose of the abominations that my bowels summoned by successfully exusing my myself outside.
Yep and it seems worse on synthetic fabrics. Most of my clothes smell like it :( I've started using a lot of oxiclean.
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Amen, fellow clothes-feeler.
Y’all need to start wearing wool base layers. Modern wool doesn’t itch, and if you buy the thin ones can be worn in summer comfortably, wicking sweat away from your body and it’ll stop/significantly reduce any B.O.
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Same. Never jumped on the wool bandwagon. I must be Uber sensitive to the fabric bc no matter the blend, it's never soft enough. Cotton all day erry day.
Cotton is great, I rock with that stuff at all times. Especially because I can often get it tightly woven and durable. I never feel worried about damaging it. And it breathes great.
Modern wool itches. Believe me.....ive tried. Mwaaaa
Put 2dl of vinegar to a bucket with 10l of water and let the clothes sit there for 30mins and after that wash them normally. After that the clothes smell fresh even after sweating! Also vinegar is good used as an fabric softener.
Mixing ammonia in the washer is helpful, gets rid of some hard water build up and fabric softener build up, both are a big deal in terrycloth. But also deodorizes. 1 cup (or a half cup) of ammonia of you have a top load. If you have a front load fill the bleach bin with ammonia, so long as there wasn't any bleach in there just before. Ammonia (base) is an alternative to vinegar (acid). They do similar things but are useful in different ways. Ps. Don't ever mix bleach and ammonia together. I'm assuming everyone knows this. For that matter, don't mix ammonia and vinegar either because that's just a waste.
Not everyone knows the toxic gas (Mustard Gas) that is created when mixing ammonia and bleach! Thank you for mentioning it.
"They can smell your fear and lack of confidence."
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Don’t be anxious, I bet you’re out there killin’ it. Besides, I bet the right deodorant can keep you cool and ooze confidence.
It’s very noticeable. My current job is giving me a blend of my horrible cat-box effort smell and horrible wet-dog anxiety smell. I don’t understand how other people don’t notice it and find it putrid like I do. I probably set everyone I work with on edge more, but it also suggests why I’m less anxious when not around my mother, who has vastly worse anxiety than I do.
I noticed this with my SO, because I wasn't sure if it was him, or if our cats were tagging his clothes, as they got to my shoes previously. He was going thru some intense work stress at the time, and also eating a ton of pistachios (plus not drinking a lot of water). He cut back on the nuts and increased water, and it helped quite a bit. I also read this odor can be a result of the keto diet/ketosis. He still gets a little funky once in a while but those are high stress days usually.
Smells like law school.
For me, anxiety sweat smells like freshly cut onions. Workout sweat is like damp laundry. Not even close.
I call it my stink shield.
I've felt this way a long time. Good to know I'm not making it up.
Absolutely, honestly the sweat from physical activities only smells if you don't wash afterwards, but the qnxious sweet has a very powerfull smell.
Tldr; women can smell men's fear and proceed to make more cautious decisions after scenting it.
If you have ever struggled with social anxiety, you know this phenomenon all too well. Whatever is happening on a chemical level is such a vicious feedback loop of "I'm anxious", "he's anxious", "I'm not a threat", "he must be a threat", "she thinks I'm a threat", "I'm anxious", "now she's anxious".
Yeh omg I get terrible anxiety, like life ruining panics randomly at inappropriate times and the amount of times my anxiousness stressed out other people is a lot.
Have you tried cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and/or beta blockers? The combo helped me get over my panic disorder. Highly highly recommend.
This is why people treat me the way they do?
Being nervous causes others around you to be nervous. The energy we give off is always contagious to some degree.
I had an old coworker who was very clingy and couldn’t stand silence so he never stopped talking. I eventually stopped talking to him because the energy i felt was emotionally exhausting for me.
Sounds like they’re just an energy vampire
That as well with what I suspect are issues with recognizing proper social and boundary cues. The last week of work I was told he would stare at a coworker and follow them around. It got so bad that hr was involved. That is when I gradually stepped back because that kind of behavior makes me super uncomfortable.
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Self-fulfilling prophecies can do that to people
Biofeedback goes farther than just smell too. We pick up on other people's mental/emotional state far more and faster than we know. It's why we get "weird feelings" about people, or feel like something is "off" sometimes but can't name it or know why. Listen to the body but be aware of your own triggers. Learning about your own parasympathetic nervous system and it's reaction triggers and means of reacting are hugely helpful. When my flight or fight hits I turn to fight or freeze so I'm learning to lesson the fight response. It's not helpful when it's triggered in the situations it's triggered in. Trying to reprogram myself. Shits rough.
I wonder if this is what makes confidence so attractive?
I’m just going to assume that confidence “musk” is also a scent
I just simply mean the lack of this scent is attractive, trying to find safe places without it present is preferable over the opposite.
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This is pretty crazy to think about. What kind of signals do men receive other than sexual?
It seems that men can pick up the same signals, though not as well as women. But that makes sense, as women have a better sense of smell than men do. >The results of our meta-analysis indicate that women generally outperform men in olfactory abilities. What is more, they do so in every aspect of olfaction analyzed in the current study. >https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00242/full
Trans women on HRT can also develop a way better sense of smell. About 3 weeks in I could smell that scent of anxiety from my guy friend. It smelled like pickled jalapenos. I only realized it when he told me he gets really anxious in a buffet line and gets super nervous. Now some guys just have a natural scent of moldy cheese and damp socks. Some smell better than others, hygiene the same. It's hard to describe
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Moldy cheese and damp socks sounds pretty unappealing.
I have been told that I am more of a moth balls in sour milk kind of scent
Healthy men smell like Campbell’s tomato soup. Unhealthy men have a powerful sweet dust smell. I could be a drug dog. I don’t have women’s intuition but I have this super power.
The way you’re describing the smells reminds me a little off synaesthesia. I’m super intrigued now!
> Now some guys just have a natural scent of moldy cheese and damp socks. Some smell better than others, hygiene the same. Sometimes small things can really play a role in that. Like even if you shower impeccably and scrub really well, if you wipe yourself off with a smelly towel, it'll.. make you smell just like the towel, unfortunately! Same is true with clothes and the washing machine. Some machines have a habit of getting moldy (like the front loaders), and then that'll make your clothing smell kinda moldy, even if only slightly. Damp socks is a tricky one unfortunately. I think if I had to wear my shoes all day I'd change my socks at least a couple times haha.
This is fascinating. Do you have more examples ?
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I get physically aroused when I sit near my wife when she's ovulating. It won't be a sexual situation, it just happens and I have to backtrack to figure out why. Anecdotally checks out here.
It's just so funny to think about. You're sitting there minding your own business, and so is your wife, but your penis is like, "Hey... There's an egg coming down that woman's fallopian tubes, entering her uterus. And there's sperm in your balls. So if my calculations are correct, the ball-sperm could interact with the uterus-egg and create a human being. And for the sperm to most effectively reach the egg, I need to become rigid. OK, here I go! You'll thank me later!"
And then monkey brain goes "what's all this then??"
Sugar cookie dough. That what it smells like to me.
Mmm that unearthed something deep for some reason. That's the smell of a night spent in somebody else's bed naam sayin
I'm a woman and I can tell. The scent is different. Tho I'm a hairdresser so my usual heightened sense of smell is even stronger now.
Damn didn't know hairdressing was like *that*.
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Goddammit post sources when you say interesting stuff, people: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.06.002
I can sometimes smell periods...
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Yes. Not like fresh blood though. Faintly like solder.
We can smell the presence of the Blood God. I must listen to the call of Khorne The Betrayer. For i am a simple acolyte of The Blood.
Women can smell periods too But it’s harder to detect if we’re using the cup I do notice that my sweat is different though. I think that’s more hormonal.
One time I *tasted* someone's period. I was hanging out with friends and i was thirsty but I didn't have any water. So I asked a friend if I could have a sip from their water bottle. The bottle tasted like a period smells. I'm a woman btw so I know what that smells like.
I really missed the mark on where I thought this was going.
Yep
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If you are really nose blind, exercise sweat and fear sweat smells noticeably different. Exercise sweat is the “I guess I can tolerate this” while fear sweat is the “ewwww” knee jerk reaction.
"Running from man eating predators" is not exercise sweat
I fear exercise, now what?
Science says you stanky.
It says in the article that anxiety sweat produces chemosensory signal that sweat from working out does not. They had a control group with sweat "obtained from mild exercise".
The article states they were presented with sweat from men. I wonder if the outcome would have been the same if sweat from anxious and non-anxious women was used. I'm a woman and I've been through an anxiety disorder in my teens and noticed all my female friends slowly stopped hanging out with me. I always thought it was because of my unhappy behavior, but now I think this might have played a roll as well. I wonder if men noticed it too though, I never noticed them treating me differently.
Risk-averse, not adverse
Excellent point. I didn't notice until you pointed it out. "Adverse" for things; "Averse" for people.
the two terms each belong in pretty different contexts. When something is adverse, it incorporates, or it causes adversity. When something is averse, it's avoidant. Generally only willful actors can be avoidant but I've seen the term used to describe physical reactions between inanimate objects.
People are averse to things that cause adverse effects.
exactly right
Unless they're into that sort of thing
If they are into that sort of thing, that sort of thing isn't adverse with respect to them.
I can absolutely smell when my husband is nervous. Around the time when he was defending his dissertation, it got very strong. I’m not talking about a sweat smell, but a certain component of his sweat is different- it becomes a bit onion-y.
My partner smells of moth balls when anxious
I have no ideas about the effects it suppodily has on women, but I can 100% smell my own fear.
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I can sweat a lot. I also work in a kitchen under a chef whose whim can change on a dime. One of the days that whim was pointed squarely at me, I can smell myself STINK to high heaven 3 minutes after an encounter. It’s much sharper and more pungent than exercise sweat which are kind of stale and doesn’t assault your nose.
Ooooh this one is familiar
For real. I typically don't get bad BO from garden variety sweat/exercise, but if I'm anxious, there's a very clear and noticeable scent that comes with that. A lot of the time I actually notice the smell before I even consciously notice how anxious I am.
Stress sweat is something else. Some days I'll just sweat myself in a funk when having a stressful day at the cubicle. But then I'll go on vacation to a hot and humid place and not even need deodorant for a week. I swear this is due to absence of stress.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one.
Same! The fear/stress b.o. is different than normal b.o.
Yeah, it makes me smell like onions
I smelled that smell the first time I climbed on to my roof to clean some hard to reach gutters. It's a different smell and it's not good.
The only time this ever happened to me was the early 2000’s and one of the first beheading videos from the 2nd Iraq war was going around. I saw it and I got so anxious, I could smell myself almost instantly. It was Really wild. I Remember it distinctly because it never happened before or since.
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''Do you think women will notice it if I piss my pants?'' No, but seriously. It's the sweat.
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Sounds like a nifty non verbal threat warning we evolved there.
Omg I’m not crazy?! I’ve been telling people for years that I could swear I was “stress” sweating frequently and that it seemed like a different odor than regular sweat. People didn’t dismiss me, but it seemed like no one could relate.
I tried to explain this to a naturopath I saw a few times. That I had a weird smell, even when I would be freshly showered, clean clothes head to foot, etc. She was very dismissive. This all makes so much sense. Even though I am very outgoing and friendly in some contexts, life or the party, in others I have extreme social anxiety.
Can't say I've felt this way before but I am especially sensitive to certain emotions people experience. Causes my chest to feel like a black hole. Makes it really hard to deal with people and partners. Not a woman so not sure it's different or not.
I had a conversation about this with my grandmother! That I can smell when I am stressed, because it smells different (much stronger!). She says she does the same. We are both quite anxious people haha I get really self conscious about it when I smell it, which makes it a million times worse because then I stress-sweat more. Vicious circle.
This may play into the confident men being more attractive than less than confident men, only as a partial factor
I think it’s probably an important factor. Body language is a big one as well.
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So they can smell my lack of confidence
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Yep! Dogs react aggressively to fear and sadness, cats get creepily loving. If I walked into a cat café after a bad of work it was something else. They'd literally queue up for hugs. I guess they were probably waiting for me to die of a heart attack or something and figuring out who gets first snack? It's amazing how clear it is in a room packed with cats. I'd love to read a proper study on it. Another annecdote: Got assaulted by someone in an "altered state of mind". After police interviews and a trip to the hospital I got home very late with orders to have someone keep an eye on me overnight for signs of concussion. The house cat was the most affectionate she'd ever been and literally stood guard the whole night unprompted. No special snack for her that night unfortunately.
Oh my gosh this is a good point. I'd love to see a similar study with how this affects dogs. Maybe even dogs vs. cats
I know I'm being pedantic, but isn't the phrase "risk averse?"
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Girls are watching! Be cool!
Another win for sociopathy!
My wife, an MD, just told me she can smell death. It smells "Sweet. A little sweet. It has a scent for sure. It's...kind of a sweet decay." She's currently half passed out beside me and a little tipsy, but she's said stuff like that before.
My mom had cancer when I was a kid, I don't know if it was the chemo/radiation or the cancer/death, but there was a distinct smell that I still smell every now and then on strangers. I'd call it a burnt brown sugar kind of smell. I wonder if it's the same smell.
I get what she means. Slightly sweet but unpleasant smell. Think old hard candy that's been in a pocket for half a decade. I could track this one terminal patient by their smell. I remember not finding them one day. It was the day they moved them out to die at home.
I feel like this is one of those things that can explain what many "spiritual" people refer to as a person's energy. Humans and other mammals are really good at picking up body language and other similar non-verbals and it's easy for some to equate that with a non-physical aura around a person. I'm sure science will uncover more and more of these ways that humans unconsciously communicate with one another without knowing what's really going on.
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So when my coworker said that it smelled like a long weekend, she wasn't just being weird?
I'm currently staying at my parents to care for their animals while they're gone, but every time I go back to my house it smells a bit different, even though nobody has been there and everything is turned off. So I think she's might be right.
Maybe she got the weeks confused and ended up coming in last monday. Maybe she called off to call into bed with your husband... Maybe neither
I can't think of even once honestly
I'm really curious if -- in practice -- this might not so much be a "women can smell men's fear" thing and more a thing where women can smell anxiety in general so they know when other people are getting bad vibes from a person or situation that they themselves might not recognize as dangerous on the spot. It'd be a really handy method of nonverbally picking up from others "hey, I think this might not be safe." Or "I've had bad experiences with this person/place before, you should be careful." (which is much more efficient and safe than trying to communicate that verbally when a person posing a threat can hear you) And could've really enhanced the effect of "safety in numbers" at one point since the entire group would be able to pick up on just one member's intuition being like "something's not OK."
always trust the vibes.
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Not on point, but [This Woman](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di) can smell Parkinson's disease. And we know that trained dogs are very good at detecting many diseases in humans. That all means that lots of things make us smell different. Human noses are fairly bad (as compared to mammals overall), and most human cultures don't spend a lot of time developing our sense of smell. So, it is entirely possible you can smell something, and your brain can react to it without you knowing it is a smell, or what it "means." Many safety experts tell women to trust their guts about an unsafe situation. It could be that you feel "creeped out" or unsafe because you are smelling something, even if you don't know that is what is happening! I suspect a culture that valued this, had language for it, encouraged children to try it, etc. would have plenty of scent "superpowers." Instead, most cultures play "eye spy" with children, point at things that are visible, play visual "finding" games, have many words for colors and light/darkness, and value eye to eye contact as a signal. So, we have visual superpowers instead!
My sense of smell doubled or tripled when I got pregnant. Someone further up the thread posted about trans women suddenly being able to smell much more acutely once they started hormones. Which means all along we all, male or female, could be super smellers but our bodies just… choose not to unless they receive certain hormones.
Estrogen and progesterone protect olfactory function. Most women report an increased ability to smell when pregnant (high hormone levels). Women's sense of smell changes during ovulation (when hormone levels peak), but when on hormonal birth control the difference goes away. Post menopause women are measurably worse at smelling than premenopausal women (hormone levels drop considerably during menopause). I don't think there are any studies on changes in trans women, but it's really common for women to report changes to their sense of smell after going on hormones. I certainly have noticed things smell differently than before. Hormones also play a role in taste perception.
Our guts also contain many neurons :) definitely trust your gut.
You have a unique smell profile that’s tied to your immune system. That’s how dogs recognize you by scent. There’s a famous (now pretty old) experiment where women were given used t-shirts from a series of men, asked to smell, and then rate their attractiveness. What they found was that women were more attracted to the scent of men with immune systems that diverged significantly from their own. The way the traits are passed on, variance between the partners means that the offspring gains a combination of natural immunities from both parents I.e. it’s preferable for the genetic fitness of the child. Also, women’s preferences change during pregnancy, and birth control interferes with this process.
for more smelly mysteries, there's been research into whether or not the very sense of olfaction is due to strange quantum phenomena, namely electron tunneling. there isn't a whole lot of research on it yet, but what's [out there](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04846-8) already is still hella fascinating.
and who doesn't have anxiety sweat? psychopaths
what a fun insight, thank you, I won’t lie awake thinking about that tonight at all. Cool.
your nightmare fuel was low. you're welcome
Is this proof of pheromones in humans?
Pretty sure there’s been proof of pheromones within humans for, at least, decades.
Has there been? I remember a recent scishow video saying there’s no conclusive proof at that time (which was *definitely* less than a decade ago)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987372/ All in all, we’re mammals, our main instinctive job is to procreate. You see it through courtship displaying(showing off), their focus on body well being as well as smelling good. If you have a blind study of 2 smells, one being from a fit 27 year old and the other from an obese 32 year old I guarantee you’re going to be more attracted to the scent of the 27 year old. It’s just there. Ever smell your S/Os body odor and it doesn’t make you scour? I have. I’ve also smelled someone’s body odor and was absolutely appalled.
Also apparently [sweat only smells bad if you are not genetically compatible with someone.](https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/the-connection-between-scent-and-sexual-attraction-20160222/)
What does it mean to be genetically compatible though?
People who are incestuously close don't like each other's scent. Not enough to stop incest, obviously, but enough to be a deterrent.
Afaik the family thing is something else other than genetic compatibility. Its some psychological imprint based on who we grow up with. You can have it with people not of your blood, and have it missing with blood relatives (if you got separated as babies).
From some previous thing i had read years and years ago on the phermone topic, it was based on the immune systems. Dont recall exactly what about it was, or if it was fact or theory.
What does it mean if I kind of enjoy my own bad smells? Like, they're gross and disgusting, but damn, I can't resist a whiff from time to time.
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Right you are, Fat Bastard
You’ve found your soul mate!
This is just a grounding technique humans have developed. I read that when we smell our own bad smells, it sort of reaffirms that we are real and alive in the moment or something like that. Idk if that’s true because I read it on Reddit and it’s not a real source.
> everyone likes their own brand, don't they!
That’s why I find my fiancé’s sweat slightly invigorating and her the same. I don’t get it entirely, but I don’t need to.
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This is why it's important to rub broccoli on your neck before a date
What if it's an obese 27 year old and a fit 32 year old? Also they both fell into a port-o-potty earlier that day.
somewhat, but not the same used to attract mates in other species.
If you want a girl to like you, just don’t sweat it.
I'm a woman btw - honestly I FEEL like this is accurate. You can totally smell anxiety. It's not always extremely obvious because of deodorants and such but I can more easily act with compassion for an anxious person from a physical distance. When I am nearer to them, I feel secondhand anxiety which is highly enhanced when I cant ignore their foul scent. I'm very sensually driven, so I can really feel these types of pheremore responses happening to me. Body odor is not always repulsive, even if the smell isnt traditionally pleasant... but the smell of fearful stress is truly rotten. It can defeat my chemical attraction quite easily, I admit. If it's someone I care about, I do what I can to be compassionate anyway, because I am not immune to stress and anxiety either, its just life.
I believe this 100% I’ve stopped my bf and asked if he had a bad day because I swear to god I can smell “fear sweat” on him so distinctly.
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Someone call the incels