Of all the senses, smell is the only one you cannot close. Eyes shut, ears can be covered, a hand can be pulled away. The nose keeps working as long as you breathe, and you always breathe.
Why it lands so hard
There is an anatomical difference that explains a good deal. Signals from sight and hearing pass through a relay station before they reach the emotional areas of the brain. Smell comes in through another door, a much shorter one, very close to the areas for emotion and memory.
Out of that comes something everyone has lived: a smell returns you to an entire scene from childhood, with its light and its temperature, before you have time to think. No photograph does that.
For a highly sensitive person, that short route means an unpleasant smell isn’t a minor nuisance. It is a nuisance that arrives straight and unfiltered, and that drags mood along with it.
Where the problem collects
The places where people suffer most are enclosed and shared:
- Lifts, after someone wearing strong perfume.
- The office kitchen at lunchtime.
- Cars with air fresheners.
- Public transport at rush hour.
- Long meetings in unventilated rooms.
- Cleaning products with an intense scent.
The curious part is that almost all of those smells are, in theory, pleasant. An expensive perfume is still an intense stimulus in a two-metre cubicle.
What is within your reach
At home. Here you are in charge. Unscented cleaning products, proper ventilation twice a day, cooking with the extractor on and the door shut, no plug-in air fresheners. Within a month you notice the difference in the background.
In the car. The little tree goes. A window open two fingers does more for your mood than any fragrance.
At the office. What can be asked for without conflict: a desk away from the kitchen, airing the room before a long meeting, not heating fish in the shared microwave. It sounds trivial and it is one of the few things a colleague grants without argument.
On you. A trick that works in places where you can change nothing: a handkerchief with a drop of something neutral you like, in your pocket. When the air is unbearable, breathing through your own scent breaks the circuit for a few minutes.
The other side
That short route also works in your favour, and it is barely used. A smell associated with calm, always used in the same context, ends up triggering the calm on its own.
If you light the same candle every time you sit down to read, within a few weeks the smell does part of the work. It is basic conditioning, and it works better than average on a sensitive person, for exactly the same reason they suffer more.
Choose a discreet scent and use it only for that. If it burns all day, it stops meaning anything.
With other people
Telling someone their perfume bothers you is a minefield. What stops it sounding like a judgement is talking about yourself and not about them: “I have a very sensitive sense of smell and I get headaches in enclosed spaces.” It is true, it accuses nobody, and almost everyone accepts it without fuss.
The section on smells in Personas Altamente Sensibles develops this inside the chapter on sensory overload.