Smells Like Human B.O.
Some time ago, I did a piece of descriptive writing entitled “Perfume”. Since I said descriptive writing, you’d get the idea that it is hardly a factual essay. So you’d be expecting a story about a girl getting a bottle of perfume from her boyfriend, or how a little boy misses the smell of his dead mummy’s perfume. But actually, my essay wasn’t on “perfume” at all. Okay, it is some form of scent, but you’d hardly call it “perfume”.
Right, so my story was about body odour. Yeah, body odour. “Yuck”, you say?
Actually, I keep hearing that, humans are attracted to other humans first and foremost by their scents, but it is unconscious to the mind.
I think that this is a really interesting discovery. I mean, who would have thought we civilized homo-sapiens, would ever be attracted to natural scents emitted by the human body. In my opinion, any form of scent emitting from the human body, if it isn’t fart, it is body odour. Eek! We humans are attracted to B.O.! Gets me feeling like an ape.
So let’s go back to my story. It was about this girl who was attracted to her boyfriend’s scent, not cologne, mind you. When they broke up, she was devastated and she smelled that scent everywhere. It was driving her to the brink of insanity. She killed herself in the end.
If this is my thesis topic, I would like to find out, just how true this theory about the human scent is, and would my story ever come true, though I hope it wouldn’t. But there are so many possibilities in life.
Right, so my story was about body odour. Yeah, body odour. “Yuck”, you say?
Actually, I keep hearing that, humans are attracted to other humans first and foremost by their scents, but it is unconscious to the mind.
I think that this is a really interesting discovery. I mean, who would have thought we civilized homo-sapiens, would ever be attracted to natural scents emitted by the human body. In my opinion, any form of scent emitting from the human body, if it isn’t fart, it is body odour. Eek! We humans are attracted to B.O.! Gets me feeling like an ape.
So let’s go back to my story. It was about this girl who was attracted to her boyfriend’s scent, not cologne, mind you. When they broke up, she was devastated and she smelled that scent everywhere. It was driving her to the brink of insanity. She killed herself in the end.
If this is my thesis topic, I would like to find out, just how true this theory about the human scent is, and would my story ever come true, though I hope it wouldn’t. But there are so many possibilities in life.
posted by DanielleDajerk at 1:17:00 am
3 Said something yet?:
[MR WONG'S FEEDBACK]
Scent - human scent and our sense of others' scents - is a topic that fascinates me too. And we're not alone; there have been quite a number of books dedicated to this sense. One I'd started reading is Diana Ackerman's "A Natural History of the Senses" - which I will be briefly refering to in Lecture 3, so listen out for that.
I'm not sure what your topic is, exactly. About someone becoming so obsessed with another's scent that s/he cannot live without it? Not sure it's as extreme as this, but smells DO have a powerful effect on us. In fact, smell is the sense with the longest memory. A whiff of a familiar scent can bring back memories from one's childhood. Perhaps you could explore WHY scent has such a strong impact on us: Is it linked to the survival of early homosapiens - e.g. the ability to smell decaying material in order to avoid it; to smell danger from the odour of a predator; to re-establish familial bonds by sniffing one another (many animals do this); etc?
Another interesting related topic is PERFUMERY. Why are humans the only ones who insist on masking their natural scents with synthetic ones? What goes into the making of a perfume?
[END]
thanks for the info
can i get more info?
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