How to recover or improve your sense of smell

Techniques for people without the sense of smell: 

Some people do not have a sense of smell, this happens to painters, oil workers, following the after-effects of Covid or due to very advanced age. 

For the one who have already access to their sense of smell, here is what to do to improve it: 

• Get knowledge of the little theory: First you got to know how to differentiate between olfactory families (reading on internet will help to improve what you know on this subject), then develop your olfactory vocabulary, acquire knowledge of raw materials behind the scenes of perfumery, all this knowledge will then allow you to put the right words to the smells you smell. Here are some site that you can check: @perfumeofthemoon, @icarus.mid.air, @waroengfrancais, @olfaxtory.
• Exercise your smell:  Smell consciously and as often as possible. Smell everything around you and as regularly as possible. The key is regularity. This is what will allow you to concentrate your sense of smell and help you strengthen your olfactory connections. The goal with this exercise is to stimulate your sense enough so that, ultimately, your brain can recognize as many odours as possible and as simply as possible. Little advice: start with simple smells from everyday life like chocolate, tea, coffee, thyme, basil, mint... and also, don't hesitate to write down all your sensations in an olfactory notebook, whether they are pleasant or not.
• Olfactory guessing game: Practice guessing with your eyes closed the smells that pass under your nose to get your nose used to recognizing smells.                                                                                                        Ask your loved ones, your friends or your acquaintances to let you smell different smells and try to distinguish them. Start with smells that are fairly simple to recognize with very distinct facets (woody, powdery, oriental, tangy, etc.) then when you feel capable of moving to the next level, ask them to make you guess more complexes smells, like : various coffees, spices, various flowers such as lilac, rose, lily, dandelion, etc.
• Memories and smells odours: Take the time to associate the smells with a word, a place, a memory or a person. Smell is one of the senses most linked to emotional memory: suddenly, all at once, a smell hits us and reminds us of a moment, a memory. We often remember a smell with a context, a memory, an emotion. For example, when you smell burning, you may feel fear because your brain has memorized the idea that this smell could be dangerous. Conversely, the smell of freshly baked cake or the smell of freshly cut log can evoke a soothing and relaxing memory and give you confidence.                                                                                       When we smell an odour, memory and emotions are immediately called upon: the odours that we smell every day take a very different path from the other senses since they go directly to two specific areas of our brain, namely the amygdala and hippocampus. Areas precisely dedicated to emotions and memories.                                                                            This exercise will allow you to better identify the smells that attract you, please you or, on the contrary, repel you.

• Visualize a smell: Recognizing a smell also means having the ability to visualize it mentally. On the other hand, olfactory mental imagery is a more difficult exercise than visual or auditory mental imagery.                      Supporting evidence: we are all capable of visually imagining ourselves walking around a historical site, or even mentally humming the latest song hit that is playing on loop in our head.  But can you mentally conjure up the smell of bread roasted to the point of smelling it in your head? It all seems complicated to us.                                                                                    According to a study carried out by researchers comparing students from the Versailles perfumery school (ISIPCA) to more experienced perfumers, the results show that olfactory mental imagery in trained people activates a brain area normally stimulated during perfumery. In this perspective perfumers were trained to recognize an innumerable number of odours, trained to create new odours by imagining and mixing them, are therefore capable of smelling an odour in the absence of it. But then, how do we do it?                                                                                                                  The keywords once again are training and regularity!     Indeed, olfactory training resolutely influences the level of activation of mental imagery neurons of odours and your olfactory connections. The more you practice, the more efficient and quicker you will be at mentally recreating smells. To do this, for example, visualize your favourite cake and try to imagine the smell that might escape from it. Proceed in this way with other smells, and you will know that your sense of smell will no longer have any secrets for you.

• Blind tasting: Did you know ? We also eat with our noses! Smell is, in fact, closely linked to taste and even richer and more complex than taste. We'll explain it to you. Our taste buds can detect 5 different families of flavours: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and the new sense of taste, umami (“essence of delight” or “monosodium glutamate”) which originates from Japanese cuisine. Its taste is often described as the meaty delight between salty and sweet that deepens the flavour. Our nose, on the other hand, can pick up to nearly 10,000 odours. Best perfumers, thanks to exercises - including those previously mentioned - can recognize and memorize up to 2 500 smells. And it only takes a cold knocking on your nose's door for your senses to be put to the test. And we think that covid was clear proof of this. So, when you eat, your sense of smell also comes into play alongside taste: smell allows you to perceive the smell and aromas of what you are eating while taste allows you to detect the different flavours (sweet, salty, sour, bitter or umami). Let say when you are eating an orange, certain molecules will come into contact with your taste buds, in your perception the buds send a message to your brain about the flavours of the latter: acidic and sweet for example. Then, its volatile aromatic molecules will be released and travel up the back of your throat to the nasal cavity, where they stimulate the olfactory receptors. Our sense of smell plays a determining role because it allows us to distinguish the “taste” of an orange from the “taste” of a strawberry. So get to your plates! This exercise will allow you to improve your sense of smell - and to appreciate what you eat even more. At your next meal, and as often as you like: close your eyes and try to determine what is on your plate.

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