Dr. Dalton and her team found that with repeated exposure, the women’s ability to detect the odors improved 100,000-fold: the women were able to detect the odor at a concentration 1/100,000th of the concentration they needed at the beginning of the study.
But the male subjects, on average, showed no improvement at all in their ability to detect the odor.
— Read more at Why Stinky Socks May Bother Women More Than Men at The New York Times.
This is so fascinating and rings very true to my life. I always smell cooking odors permeating my bath towel or in the bedroom because we live in a smallish open concept apt. Had my SO smell my towel to see how thick the scent is, and he just shrugged.
True here too! My husband is always saying I am “super sensitive” but I think he just has little sense of smell.
I assume it can’t be true for everyone — most perfumers are men, and they obviously somehow go through training and are able to identify specific odors.
ha! stinky socks are my kryptonite. I can sense a wet towel left on the floor under a bed *before* it starts to mildew, lol.
Interesting article, thank you for sharing this one. I have noticed the difference in sensitivity based on gender though I do know men who are very sensitive to smells.
As a guy, I am hyper sensitive to mildew! I smell mildew near the floor from my height (6′ 1″) while others have to press their noses into it.
Yeah, so much of this is genetics / training / etc and not just a simple matter of gender.
Perhaps this is why my abhorrence of the odor of (clean) cat litter mounts with each passing week while the darling boy says he doesn’t think cat litter smells at all.
They probably scent it, don’t they? With some “clean” smell.
Fascinating. I’ve been wondering about the current prevalence in many perfumes of certain spiky wood/horseradishy notes that I find overbearing to simply unbearable. My hypothesis is that the some perfumers, especially men, simply don’t smell them very well. I mean, they can’t be smelling what I smell and thinking that’s a great idea. Those notes must be merely a nuance to them.
And don’t forget, it’s not just the perfumers. It’s the evaluators and the creative directors. So it goes down a chain, and then some consumers presumably can only smell some aspects of the finished product. The variables are so huge.