That is Not What Sentinel Sidney Crosby Would Be Smelling, Okay?
Right. So one of the great things about humanity and biology and the reality that we actually live in is that there's such a range of everything. People experience the world differently; it's pretty cool.
For me, reading stories about characters with heightened senses is both delightful and incredibly baffling sometimes. Sometimes I have a better sense of smell than a supernatural creature; it's a little absurd, to me.
I mean, it makes sense! You write about what you know and there are people out there with a poor sense of smell; the world of smells is not really something they experience, so they don't write it. Probably there are some people writing fic about vampires, werewolves, sentinels and so forth that straight-up forget that smell is one of the senses, or maybe they steer away from it because they don't know how it works.
There are a lot of fics out that I think of as, like, smell AUS - where characters smell of things that make no logical sense because they don't spend a lot of time around metal, or thyme, or sod, or fresh-baked bread. It is totally possible to smell like all of those things, on a regular basis, even, but you sort of have to be immersed in them. Humans, in this universe at least, don't tend to give off scents spontaneously like they've hidden a selection of scented candles about themselves and pull out the correct one suddenly to light it, like, I AM ANGRY, TIME TO SET THE MOOD WITH PINE. Like, most humans don't smell like trees, because they are not trees.
I actually really like smell AUs, and I think they're interesting. The genre is sort of a combination of works that are autopilot purple prose and others that are more deliberately AU. They don't match up with how I experience the world.
My sense of smell varies a fair bit. Some days I have to be standing like three inches away from someone to really, really smell them and other days it's like PLEASE DO NOT STAND ANY CLOSER THAN YOUR CURRENT THREE METRES, IN FACT, PLEASE GO AWAY. I had a really bad day a few months ago. Someone asked me what was wrong and I was like I can smell everything. When I got home that night I put my clothing in really weird places and left my keys in the door. (For me, that is extremely out of sorts.) In retrospect I am pretty sure I looked like I wanted to murder someone - someone actually jumped out of my way at one point.
On an average day it's not bad for me. Strong perfume is an issue but I suspect that's some kind of allergy thing and not really about the intensity of the smell.
I worked with someone once who smelled of a butcher's shop and perfume - their other job and their desperate attempt to cover that scent up when they had to go straight from one job to the other. People who work in a coffee shop are likely to smell of it - it gets in their clothes. Sometimes people who live on a farm smell of it. I think most people can smell that.
What people smell of, to me, is mostly what they're wearing and whatever beauty products they use. Soap, laundry detergent, hair gel, shampoo, conditioner, aftershave, perfume, deodorant. When my ex changed soaps I could tell when I was standing close. I avoid changing my own products because I hate getting used to a new scent. (It doesn't take me long; I just really dislike it. Some scents I never get used to.)
I can't sniff someone and then rattle off all the products they're using. I might be able to learn to do that - learn what all the scents are and how they fit together - but that would be hard for me, and seriously, what the fuck would I do with that skill?
Most of the time I don't really pay attention to what I smell, because, for me, people don't really communicate with smell. My nose isn't so finely tuned that I can pick up on, like, okay - I think it's hilarious that one of Derek Hale's superpowers, according to fandom, is the ability to sniff out erections and other symptoms of sexual receptivity at, like, the slightest stirring of arousal. (I feel like this is one of the many reasons his life is terrible.) Sexual arousal absolutely has a smell but you have to be pretty far along before that's a thing I'm going to pick up on. I'll pick up things like physical exertion and if someone doesn't have great hygiene - shit and piss and sweat and sometimes a kind of rancidness. I can smell when I've been drinking coffee - this is one of the reasons I don't drink a lot of coffee, even though I like the taste; I don't like the smell that comes out of my skin afterwards.
I've been walking around with people and been like, Okay, where's the Indian restaurant? and no one else can smell it and I don't figure it out until like a block and a half later when I see it across the street about 150 metres away.
I don't really think my sense of smell is extraordinary; I feel pretty average most days, but, like, I remember zeroing in on someone and having a disproportionate interest in them because they smelled amazing to me, like leather and eucalyptus, and their house smelled amazing, too, like green, because there were so many plants, and also, again, like eucalyptus - I never figured out where that smell was coming from; I think it might have been some kind of cream. They may have smelled nicer, too, because they ate really healthy.
...and somewhat embarrassingly in retrospect, I dated someone who wore leather and used a eucalyptus shaving cream. (I had not connected those dots together until now and am sort of personally offended.) I definitely move towards people who smell good to me and away from people who smell bad. Smokers aren't a real favourite with me. There's something that I pick up from ~50 year old men on the bus that they're wearing that smells sickly to me. There's a lot of perfumes I don't like and a few that I really do.
If I'm looking for a seat on public transit and I walk by someone who smells good I tend to sit near them on autopilot, which I sort of feel is a creepy werewolf thing, but I do not really have any qualms about this. It's mostly pretty subconscious and it's not like anyone else would notice any kind of unusual behaviour. I sat behind a guy last week who smelled amazing, like coffee and something sweet, but not sweetened coffee and it was great, A+ transit smell, but there was a point at which another smell interfered and it was sad, like cleaners coming into a rose-filled lobby with something incredibly bleach-heavy.
I tend to choose to surround myself with scents that are neutral or subtle. I'm particular about what I choose to wash my clothes with and if I'm picking out a product I'll probably go with the one that claims to be scentless or have no perfume - that tends to be safer for me.
Cooking smells are sort of annoying to me when they're not my own, because I'm sort of easily suggestible. Like, I pretty much never eat fries - but I have neighbours now who regularly make fish and chips, so I'm exposed to that smell, and (I'm a vegetarian) so I end up eating poutine and making sweet potato fries way more than I normally would. I ate a lot of fried rice and pizza when I lived somewhere else, for the same reason. The smell of cooking flows through open windows and through the cracks in doors and between floorboards.
So, that's a little bit of what smell is like for me, and why I've read fic and gone Sidney Crosby is a Sentinel? ...and he is standing where? He totally knows what is being cooked in that other room. What is this factual inaccuracy. *grumble* Like, it's fine, it's just weird to me, and really obvious that the writer isn't as tuned into their sense of smell as I am. Everyone's different.
Hopefully this will be useful to someone writing about werewolves or something and not just one big exposition of my personal weirdness.
This entry was originally posted at http://kiki-eng.dreamwidth.org/104999.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
For me, reading stories about characters with heightened senses is both delightful and incredibly baffling sometimes. Sometimes I have a better sense of smell than a supernatural creature; it's a little absurd, to me.
I mean, it makes sense! You write about what you know and there are people out there with a poor sense of smell; the world of smells is not really something they experience, so they don't write it. Probably there are some people writing fic about vampires, werewolves, sentinels and so forth that straight-up forget that smell is one of the senses, or maybe they steer away from it because they don't know how it works.
There are a lot of fics out that I think of as, like, smell AUS - where characters smell of things that make no logical sense because they don't spend a lot of time around metal, or thyme, or sod, or fresh-baked bread. It is totally possible to smell like all of those things, on a regular basis, even, but you sort of have to be immersed in them. Humans, in this universe at least, don't tend to give off scents spontaneously like they've hidden a selection of scented candles about themselves and pull out the correct one suddenly to light it, like, I AM ANGRY, TIME TO SET THE MOOD WITH PINE. Like, most humans don't smell like trees, because they are not trees.
I actually really like smell AUs, and I think they're interesting. The genre is sort of a combination of works that are autopilot purple prose and others that are more deliberately AU. They don't match up with how I experience the world.
My sense of smell varies a fair bit. Some days I have to be standing like three inches away from someone to really, really smell them and other days it's like PLEASE DO NOT STAND ANY CLOSER THAN YOUR CURRENT THREE METRES, IN FACT, PLEASE GO AWAY. I had a really bad day a few months ago. Someone asked me what was wrong and I was like I can smell everything. When I got home that night I put my clothing in really weird places and left my keys in the door. (For me, that is extremely out of sorts.) In retrospect I am pretty sure I looked like I wanted to murder someone - someone actually jumped out of my way at one point.
On an average day it's not bad for me. Strong perfume is an issue but I suspect that's some kind of allergy thing and not really about the intensity of the smell.
I worked with someone once who smelled of a butcher's shop and perfume - their other job and their desperate attempt to cover that scent up when they had to go straight from one job to the other. People who work in a coffee shop are likely to smell of it - it gets in their clothes. Sometimes people who live on a farm smell of it. I think most people can smell that.
What people smell of, to me, is mostly what they're wearing and whatever beauty products they use. Soap, laundry detergent, hair gel, shampoo, conditioner, aftershave, perfume, deodorant. When my ex changed soaps I could tell when I was standing close. I avoid changing my own products because I hate getting used to a new scent. (It doesn't take me long; I just really dislike it. Some scents I never get used to.)
I can't sniff someone and then rattle off all the products they're using. I might be able to learn to do that - learn what all the scents are and how they fit together - but that would be hard for me, and seriously, what the fuck would I do with that skill?
Most of the time I don't really pay attention to what I smell, because, for me, people don't really communicate with smell. My nose isn't so finely tuned that I can pick up on, like, okay - I think it's hilarious that one of Derek Hale's superpowers, according to fandom, is the ability to sniff out erections and other symptoms of sexual receptivity at, like, the slightest stirring of arousal. (I feel like this is one of the many reasons his life is terrible.) Sexual arousal absolutely has a smell but you have to be pretty far along before that's a thing I'm going to pick up on. I'll pick up things like physical exertion and if someone doesn't have great hygiene - shit and piss and sweat and sometimes a kind of rancidness. I can smell when I've been drinking coffee - this is one of the reasons I don't drink a lot of coffee, even though I like the taste; I don't like the smell that comes out of my skin afterwards.
I've been walking around with people and been like, Okay, where's the Indian restaurant? and no one else can smell it and I don't figure it out until like a block and a half later when I see it across the street about 150 metres away.
I don't really think my sense of smell is extraordinary; I feel pretty average most days, but, like, I remember zeroing in on someone and having a disproportionate interest in them because they smelled amazing to me, like leather and eucalyptus, and their house smelled amazing, too, like green, because there were so many plants, and also, again, like eucalyptus - I never figured out where that smell was coming from; I think it might have been some kind of cream. They may have smelled nicer, too, because they ate really healthy.
...and somewhat embarrassingly in retrospect, I dated someone who wore leather and used a eucalyptus shaving cream. (I had not connected those dots together until now and am sort of personally offended.) I definitely move towards people who smell good to me and away from people who smell bad. Smokers aren't a real favourite with me. There's something that I pick up from ~50 year old men on the bus that they're wearing that smells sickly to me. There's a lot of perfumes I don't like and a few that I really do.
If I'm looking for a seat on public transit and I walk by someone who smells good I tend to sit near them on autopilot, which I sort of feel is a creepy werewolf thing, but I do not really have any qualms about this. It's mostly pretty subconscious and it's not like anyone else would notice any kind of unusual behaviour. I sat behind a guy last week who smelled amazing, like coffee and something sweet, but not sweetened coffee and it was great, A+ transit smell, but there was a point at which another smell interfered and it was sad, like cleaners coming into a rose-filled lobby with something incredibly bleach-heavy.
I tend to choose to surround myself with scents that are neutral or subtle. I'm particular about what I choose to wash my clothes with and if I'm picking out a product I'll probably go with the one that claims to be scentless or have no perfume - that tends to be safer for me.
Cooking smells are sort of annoying to me when they're not my own, because I'm sort of easily suggestible. Like, I pretty much never eat fries - but I have neighbours now who regularly make fish and chips, so I'm exposed to that smell, and (I'm a vegetarian) so I end up eating poutine and making sweet potato fries way more than I normally would. I ate a lot of fried rice and pizza when I lived somewhere else, for the same reason. The smell of cooking flows through open windows and through the cracks in doors and between floorboards.
So, that's a little bit of what smell is like for me, and why I've read fic and gone Sidney Crosby is a Sentinel? ...and he is standing where? He totally knows what is being cooked in that other room. What is this factual inaccuracy. *grumble* Like, it's fine, it's just weird to me, and really obvious that the writer isn't as tuned into their sense of smell as I am. Everyone's different.
Hopefully this will be useful to someone writing about werewolves or something and not just one big exposition of my personal weirdness.
This entry was originally posted at http://kiki-eng.dreamwidth.org/104999.html. Please comment there using OpenID.