
Do older people have a different smell? - bookofjoe
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/well/live/do-older-people-have-a-different-smell.html
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dredmorbius
Babies smell.

My friend, undergoing radiation therapy for cancer, had a distinct smell. As
have those treated with specific chemotherapies.

Athletes smell. Indoor and outdoor athletes differently. Pool swimmers of
chlorine, open-water swimmers of the sea.

Parkinsons and Alzheimers appear to have distinctive smells.

Diabetes is characterised for its distinct smell (and taste).

We are chemically-regulated, processing, producing, and (to an extent)
signalling systems. The notion that there are associated perceptible scents is
exceedingly probable.

Another aspect of older people (and again: Parkinsons and Alzheimers in
particular) is a loss of the _sense_ of smell. Which may mean that odors
otherwise noticeable and addressed aren't.

~~~
lonelappde
Swimming seems a special case because that's a clearly foreign substance
attached to the body.

More interesting are cases where the lifestyle causes smellable long-term
changes to body chemistry that can't be cleaned off.

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Andrex
Immersing yourself in chlorine for large stretches of time probably messes
with your skin's biome, though I agree probably not to the extent that the
change alone would produce a discernible smell.

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coldtea
> _though I agree probably not to the extent that the change alone would
> produce a discernible smell._

If you do it often (e.g. swim professionally), why not?

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jraph
I wonder if part of the answer is different habits with respect to perfumes,
soaps, and also in how homes are furnished, decorated, maintained and what
products are used (cleaning, detergent). And smoking, too.

I could tell a friend had just left their home from the odor when they lived
at a particular place¹, and sometimes, I can tell if some item of clothing has
been left at some place (not that I'm special at that).

The odor the author of the article could smell at her place after renting it
for a month could have been a (mix of) perfume(s) their guests used.

Obviously, people have their own odor on top of (or under, more accurately?)
that.

¹ in a forest ­-- no, I'm joking.

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r0ze-at-hn
As someone that sees smells (synesthesia), the answer is yes. The reason I
presume is simple, hormone levels change as you age and thus you smell
different.

~~~
jraph
How did you notice you were seeing smells (and not everybody is)?

~~~
beat
Synesthesia is very hard to explain. It's like explaining color to the blind.

I have mild synesthesia myself - I hear flavors. I can say "I hear flavors",
but that doesn't help to tell you what different flavors sound like, because
sounds themselves are very hard to describe in words.

The best way to experience something like synesthesia is under the influence
of LSD or similar drugs. Not that I recommend it, but it does work. "When
colors taste like music" is my favorite description ever.

~~~
jraph
Do noises prevent you from fully tasting food? (sorry if these questions are
boring to you)

I asked this question in my previous comment because I've read about people
having synesthesia discovering quite late that no, to most people, smells or
figures don't have any specific color or character (depending on the involved
senses), during a conversation in which they take for granted that their
interlocutor experiences it too.

My father himself kind of realized that contrary to many people, he sees
months of the year as a ring, when I spoke about synesthesia, and said that
some people having synesthesia may see numbers or years in a specific shape,
that does not change across their whole life (and, indeed, he confirmed this
point about him).

~~~
rebuilder
My wife has fairly classic synesthesia, with letters and numbers having
colours and "character" etc. I don't have that, but I do have exactly what you
described with numbers, months of the year, and years having an unchanging
position in a mental 3-d model. The model for each of these is a bit
different, but each could be described as a kind of winding road.

So I wouldn't say I'm synesthetic, but at the same time I can't really point
to a clear difference between how my mind associates numbers with locations in
a spatial structure, and how my wife's mind associates them with colours.

I also can't really say how those associations are different from the kinds of
associations that the mind seems to make to anchor new experiences and
information into memory. I'm not explaining that very well, but overall I half
think synesthesia seems more like just an atypical manifestation of a probably
universal human trait, and less like a rare oddity.

~~~
jraph
I also have some representation for numbers and for the days of the week, but
it would not be 3D, more like 2D, and kind of dynamic, too: the view is
relative to the “focused” number / day. Same thing as you, the representations
are different for numbers, days of the week and months. The days are
horizontal, and months too. Numbers, not so much. Kind of horizontal up to
ten, and then vertical up to twenty, and then I would not know how to describe
it. There is a kind of break for each tens up to one hundred, with numbers
being mostly horizontal but not quiet, and each teen somewhat higher than the
previous one. Negatives have the exact same place as there opposite. Days of
the months are the same as numbers. Anyway, describing this is kind of
pointless. This representation does not feel very precise.

These representations are the same since as far as I can remember. I know that
some people I discussed with don't think they have such a representation for
numbers or dates. It seems to correspond to the description given in [1].

I think it may have an impact on my memory, at least for dates (but nothing
extraordinary). It's usually easy to remember meetings and events in the year,
because they somewhat appear in the representation, I don't really need a
calendar if there are not too much things scheduled (but I note in a log, just
in case, and it's not completely reliable too).

You might have calendar synesthesia [2,3], and maybe me too, but maybe weaker
than yours or my father's.

And yeah, it's not something we really see, its a representation that
automatically comes into the mind without us trying to at all. Right?

Maybe many people actually have some form of synesthesia.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Number_form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Number_form)

[2] [https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/the-form-of-synesthesia-
where...](https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/the-form-of-synesthesia-where-people-
literally-see-time.html)

[3]
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesth%C3%A9sie#Synesth%C3%A9...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesth%C3%A9sie#Synesth%C3%A9sie_spatio-
temporelle)

Translation of [3]:

> Like “numerical synesthesia”, spatio-temporal synesthesia is a mental map of
> the days of the week and/or months of the year. People having this kind of
> synesthesia state that they can “see the time” as a ribbon, a ring or a
> circle for instance. According to some studies, these people would have
> particular synaptic connections in their brain, allowing them to live time
> like a spatial construction.

> Like all the forms of synesthesia, “spatio-temporal” also shows a permanent
> feature: tested months later, someone having synesthesia will report the
> same experiences they had previously reported.

~~~
rebuilder
Calendar synesthesia sounds like a good match with mine, although for me it's
very much a "mind's eye" thing, not like an image projected into my visual
field. In article 2, the researchers are said to have asked their subject to
recite every third month going backwards, apparently to test that it's not
just a mind's eye visualization. I get similar speeds as their test subject,
and do go through the months in my mental image to help with the task.
However, since for me it _is_ a mind's eye visualization, I'm not sure the
test as described is very useful.

The Wikipedia article points out that in theory, all logical synesthetic
combinations are possible. I suspect that if you tested broadly for any kind
of synesthetic experiences, you'd find a significant portion of the population
had them, maybe even the majority.

~~~
jraph
> for me it's very much a "mind's eye" thing, not like an image projected into
> my visual field

Same for me.

> In article 2, the researchers are said to have asked their subject to recite
> every third month going backwards, apparently to test that it's not just a
> mind's eye visualization

I would be terrible at this task. I don't see the whole year (week) at once.
This representation would not be of any help for that. It's here when I am
scheduling / planning, or when someone is saying / I'm reading a date.

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foxfired
If scent is of interest to you, I suggest you read _Perfume_ by Patrick
Suskind. I couldn't help but notice the distinct smell of everything and
everyone after reading this book.

~~~
edgarvaldes
One of those books[1] that are really hard to translate to another medium. The
movie tried, but somehow the book can give you a better approximation about
the sense of smell.

[1] Another one is the upcoming adaptation of The Colour Out of Space

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cbanek
Penn & Teller: Bullshit Season 8 Episode 8 did an experiment to try to verify
this. They couldn't find that people could predict who is old and who isn't
via a sniff test.

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ColanR
Unfortunately, that experiment could just as well have been testing people's
ability to smell the difference.

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bradknowles
One thing I remember very distinctly from when I was much, much younger is how
my grandfather smelled. A very distinct smell that I always attributed to his
heavy tobacco smoking and sweaty manual labor as a master cabinet maker. He
died when he was in his sixties, from a heart attack. I was in sixth or
seventh grade.

A few years ago, I was astonished when I realized that I could smell that
exact same smell again. Only this time, to my horror, I discovered that I was
now the source of that exact same precise smell. Only I don’t smoke, and my
labor is mostly mental.

It’s not a knock-you-over-with-body-odor smell. You can cover it with
deodorant or other perfumery type of application. But it is the baseline
smell, minus all additional covering odors.

I finally decided that it must be a combination of genes and aging, since I am
now close to the age when I recall that my grandfather smelled like this.

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agitator
My dog was chased around as a puppy by an old lady with oven mitts.

Now he gets anxious when he smells old people. So from my anecdotal evidence,
I think they probably have a distinct smell.

My theory is that the smell is distinct because of pharmaceuticals. A lot of
older people are on all sorts of medications. I think a lot of medicines cause
the body to give off differing odors. From personal experience, I've noticed
my body odor change when on different medicines. And have actually noticed
that other elderly people I've been around have a faint chemical odor to them.

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irrational
I don't know if I'm old, but my wife and I are in our mid-40s and we agree
that we smell differently than we used to smell, for instance when we were in
our early 20s.

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slowhand09
I used to be the 1st person mosquitoes went after, fair-skinned as I am. I had
a surgery recently and for several months a few of my blood metrics have lower
than normal levels (hemocrit, red cell count, platelet count, etc). Now I
watch others slapping at mosquitoes which seem no longer attracted to me. My
theory is I don't "smell" as good to the little bloodsuckers.

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joker3
A lot of older people don't shower or bathe as often as young people because
they're worried about slips and falls. I'm surprised that the article didn't
consider that.

~~~
jmull
Two of the three studies defined "old" as people 40 or 41 and older, so
frailty might not be a large factor.

(Those two studies had different conclusions. The third study defined "old" as
75 and older, but found the most intense and unpleasant orders in middle-ages
males, 45-55, so again, frailty doesn't seem likely to be a significant factor
in terms of a strong or bad old smell.)

Edit: also, I kinda doubt your assertion about the bathing habits of older
people. I wonder what you base that on?

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chenster
Never smell anything differently on my grandparents, parents, elderly around
me. Maybe it's not a widespread myth?

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snarfy
I started taking probiotics about three months ago and I definitely have a
different stink than I used to.

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jack2
What do old people smell like?

Depends.

~~~
jjtheblunt
I'm not sure people understood your innocuous joke...I did.

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bregma
My gran has no nose.

How does she smell?

Terrible.

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clircle
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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yakubin
Well, they certainly smell awful to me. Especially old women. That's a very
distinctive smell. I could recognize an old woman without the use of any of my
other senses.

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patrioticaction
Sucks to be you

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yakubin
TBH it does. It seems like I generally have a more sensitive sense of smell
than most people. It's annoying, because the result is: a lot more things have
a bad smell for me.

