Scents & Sensibility

Last week, Ian and I racked up some serious mileage on my parents’ Honda Element.  They let us borrow their fuel-efficient car for our big March road trip, which went like this:  Indy (home) to Chicago (interview) to Little Rock (pit stop) to Austin (wedding), and then we did all 1,200 miles in reverse.  Epic.  A few minutes after checking into our charming B&B in Texas, we found out that (home) is actually going to change to where (interview) took place: Ian got the Chicago job!  So, apart from cutting a rug and drinking lots of Dr. Pepper (created in Texas), we spent the wedding mostly confusing the party guests with our inordinately long answer to the standard introductory question So, where are you from?:  “Well, we lived in Chicago, but we’ve been living in Indianapolis for a year, and now we’re moving back to Chicago.”  I hope our blabbering came off as excitement because, as much as we love being in Indiana and close to my family, we’ve had trouble escaping the feeling the Chicago just feels like home.  But more on that later...

After a week away from Indy, our suitcase had become a clothing battleground, with the forces of Clean fighting for space against the forces of Dirty. I packed one medium-size suitcase for the two of us, and by Monday, Dirty had won.  The clean clothes, neatly rolled into squat tubes, hid under blow dryers and belts while the dirty clothes sloppily squished their way into the nooks of the suitcase.  In a true travel triumph, suitcase had turned into hamper, with the worn undergarments purposefully segregated to the front zippered pocked.

You might think that I would have been bothered by the dirty clothes mixing with the clean ones in my suitcase.  But it didn't bother me at all.  Rather, just like I’ve noticed when I dump the hamper into the washing machine every week, I don’t mind the smell of my husband’s lightly worn undershirts and button-downs.  Actually, I kind of like it.  And before you go accusing me of spending too much time in France, I’ve got science on my side: scent is a pretty powerful biological force.

It turns out that I like the smell of my husband’s dirty laundry because scent and romance are intimately linked.  And the reason I find his scent more attractive than others is because, of all things, our immune systems, as summed up in this Psychology Today article:

Our immune systems are coded for by a cluster of genes called the major histocompatibilty complex (MHC), and everyone, except if you have an identical twin, has a unique set of MHC genes. Your unique string of MHC genes are the genotype for your immune system, and your phenotype, the external manifestation of the genes for your immune system, is your body-odor! And your odorprint is as unique as your fingerprint.

In the now famous "T-shirt" experiments it was shown that specific women chose as most sexy and pleasant smelling T-shirts belonging to men who had immune systems that were different from their own. Because we all possess different MHC genes (and body-odor), for every woman a different set of men will be delicious smelling and others won't be. There's no Brad Pitt of body odor! A woman's nose not only responds to a man's body-odor in terms of his biological suitability, women actually find how a man smells to be the most important factor in their sexual attraction.

Takeaway: always let your spouse buy your perfume or cologne.


And have you ever had a smell provoke a vivid memory?  I have.  In the 9th grade, my dad found an old bottle of cologne that he hadn’t worn in years.  When I smelled it on him that morning, I blurted out, “You smell like England!”  We realized that the last time he wore that particular cologne was during our England trip five years earlier.  Apparently, this smell-memory link occurs because smell and memory are neighbors in our brains:

The olfactory bulb has intimate access to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning. Despite the tight wiring, however, smells would not trigger memories if it weren't for conditioned responses. When you first smell a new scent, you link it to an event, a person, a thing or even a moment. Your brain forges a link between the smell and a memory -- associating the smell of chlorine with summers at the pool or lilies with a funeral. When you encounter the smell again, the link is already there, ready to elicit a memory or a mood. Chlorine might call up a specific pool-related memory or simply make you feel content. Lilies might agitate you without your knowing why. This is part of the reason why not everyone likes the same smells.

I may like the way my husband smells, and I usually enjoy the strong memories distinct odors trigger in my mind, but my favorite demonstration of the power of smell happens every night.  When Teddy takes his evening nap, he sometimes chooses the porch or the cool tile in the kitchen.  But most of the time, he sleeps right here: 

Teddy sleeping on our shoes