How smell loss affects sex

When I started losing my sense of smell about five years ago, I fixated on what that sensory shift meant for my relationship with food. Smell is a key component of our perception of flavor, so I had to figure out how to keep on enjoying eating, which has long been one of the key pleasures in my life, even as I lost my ability to appreciate complex notes and aromas. I had to cultivate my appreciation of things like heat and texture instead. I also had to learn how to cook without the guidance of scent — but with awareness of the fact that I can’t reliably smell smoke, burning, or gas anymore. 

But after reckoning with my new culinary reality, as I learned more and more about the diverse and influential effects of smell on everyday life, my mind turned to sex. It is, after all, my job as a sometimes sex writer to think about life through an erotic lens. And I’d noticed that, around the same time my sense of smell started to fade, sex had begun to feel somehow flatter to me — like there was less feedback pulling me into and engrossing all of me within the moment. I wondered whether that was a coincidence, or yet another unexpected effect of my slow sensory decline.  

When I went looking for information about the effects of smell loss on sex, though, I struggled to find any. Several smell researchers told me that neither they nor their colleagues had explored this topic in any depth. And sex educators and therapists told me that, while they know odors can act as a turn on or a turn off for many people, they’d never grappled with the effects of smell loss. Sex doesn’t even come up often in smell loss patient groups and forums, several advocates told me, largely because many people still seem to view it as a taboo topic. 

But as I’ve found people with smell loss willing to speak candidly about their intimate lives, I’ve learned I’m hardly alone in drawing a connection between the olfaction issues and a sense of sexual disconnection or narrowing. 

“I think there’s a pretty significant impact for most people,” said Duncan Boak of the smell disorder advocacy group Fifth Sense, who suddenly lost his entire sense of smell to a head injury nearly two decades ago. “There certainly has been for me.” 

“It’s like seeing the world in monochrome and I worry I will never be able to share again properly in my social and sexual life.”

Boak added that a Fifth Sense survey once asked group members about their sex lives following smell loss, and quoted one response that stuck with him: “‘It’s like seeing the world in monochrome and I worry I will never be able to share again properly in my social and sexual life.'” Similarly,  Chrissi Kelly of AbScent, a UK-based advocacy group for people with smell disorders, who first experienced smell loss in 2012, partially recovered the sense, and then temporarily lost it again twice to COVID-19 over the last two years, says that she’s “heard people say things like, ‘sex is like putting my arms around a cardboard box now.'”  

“Even thinking about it now, I nearly come to tears,” Sandra, a woman who lost her sense of smell several years ago and later recovered most of it (and who asked to only use her first name so that she could retain her privacy while speaking openly about her sex life) told me. 

The lack of concise and meaningful information about the effects of smell loss on sex, despite common experiences of sexual change among people with olfactory issues, frustrates me to no end. So, I decided to track down all of the scattershot and often provisional information about the interplay between scent and sexuality I could find, and try to make sense of it all. 

The anemic state of smell science

Scientists, philosophers, and artists have long argued that smell can have a powerful impact on attraction and arousal. Intuitive suppositions about this interplay have given us a ton of folk wisdom about supposedly aphrodisiac scents, often employed in the form of perfumes. Rigorous, formal studies exploring the exact dynamics of this interplay date back to the mid-20th century. 

But smell research in general is chronically neglected, especially compared to research into vision and hearing. Despite the fact that, according to likely lowball estimates, at least 12 percent of Americans experienced some degree of smell loss even before the coronavirus pandemic, with all its olfactory effects, hit. Alan Hirsch, a leading smell scientist at  the Smell & Taste Research Foundation, suggests that this stems from a prevailing modern cultural belief that smell is somehow lesser than our other senses, or irrelevant to human experience. Notably, we often assume that humans have an underdeveloped sense of smell compared to other animals, and that this is because we rely more on sight and sound to navigate our environments. (In truth, we seem to have as much olfactory potential as most animals; we just don’t use smell enough to hone it.) 

Some smell researchers believe that the coronavirus pandemic, and the wave of smell loss it’s caused across the world, will draw more attention to olfactory issues in the coming years, and with it more funding for rigorous research. After all, about half of all people in a recent survey with symptomatic COVID reported they’ve experienced smell loss for some length of time as well, and about a dozen smell scientists estimate at least 10 percent of them will likely have long-term smell loss. That’s a huge new population in need of help. 

Smell science is so anemic that we only identified the receptors in our noses and the back of our throats that detect odor molecules and send signals to our brains to create the aromas we smell, in the ’90s. And we’re still trying to piece together exactly how that perception pathway works. We don’t know, for instance, exactly why a given mix of odor molecules in one concentration may smell delicious, but at another may smell foul. (Think cheese: Parmesan smells great in a small dose, but in large doses it smells like vomit.) Nor do we know why, for example, our brains read the scents of potatoes, cucumbers, and tomatoes together as the scent of a dead fish. We don’t even know how many distinct scents we can detect, or what counts as a normal sense of smell, much less how this complex sensory system interacts with the complexities of sex and attraction. 

Most of us don’t pay much attention to the intersection of smell and sex in our personal lives either, the sex educator Lawrence Siegel argues, because modern culture tells us that bodily odors are disgusting, and sells us tons of products to cover them up. As most of us try to ignore smell in most aspects of our lives, Boak argues that the effects of smell on sex are often subconscious — which he thinks is part of why it’s so hard for people with smell loss to recognize and talk about how our conditions affect sex. “It is difficult to understand the impact of losing something when you were never aware of the significance of that thing,” he explained.   

What’s more, until relatively recently most of the cultural and academic bandwidth available for discussions of sex and scent has been dedicated to the topic of pheromones. While we tend to use this word colloquially to refer to scents that evoke attraction, Avery Gilbert, an independent smell researcher (who’s currently studying the aroma of cannabis), explains that it actually refers to chemicals excreted from animals that trigger automatic reactions in their peers. “Think cockroach sex pheromone,” he says. “Put a dab on a Q-tip and every male roach in your kitchen will swarm to it and try to mate with it.” It’s like a spell that determines sexual agency. 

Throughout the mid-20th century, research into pheromones in other animals generated curiosity about whether humans emit or respond to pheromones, sexual or otherwise. A few tantalizing studies, including a famous account of women’s menstrual cycles syncing up after months of living in close quarters, suggested that we do — and that this may play a role in our sexual decisions and experiences. However, more recent research has shown that this famous menstruation study, among others, was actually just the result of a statistical anomaly. And that the organ that most animals use to detect pheromones is only vestigial in humans. “Scientifically, the idea of human sex hormones is a dead letter,” Avery argues. 

But that hasn’t stopped scientists from continuing to heap focus on the topic — and perfumeries to sell so-called pheromone-based scents, supposedly guaranteed to drive the object of your desires wild and draw them to you.

When cum smells like ‘burned things’

However, over the last couple of decades a handful of studies have yielded some tantalizing, if largely provisional, insights into smell’s role in sexual attraction: They’ve suggested, for example, that many women wear their partner’s clothes because of an infatuation with their unique odor signatures. That women smelling unknown men’s t-shirts appear to find the odor of guys with DNA closer to their own less attractive than that of men with more varied or distant DNA. And that men appear to be able to pick up on sexual arousal in women’s body odor. 

In the 1990s, Hirsch also found that 17 percent of people with smell loss appear to experience some kind of sexual dysfunction. More recently, a series of studies by a small team of German smell researchers — one of the few groups interested in smell loss’s effects on sex — have found that men born without a sense of smell tend to have fewer sexual partners over the course of their lives than men who can smell; the same wasn’t true for women. That greater sensitivity to odors correlates with greater sexual pleasure, and for women more orgasms. And that about a fourth of people with smell loss have less sex drive, and are more depressed, than other folks. 

Reading these findings through the lens of larger theories, a few scientists have cobbled together cohesive theories about smell’s role in human sexuality. Notably, the smell researcher Rachel Herz explains that many evolutionary psychologists believe women use smell as an indicator of a man’s health, and his immune system — whether he might possess genes that complement her own and thus convey benefits to a potential child. And that men care less about odor, and more about appearance, because they want to spread their genes to as many fertile women as possible, and looks are a better marker of female fertility. This doesn’t mean smell is irrelevant to men, or all-important to women. But it does offer a cohesive narrative of the role of smell in sex — and an explanation for the greater sensitivity to smell that women seem to exhibit in many studies. 

However, it’s easy to poke holes in these big, sweeping theories when we think about, say, the culturally and historically contingent nature of what people find attractive, whether visually or olfactorily. And when we recognize that they don’t account for all of the information studies have yielded to date — such as the greater impact total smell loss seems to have on men’s ability to form relationships than on women’s. 

Most of the researchers behind the handful of influential studies on the intersection of scents and sex also acknowledge that they’re pretty weak. They rely on small samples, often drawn from pools of university students, and fail to account for potential confounding variables, like how attractive someone finds the attendant who gives them a smell to assess, which may influence how attractive they rate the aroma itself. Hirsch isn’t aware of any studies that’ve tried to assess how people’s other senses modulated their sense of smell.

“Smell has an impact on sex — but we don’t really understand much about it.”

Nor do most studies on the effects of smell loss distinguish between varied types or experiences of that loss. Although today we tend to associate smell loss with COVID-19, it can be caused by anything from the common cold to brain damage to neurodegenerative disorders. Partial smell loss can dim some smells, eliminate your ability to detect others, increase your sensitivity to others still, make you smell things that aren’t there, or make once pleasant aromas suddenly smell foul. The exact shuffling of sensations differs from case to case. And partial smell loss is a drastically different experience than total loss — just as the experience of living with smell loss from birth is different from the experience of acquiring smell loss later, and developing smell loss gradually is a distinct experience from losing some or all of your smell all at once. 

Sandra, for instance, notes that at one point after developing smell loss she developed parosmia, an altered sense of smell, which made sexual fluids “smell like burned things,” creating a disgust response. But once that faded, she shifted to just feeling a dulled sense of her husband’s smell, something she’s appreciated in the past. As her symptoms evolved, she felt less disgust and more distance. 

On top of all of this, studies on the intersection of smell and sex rarely bother to figure out the causal mechanisms between olfactory issues and observed effects. For instance, it’s unclear whether some people with smell loss have fewer partners, less sexual desire, or find less joy in sex because (as some speculate) they’re missing a vital sensory tool for intimate bonding with others, or because they’re just incredibly anxious about whether or not they stink. 

The only definitive thing we can say about about the interplay between smell and sex, Siegel argues, is that “smell has an impact on sex — but we don’t really understand much about it.”

Your idiosyncratic nose

In truth, there probably is no single narrative about how scents influence sex, and thus about the effects of smell loss on our intimate lives. While the science of scents and sex is an absolute mess, we know enough about the complexity of smell overall to understand that, as Hirsch puts it, “everyone’s olfactory ability is different — there’s a wide range of normal smell perception.”

For starters, our distinct genetic profiles probably start us all off with unique constellations of olfactory receptors. This is likely why people with certain genes think cilantro smells like soap, for instance. As we grow up, we all hone our raw physical potential to different degrees; as some of us attend more to smell than others, scents start to have a greater impact on our lives. 

On top of this, our brains filter raw information about odor molecules through cultural memes and personal memories in order to interpret smells. As Herz explains it, lavender is not actually universally relaxing — but in the West we often hear that it is, so many of us embrace that notion, and thus our brains and bodies read the scent of lavender as relaxing. Likewise, Herz notes that the early sexuality researcher Havelock Ellis documented a case in which a woman claimed to orgasm spontaneously whenever she smelled leather. He argued that this was because her early masturbatory experiences involved a leather saddle, and thus her brain developed an intense, idiosyncrtic, connection between leather and sexual gratification. 

As Mark Griffiths, a psychologist who studies kinks (including one he dubbed eproctophilia, attraction to farts) once wrote: “Odors that are sexually arousing are likely to be very specific and, in some cases, strange or bizarre.” 

This mashup of genetics, development, cultural norms, and personal proclivities mean that some people put a premium on scent in sex above all else, either as a source of initial arousal or as a key element of the sensory feedback that drives pleasuring during sex. For others, it’s just one subtle factor among many. And for others still it’s a non-factor, even if they have a fully intact sense of smell. Some folks who aren’t attuned to smells in a positive sense but are particular about odors they perceive as negative, like ass, may even benefit sexually from smell loss. 

Even within the framework of one individual’s unique smell system and set of sense memories, Herz notes that context and priming can have a huge impact on how we interpret smells. Siegel adds that if you ask people to close their eyes and then wave an aromatic compound under their noses several times in a row without telling them what it is, or that it’s the same smell, each time they seem to pick up on something different within it, and react to it differently. 

Jim Mansfield, a scientist who’s experienced smell loss, likewise tells me that he used to “love the smell of women” he was attracted to. But he was also fully aware that the same personal scent was “either stimulating or relaxing to me, depending on my mood and the circumstances.”   

What can you do if you’ve lost your sense of smell?

“That subjective experience element is very difficult to overcome in research,” Siegel explains. And a lack of solid research findings leave sex educators, doctors who know about smell issues, and patient advocates alike with little hard and fast guidance for people who feel as if smell loss has negatively impacted their sex lives. “I just don’t know what to tell these people,” Kelly says. 

Mansfield says that he, like many others, just focuses on trying to claw back their sense of smell. But as Hirsch points out, there aren’t actually a lot of established treatments out there to treat smell loss. Those that exist, like smell training, intently sniffing concentrated odors several times a day to encourage healing and/or retrain smell circuitry, may be worth trying — but there’s not a lot of robust data that supports their efficacy. And there are no treatment options for people with total smell loss due to the severance of the olfactory nerve, among a number of other disorders. Even people who claim they’ve regained their sense of smell, either through natural healing over time or a purported treatment, often acknowledge they don’t get their full, original sense back. 

Sandra says she just tried to push through the unpleasant odor distortions that came with her smell loss. Others told me that they similarly simply accepted a shift in their sexual lives, and just lived with it. Often, this means giving up on sex and pleasure to some degree. “My interest in sex has been dulled to almost non-existence,” says Deborah McClellan, who gradually lost her sense of smell starting around 2012. She characterizes this dulling as “the loss of a simple joy.” 

But all of the experts I’ve spoken to agree that, even if smell loss takes a toll on someone’s sex life and they accept that they’re not going to get their sense of smell back, that doesn’t mean that they necessarily have to live with lessened sexual desire or enjoyment. They just have to shift their focus onto other aspects of sexual experiences, building up new arousing associations, memories, and feedback loops that get them worked up, draw them deep into a sexual moment. 

Dia Klein, a comedian who was born without a sense of smell, stresses that she has a strong sex drive and a great sex life based entirely on non-olfactory sense memories and erotic associations. “The feel of my partner’s whiskers, the way he kisses my neck, the timbre of his voice,” she says, all get her going. “I’m an active service person, too, so him fixing the dishwasher is way more of a turn-on for me than what I imagine the smell of his shirt must be like.” 

“When you don’t have a thing,” like a (complete) sense of smell, Klein stresses, either because you never had it to begin with or because you lost it somehow, “you or your body will come up with a way to compensate for it.” So long as you don’t fixate on what you’re lacking, that is. 

Boak of Fifth Sense, the smell disorder advocacy group, echoes this sentiment. “Not being able to smell my girlfriend is still the thing I miss most” about not having a sense of smell, he says. “That sense of loss has not diminished over time.” But, he says, although he was not a tactile-focused person earlier in his life, he’s learned to cultivate an appreciation for touch. Now, he says, “a simple hand on the shoulder can carry so much meaning. It can even be electrifying.” 

“You can work with your partner to explore intimacy in new ways.”

Rewriting our sense of attraction and arousal to make up for whatever we feel like we’ve lost to smell disorders — or any other sensory issue — is tricky. It takes time. Honestly, I’m still working on it myself, slowly trying to dissect what feels different about sex for me now, what senses I do and don’t draw upon in intimate moments, and what sensations I could try to lean into further. 

But this need not be lonely or tedious work. “It can be a journey of exploration with another person,” Herz points out. “You can work with your partner to explore intimacy in new ways.”

Or, put another way, smell loss can be devastating on many levels, sexual and beyond. But past that devastation, there is an invitation: To learn more about how we’ve experienced sex, and to consider all of the new ways we could explore it in the future. If I think about it this way, my smell loss starts to feel almost liberating and exciting. Even if it still sucks absolute ass overall.