DRMacIver's Notebook

The scent of reality

Published: 2025-04-10

Sometimes when I’m alone, I like to smell myself.

Usually I sniff my hands or arms (sometimes my armpits) because that’s the most easily accessible way of doing this.Although, prompted by writing this, I did try sniffing my foot. It’s an interesting experiment but not nearly as pleasant. I probably won’t repeat it often. Also maybe I need to wash my feet more thoroughly and/or go around barefoot more. I also like smelling other people, but generally only do that with partners.

Why smell myself? Well, it’s weirdly comforting, for starters.

I think sometimes that’s because I smell of me - certainly that’s the big benefit of sniffing my arms - but that’s not all of it. Hands often pick up scents from what I’ve been interacting with, and that’s often even more interesting.

For example, whenever I’ve been using a measuring tape, I’ve noticed that my hands always end up smelling of a sort of metallic oil scent that I pick up from it. I think that may even be where this habit started. It’s an oddly charming smell. I could tell a story about associating it with my father’s workshop and that might even be true, but I mostly just think that it’s interesting.

I get a similar effect from using the typewriter - my hands often pick up a smell of typewriter from it. Typewriter and measuring tape are very similar smells, although I think I could probably tell the difference if I compared them side by side. I don’t know if different typewriters smell different - very likely. I’ve got two measuring tapes here next to me but they smell the same. They are from the same brand and of similar vintages, so that makes sense.

Right now, my left and right hands smell different, because prompted by thinking about scent I put on my essential oil vaporiser with some sandalwood and bergamot. I got some of the bergamot on my hands when I was doing this, so on my left hand the scent is textured between measuring tape and bergamot.Sandalwood is a much thicker oil which will barely come out of the bottle willingly, so doesn’t get all over you in the same way.

Except… actually I’m not sure that’s bergamot I’m smelling. I don’t know what it is. Some sort of essential oil fusion from the various outsides of the bottles mixing together. I had a sniff of the vapouriser directly (it’s not yet vapourising enough to give off the scent very far) and it smells like earl grey tea, because obviously that’s what bergamot smells like. I think what I’m getting off my hand is maybe… lemongrass? Certainly seems plausible. I do have a lemongrass in my collection, and I rarely use it.

My ability to discern individual scents is surprisingly bad. I feel like I should train it more.

At about this point in writing, the vapouriser got up enough heat that I suddenly got hit by a wave of very recognisable earl grey scent.

Anyway, smell and taste have a lot of range, and I think it’s actually quite easy to detect, it’s just that you very rarely receive much training in it. I’d like to do more.

Back in, I think, 2019, I did a blind gin tasting for my family for Christmas, where we tried a number of different gins.And, because I’m a jerk, one vodka and one Seedlip non-alcoholic spirit that I didn’t tell anyone were in the mix. Many of my family believed previously they couldn’t tell the difference between different gins, but when actually comparing them side by side I think it quickly became apparent that actually all of the gins had quite distinctive tastes, and they did have genuine preferences among them that they hadn’t previously noticed.

Every time I do a blind gin taste testing we come to two conclusions:

Tanqueray is everyone’s first or second favourite gin.
We do not agree about what our favourite gin is.

For example, in the gin taste testing we did then, the one I liked the most was Mason’s tea gin. I don’t think anyone else put it in their top 3, but I thought that the addition of the tea flavour was really interesting.This post is perhaps suggesting that I’m more into tea than I am, but on the other hand I am British so maybe it’s just accurately reflecting my love of tea.

I think, in general, with scents and flavours I’m drawn to interesting and complex. There’s a running joke with my paretners that I don’t like nice things, especially in drinks, because I’m drawn to complex bitter herbal flavours but this is partly because there’s so much going on in them and I really like that. In contrast, I find a lot of ostensibly “nice” things just a bit boring.

This comes up a lot in scent as well as spirits. Air freshener scents and other highly artificial scents are often very upsetting to me. Air fresheners in bathrooms are often actively upsetting to me - I can handle the naturally unpleasant smell of a bathroom, but I can’t handle the fake floral scents that are being used to cover it up.I’m actually not wild about floral scents in general, at least not inside. Fake fruit is even worse - I had to ask my partners to change washing up liquids quite early in our relationship because I absolutely couldn’t handle the “apple blossom” scented atrocity that they used.

Complexity isn’t enough though. My personal vision of hell is walking into a Lush, because I just get bombed in the face with a complete cacocophony of scents. It’s certainly complex, but it’s just noise, it’s got no depth to it.

At this point by the way the candle in my vapouriser burned down (it had a weirdly short wick from previous use and hadn’t been doing well) so I replaced it with a new candle. This gave me a chance to smell the hot wax. It’s standard paraffin wax rather than beeswax - I’ve previously experimented with beeswax candles and learned to my surprise that I actually prefer the smell of paraffin wax. I think of paraffin wax as pretty odourless, but a good up close sniff makes it clear that this isn’t the case. It’s a mild smell, but actually quite a pleasant one.

I don’t know exactly what scent is doing for me in these cases. It feels something like… connecting me up from the world I’m in. The world feels real, and I a part of it, when I’m able to smell it, and it feels like the strongest counter I have to just regarding myself as a pure information processing unit that happens to exist in a physical world.

Given that, it’s interesting that the scents I prefer seem to have relatively little connection up to the “natural”. It feels like some sort of expression of what the world I want to be connected up to is. It’s real, and complex, but it’s very much the world that we built rather than some pristine state of nature, and it feels good and real to be a part of that.