Snowflakes skittered in the wind, and Shams leaned forward to pull my shawl tighter.  For a passing moment, I stood frozen, inhaling his smell.  It was a mixture of sandalwood and soft amber with a faint, crisp tang underneath, like the smell of earth under the rain.

-Excerpt from The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi
by Elif Shafak, Penguin Books

What a marvellous description of Sham’s smell!  This book is a feast in itself, and as I savoured these words this morning, I began thinking about our natural scent and how rare it is to both reveal it, and smell it on others.

We spend a great deal of time and money masking our natural odours, often considering them antisocial, with mouthwash, deodorants, perfumes, and scented creams etc.  Even the hormones in our foods and the contraceptive pill may have a hand in obscuring our natural smell.  Aristotle himself said that pleasant odours contribute to the well-being of mankind, but if you consider that our natural scent is important for primal things such as sussing people out and finding a mate, could we be inadvertently paralysing one of our key senses?

In The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour, Michael Stoddart says that our gut reaction to the people we meet has something to do with a subconscious awareness of the pheromones they produce.  Smell, whether overt or perceptible only at a subconscious level, has a huge impact on whether we like someone or not, and can even impact who we developfriendships, relationships and business partnerships with. Could this be the reason why divorce is so high and I am still single? Was my soulmate’s true scent masked by laundry detergent and his shower gel?!

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