Are Perfume Lovers Quietly Losing Their Noses?

I had that rude awakening last year. My espresso smelled like toast. My beloved Guerlain Shalimar felt like vanilla fog on mute. I blamed a bad night’s sleep, not my nose. Then I read results from a huge smell test and my gut sank. Among 2,956 people who’d had COVID and 569 who hadn’t, many were tested an average of 671 days after their first COVID test. Of those who never reported a problem, 66 percent actually had hyposmia or anosmia. And of those who suspected an issue, about 80 percent were right. Two years on and still not smelling fully. That’s not a blip. That’s a shift.

Why this matters if you love perfume: a dulled nose can push you toward loudness instead of nuance. You keep spraying, or you only register top notes while the heart and base feel ghostly. It’s not your taste suddenly changing. It might be your sensory bandwidth.

I’m not a doctor, but I am a working nose. A quick self-check I use:

• Smell a lemon, coffee grounds, white vinegar, and a skin-worn perfume you know well. If any register as vague or “samey,” pause before blind-buying that next powerhouse.

Then I do a weekly “training playlist” across families. A few benchmarks that map the whole arc of a fragrance:

• Chanel No. 5 - look for aldehydic fizz, creamy jasmine, cool iris.
• Acqua di Parma Colonia - tart citrus, neroli brightness, clean mossy hum.
• Guerlain Vetiver or Encre Noire - rooty green vs inky woods contrast.
• Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan - sticky resins, herbal snap, amber warmth.
• Comme des Garçons Avignon - dry church incense, cold stone air.
• Fracas by Robert Piguet - heady tuberose and buttery white petals.
• Guerlain Shalimar - lemon sparkle melting into smoky vanilla and leather.

Spray lightly on skin and revisit at 10, 60, 180 minutes. If all you get is top-note chatter or you lose the base completely, keep training and rest your nose. Perfumers like Jean-Claude Ellena, Dominique Ropion, and Christine Nagel talk about calibration like athletes talk about muscle memory. It isn’t macho or mystical. It’s daily reps.

If your favorites suddenly feel faint, resist the urge to crank the volume. Seek texture instead. The day my Shalimar purr returned at the two-hour mark, I knew my world was slipping back into focus.