Not exactly scientific, is it? I would use the terms artificial, synthetically produced scents, or natural scents.
Not that you’d want to permeate an Airbnb with either.
I would just ask guests to be discreet in their use of scented products. I don’t care how it’s produced. Farts are the most natural scent I can think of and I don’t want to smell that either.
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And some people are just looking to host people that follow their house rules because it is what allows them to be happy to host them…I do NOT want to host just any old guest who does things that bother me, whether it’s in the home I am living in or just a house I own.
For me it is because I abhor the smell of smoking and it affects my health and happiness. I am VERY sensitive to the smell.
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Thank you for your reply. Does this mean that there is absolutely no smoking near your rental?
I agree wholeheartedly that there should be no smoking in a rental - that is just impolite.
I allow smoking outside but I suppose it depends on the ‘outside’ space available. We have plenty of space for smoking outside but I appreciate that other hosts many not.
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If any of my guests or friends or family buy cheap Mexican butter, I make them triple wrap it and never leave it out of the fridge. The smell of it totally makes me gag. I don’t know how they manage to make the stuff smell so rancid.
Once we had a couple and the woman just drenched herself in hair spray. It smelled like a chemical plant in AND around our house. The fumes were so condensed in the bathroom that she left a sticky film on ALL surfaces in the bathroom. I had to wash the walls and door not only because of the smell but mainly because of the visual texture she created.
Some people…
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Correct. I am very sensitive to it and if I am there I will smell it. Sometimes, even if I am not there, I can smell it when they leave. I also hate it if neighbors smoke outside as I am outside a lot and can usually smell it.
Sadly, I have a very high rate of being able to smell if someone in a car on the interstate is smoking, even when I (and maybe even they) have windows all rolled up tight. Very often they prove me right by tossing their butt out the window. Drives my friends wild that my sense of smell is that good (bad…it’s a curse…I often say that my sense of smell makes up for my senses of sight and hearing).
I listened to a podcast interview about the human sense of smell with a woman who has a business taking people on “smell tours” through the city.
We are told that dogs have this fantastic sense of smell, but humans apparently also can distinguish just as many smells as dogs, we just don’t use that sense that much, relying much more on sight and sound. But if we pay attention to what we can smell everywhere we go, and concentrate on distinguishing what we smell, like a muscle we let atrophy, with use, it becomes stronger.
So this woman takes people on these walking tours, where they will focus attention on all the smells they can distinguish, and talk about them.
Smell is also strongly linked to memory and they talked about how the neural pathways of the olfactory sense and memory are connected in the brain. Whether something smells good or bad to us is strongly connected to its memory association. Someone might hate the smell of lavender because some teacher they had and hated used lavender perfume, even though they have no conscious memory of that.
I have a friend who has never smoked in her life, aside from trying a drag once as a teenager, as many people did, and finding it disgusting. But she likes the smell of cigarette smoke because both her parents smoked, and she had a happy childhood, so the smell has pleasant associations.
When I lived in Paris, I knew which metro station I was at by the smells.
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