Smelly Facts
February 13th, 2008 — Allergy, Ban, Contact Dermatitis, Coumarin, Feature, Fragrance, Perfume, Smelly Facts, allergen from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Are our favorite fragrances getting reformulated for no good reason? Ingredients like coumarin and oakmoss are increasingly getting a lot of bad publicity and gaining in notoriety. But are the claims against them substantiated? Some researchers tend to think that it might not all be as black and white as so far presented. Perhaps judgment has been passed too quickly - at least in the case of
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts: Wrongfully Accused - Does Coumarin Deserve its Bad Rep?
February 1st, 2008 — Aldehydes, Fragrance, Perfume, Smelly Facts, alloanointing, citrus, crested auklets from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
A couple of weeks ago, in a different Smelly Facts post, we saw how bees gather and use perfume in order to communicate with each other. Today we turn our attention to a very different animal and they way it uses fragrant chemicals. Alloanointing is the transfer of chemicals among members of the same species – an activity that has long been documented in mammals. According to Hector Douglas, an
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts: Perfumed Lovin’
January 18th, 2008 — Chanel, Fragrance, Perfume, Smelly Facts, no.5, reformulated, reformulation from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Since speculation about which of our favorite, classic perfumes have been reformulated has been a rather hot topic in the last couple of years among perfume lovers, I decided to include an excerpt from a 2006 issue of New Scientist I found this week for today’s Smelly Facts post. We might not yet be 100% sure about most of the fragrances we are suspecting to be reformulated, but slowly, we are
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts : A Bit of Old News
January 11th, 2008 — Bees, Feature, Fragrance, Perfume, Smelly Facts, chemicals, communication, enfleurage, mating, neotropical orchid bee, odors, scent, signaling from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Bees commonly use odors in order to communicate with each other. This behavior is especially prevalent in the context of mating. These odors, are most often produced by the bees themselves – that is, they are chemicals produced by their glands. Some bees however, make use of odors found in their environment in order to communicate. The males of the neotropical orchid bee genera, which count more
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts : Bee as Perfumer
December 10th, 2007 — Breath Garden-Tenderness Time, Feature, Making a Good Impression, Nonsymbolic Movement, Nonverbal Cues, Perfume, Shiseido, Smelly Facts from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Smelling pleasantly can certainly improve the chances of being positively evaluated – for example a pleasant smelling man will be perceived as more attractive than an unpleasant smelling one, as the experiment presented in a previous Smelly Facts post a few weeks ago demonstrated. But making a good impression does not just depend on how attractive we look. The pitch of our voice, our style of
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts: Making a Good Impression
November 26th, 2007 — Random Facts, Sense of Smell, Smelly Facts, olfaction, smell from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Do we take our sense of smell for granted? Do we lament the fact that it is nowhere near as sensitive as that of many other animals? It is still pretty remarkable. A few random facts today to remind us how special our sense of smell is.
· “We can smell smoke at concentrations well below that needed to trigger even the most sensitive of household smoke detectors.”
· “We can distinguish among
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts: A Collection of Little Facts
November 16th, 2007 — Feature, Fragrance, Smelly Facts, attractiveness, body odor, experiment, geranium, odors, olfaction, rubber, study from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Visual cues -such as symmetrical features- are of great importance when judging how attractive a face is. Sensory cues however (such as a person’s voice) also play a big role in whether a face will be perceived as attractive. (Demattè et al., 2007) Could the presence (or indeed absence) of certain smells affect the perceived attractiveness of a face as well? “Olfactory Cues Modulate Facial
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts: Odors & Perceived Attractiveness
November 2nd, 2007 — Smelly Facts, gender differences, odor, olfaction, scent from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Perfume enthusiasts often marvel at the individual differences that emerge when one person’s experience of a scent is compared to another’s. Our individual perception of a scent is likely tied not only to life experiences that have shaped the way we perceive certain smells, but to constitutional differences as well. One very surprising and important variable that plays a role in olfactory
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts: Olfaction and Gender Differences
October 12th, 2007 — Sense of Smell, Smelly Facts, anosmia, olfaction from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Anosmia, the general lack of olfaction, can be congenital – that is, a person can be born anosmic. Alternatively, anosmia can occur later in life, either due to brain damage or because of vitamin A deficiency. In contrast, Specific Anosmia is the inability to detect the smell of a single chemical. A small percentage (2%-3%) of the general population for example, is unable to detect the smell of
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts: A Glance at Anosmia
October 4th, 2007 — Olfactory Receptors, Sense of Smell, Smelly Facts from Divina @ Fragrance Bouquet
Have you ever heard others say that the adult brain has a fixed number of neurons and is unable to generate new ones once these die out? Indeed it was traditionally believed among scientists that the adult vertebrate brain could only lose neurons, never gain. (Kalat, 2007) Recently though, a small number of exceptions have been found. Among them, and of special interest to us of course, are the
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Continue reading → Smelly Facts : Neuron Renewal
