the google search results largely insist that other people can’t smell your period except for like one poster on reddit. if that’s what i’ve been smelling then that poster is right and the other sources are wrong
google.com/search?q=can+p
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when i kissed a woman who smelled really really good to me for the first time i was able to smell a slight metallic smell and apparently that was also a period thing. it didn’t smell bad that time though. more like it added a jazz note to her smell. mysteries
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can you smell when someone is on their period?
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Hmm. It's not something I've consciously noticed, but I don't think I've knowingly been close to someone on their period who I wasn't already scent bonded with, so I'm not sure.
(Chances are I have been and just didn't know, but I tend to maintain a lot of personal space)
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"scent bonded"? tell me moar
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Uh, like when you have a partner or someone you're very physically and sexually intimate with, you can hit a point where they just smell very good to you, even if they are in some "objective" sense currently a bit stinky. There are limits to it, but it covers a lot of sins.
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gosh that sounds wonderful. i've sort of heard people describe things along these lines but i've never heard anyone give it its own term
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I'm not sure if it's an official term. I described it to a partner and this is what they referred to it as and I liked it and thought it captured the concept well, so I kept using it.
And yeah, it's pretty great.
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I've used the term "imprinting"
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Hmm. That's good too but I think I'll stick to "scent bonding" - imprinting feels like it has some connotations I don't quite want/mean (mostly it feels less voluntary. Not that scent bonding is exactly voluntary, but it's part of a voluntary process).
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one of the many things i like about this is it strikes me as potentially a really robust way to gauge how into someone i am, in a way that is like minimally subject to various forms of self-deception?
someone else i was talking to about this mentioned that they'd had experiences where they weren't into a relationship anymore and suddenly their partner smelled very bad to them
so fascinating
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Yeah, that makes sense.
I think there's something going on here where like the smell of a person is attached to your conception of the person as a whole? The smell of them is the smell of their presence, so is good partly if that presence is good.
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i use scent a lot to understand when i'm bullshitting myself, 100%
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neato! do you have examples?
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I've always been very confident I'm not into men because a man has never really smelled good to me.
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I'm kinda suspicious of this as a heuristic really. I think the whole process of scent bonding demonstrates that how good someone smells can change depending on your emotional associations with them, and there's often a lot of weird emotional baggage in male-male interactions.
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