As reported recently in the Los Angeles Times, an article in the scientific journal PLoS ONE discovered that as people age, their scents change, and that older people tend to develop a distinct smell. Every person has a specific scent or odor associated with them, but researchers found that the smells of older people was less intense than those of younger people.
Older people also smelt more womanly.
“As you grow older, you smell more and more like a woman,” lead researcher Johan Lundstrom, a neuropsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, told the newspaper. “It’s almost as if you’re going back to what happened before puberty.”
Lundstrom told the Times that the inspiration for the study came from his own personal experience. Growing up in Sweden, his mother worked at an assisted living community there, and he would occasionally visit her at work.
More recently, Lundstrom was speaking at an assisted living community in Philadelphia, and his sense of smell immediately recalled his experiences as a boy. The smells of the two communities smelled very similar, even though they had nothing in common, and located thousands of miles apart. That’s what sparked his curiousity.
What do you think? Do seniors have a distinct smell or odor?