Regularly Whiffing Essential Oils Can Retrain Lost Sense of Smell

The simple therapy likely exploits the neural plasticity of the olfactory system.

kerry grens
| 5 min read

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ANDRZEJ KRAUZE

As a postdoc in the late 1970s, Charles Wysocki visited a lab in New York City, where he helped put together olfactory test kits to be used in determining the genetics of smelling certain odors. One of the compounds in the battery was androstenone, a pig pheromone that for about half the human population evokes either woody muskiness or stale urine. The other half—Wysocki included—can’t smell it at all. “Little did I know I’d be getting it all over my clothing,” he says, which probably made for a few wrinkled noses on the subway ride home.

His stint putting together the kits lasted just a week, and Wysocki didn’t have the need to test androstenone again until 1980, when he launched his own research group ...

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Meet the Author

  • kerry grens

    Kerry Grens

    Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.

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