Surviving Scent Sensitivity in a Smelly World

You know how dogs have a really keen sense of smell? Like, they can pick up scents that humans miss?

According to Peter Tyson in his article on NOVA Science Now:

“What do dogs have that we don’t? For one thing, they possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in us. And the part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-sense-of-smell.html

Well, not to call our youngest daughter a dog, but Hope might be part canine.

She has always had an incredibly sensitive sense of smell!

When she was just a toddler, she would sputter and cover her nose whenever she sensed a smell that she didn’t like. And now that she is older, her sense of smell continues to allow her to pick out scents the rest of us do not.

This super sensitive schnoz can be a barrier to Hope’s experience of edventures such as needing to use a petrol station toilet in India, or the type of marketplace tour that often accompanies the cooking classes we are taking around the world.

Fresh markets in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam are loaded with sights, sounds and scents — which make them a special challenge for scent sensitive people like Hope.

(Please view this photo while listening to the soundtrack of a horror movie to more fully grasp the special type of horror Hope experiences walking through fish markets in SouthEast Asia.)

So, how does Hope’s sensitive schnoz survive as we drag her through the smelly world?

By offering her nose an alternate, reliably strong scent that she can access as needed that is entirely within her control.

We always have DoTerra Peppermint Essential Oil droplets with us for health reasons, but we have found that just one droplet squeezed onto Hope’s sleeve works miraculously!

With the strong aroma of Peppermint readily accessible, Hope can simply cover her nose when she catches wind of something that smells bad to her. The strong scent of Peppermint can get her through till the air clears.