New research shows that stress causes people to sweat special stress hormones, which are picked up by the olfactory senses of others. Your brain can even detect whether the “alarm pheromones” were released due to low stress or high stress. Negativity and stress can literally waft into your cubicle.

flag up associations with flowers and femininity

effeminate Roman noblemen in Ciceronian invective

too highly developed olfactory sensibility, then perceived as a symptom of hysterical hyperesthesia

just when the outlines of the social order were becoming blurred. Smell, in particular, the sense of transitions (Howes 1987), of thresholds and margins, which reveals the processes by which beings and things are transformed, fascinated at this period of confusion, whilst the sense of sight was no longer able to read the hierarchies with the same assurance

warns us against equating changes in scientific understanding of a sense such as smell, what is called “osmology,” with experiential transformations. Attending to the history of smell, he tells us, is also valuable in undermining simple binary oppositions between boundaried individuals and their englobing environ- ment, the basis of Cartesian subject/object dualisms. Instead, it helps situate us in a more fluid, immersive context, where such stark oppositions are understood as themselves contingent rather than necessary

extradiegetic sense experience

might represent olfactory experiences, let alone reproduce them

‘it is through catching a whiff of oneself, and being able to distinguish that scent from all the other odours that surround one, that one arrives at a sense of one's own identity