Scent

So tonight I was thinking about scents. And the scents of people. Why do people smell the way they do? How can the same scent last a lifetime, like when you hug someone and it brings back forgotten memories from years before, or from your childhood. That is so weird. Are these people-scents created by the environment the person lives in, what they eat and drink, or do we all just have unique scents that we would carry with us even if we ate different, showered with different soaps and then completely left everything and bought new clothing and moved to a different country? Would we still radiate the same scent? As impossible as it seems, I almost think so.. so if people go into hiding with intricate disguises and years of aging on them.. would someone eventually be able to identify them by their scent? If you wanted to find people this way, and there was no one meticulous or extraordinary enough to be able to remember exactly a scent enough to identify a person after years, would you somehow be able to capture the scent instead? Or could you not capture it because a scent would only exist in air, which in itself is hard to just "capture" ...or on clothing, and unless it was concealed amazingly well, the scent would maybe eventually fade or take on subtle other scents that were maybe contributed by the place where the cloth was concealed or maybe by the air that had already been in the concealer before the clothing was in there. Would this change the scent enough to eliminate it's effectiveness? Or are scents vague enough that slight changes wouldn't be prominent enough to alter the full product? Earlier in the school year after not being home for a month and a half, I finally saw my family again. It was the strangest thing, all three of my little sisters gave me and hug and all three individually made some comment on how I "smell like Amy" and liked the "Amy smell"...

What? Gosh I hope the so-called Amy smell is decent because my room at school smells like trash! So being in a totally new environment w/ my clothes in a overwhelmingly musty smelling closet, new(ish) bedding, a futon that I got from someone else, eating different foods.. not to mention the mix of a roommate's fermenting smell mixing with all the rest.. and I still come home smelling like Amy? Isn't it weird how rooming with some random person can cause such a weird scent result? With my first roommate, the room always smelled like old medicine.. she had severe allergies and I think an inhaler. Second roommate, lots of hair products.. room kind of smelled sweet, but with an undertone of wait-a-minute-is-that-trash-i'm-smelling? And now the third.. the most potent person-scent I have EVER encountered... smells like old farts and a type of fermenting something baking out in the sun... and along with that, trash. It's like how when you walk into other people's homes, there is a distinct smell. Like with one friend's house that smells like mothballs, but in a good way. And after coming home to a vacant house after a week/2 week camping trip, and actually noticing for once the unique smell of your own house. It's like that but really really potent. Potent is the best way I can think of to describe it. While this 3rd room smell totally repels me, I wonder if anyone is attracted by it. All that baloney about when people didn't really shower and they were enticed by other's raw scents and by that you could almost tell if you were meant to be with someone, because you were attracted by it? Don't know.

If scents are as unique and lasting as I think they are, then shouldn't we invent some kind of scrupulous/fastidious super powerful nose contraption thing, one that could find people by their scent? Wait.. I just thought of something.. how they use bloodhounds and other type of specialized trained canines to smell a person's scent and then go find the missing child/person... hmm.. well I guess now realizing this, why don't we somehow create some technology that replicates this canine process of remembering scents and then finding things, but one that can hold the scents for longer than a canine could. A giant smelling machine - haha. I guess this would put dogs out of business though.. and they need job security just like the rest of us! Well I guess this was all just very very pointless and I hope you didn't actually read the whole thing. Sucker! hehe ;)

woof.