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Nonenal & Body OdorHeightened Sense of Smell in Menopause: What Has Been Measured
Smelling more and smelling better are two different measurements, and in the one study that compared them directly they moved in opposite directions in the same people.
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In this guide
- What readers are actually describing
- Detecting a smell and finding it strong are two different measurements
- Nobody has measured it in perimenopause
- What your own rating of your nose really tracks
- The headache nobody mentions in these threads
- Three things that are not a sharper nose
- What a bar of soap can do here, ours included
- What to do instead of buying something
- The bottom line
Somewhere in the forties, a particular complaint starts turning up in menopause threads with the regularity of a bus timetable. Not I smell bad — though that one is there too. The other one: I can smell everything. The fridge through a closed door. Who was in the office corridor before you got there. A shampoo that was fine for a decade and is now intolerable.
Almost everywhere it is discussed, this is treated as settled: hormones have sharpened your nose. The measured evidence neither supports that nor quite contradicts it. What it shows is more useful — that detecting a smell and finding it strong are two separate measurements, that they have been recorded moving in opposite directions in the same people, and that the version readers describe has never been tested in this group at all.
The short version
- Smelling more and smelling better are measured separately, and they can come apart. In the one window where both were measured together, they did: women in the luteal phase needed more odour before noticing it, and rated what they did notice as stronger.
- Nobody has measured it in the transition. Pairing hyperosmia with menopause, perimenopause, estrogen or oestrogen returns no records at all.
- How you rate your own nose tracks how much odours bother you, not how you score on a smell test — which is why it is never spring flowers.
- Nearly half of people with migraine report odour hypersensitivity. The best-evidenced explanation here, and not a hygiene problem.
What readers are actually describing
Searching one subreddit for the single word smell, sorted by newest, returns a year of threads on this. There is a recurring vocabulary — bloodhound, super sniffer, superpower I did not ask for — and a recurring list of what gets smelled. Unwashed hair across a street. Cooking meat. Cigarette smoke from a passing car. A forgotten iron, three rooms away.
Notice what is missing from that list. Nothing nice is on it.
“Unfortunately it's never spring flowers I'm smelling.”
The second thing worth noticing is that two different experiences are filed under one heading. Some readers describe detection: knowing who walked down a corridor. Others describe aversion, which is a claim about a different part of the system. In an early-October thread on cooking smells, readers described banning cooking in the house and dry-heaving over onions. Nobody there reported detecting anything at a greater distance — only being unable to tolerate what they had always been able to smell.
“My nose seems to be what is plaguing me.”
Detecting a smell and finding it strong are two different measurements
A detection threshold is found by presenting one odour at progressively weaker dilutions until you stop noticing it: a measure of the equipment. An intensity rating asks how strong a given odour seems to you: a measure of the experience. They are not the same number and they do not have to agree.
They have been measured together. In a study of 80 people given the Sniffin’ Sticks battery twice, with intensity and pleasantness ratings for n-butanol alongside, women in the luteal phase showed higher thresholds — needing more odour before detecting it — and higher intensity ratings for the same substance (Derntl et al., 2013). Detecting less; rating it stronger. That is the shape of what readers describe, and it is not a sharper nose.
The cycle work either side of it shows how unsettled this is even where it has been studied properly. One study of 332 women tested at a single cycle phase, with 15 more tested at all four phases using amyl acetate sniff bottles, found thresholds lowest at ovulation and highest during menstruation — and its 83 post-menopausal controls had higher thresholds than cycling women at ovulation (Navarrete-Palacios et al., 2003). A 2021 study was designed explicitly to “clarify conflicting findings” on the question (Stanić et al., 2021). Hormonal state does move olfactory performance around; which direction depends on what you measure.
Nobody has measured it in perimenopause
The clinical word for an abnormally acute sense of smell is hyperosmia. Pairing it with menopause in a PubMed title-and-abstract search returns zero records; widening the second term to perimenopause, estrogen and oestrogen still returns zero. Searching olfaction together with perimenopause returns exactly one paper, and it runs the other way round — it measured what exposure to essential oils did to salivary estrogen (searched 2 November 2026).
Put a second absence beside that. The NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders defines four smell disorders on its smell disorders page — hyposmia and anosmia, meaning reduced or absent detection; parosmia, “a change in the normal perception of odors”; and phantosmia, “the sensation of an odor that isn’t there.” Hyperosmia is not among them. Every disorder listed runs towards less smelling or wrong smelling, never more — and the page is not avoiding hormones, since aging and hormonal disturbances are both on its list of causes. It simply does not recognise more sensitive as the thing that goes wrong.
Where noses have been measured in this age band, they measure worse rather than better. Eighty women, twenty each in four groups — reproductive age, and 0–5, 6–10 and more than 10 years postmenopause — took threshold and identification tests; both differed between groups, but after adjustment for age the threshold differences were no longer significant, and the identification effect that survived ran downwards (Atalay et al., 2025). Age did most of the work. Sensitivity to Exaltolide, a perfumery musk, tracked blood estradiol across 60 women: 5.8 at ovulation against 0.3 after menopause (Clarós et al., 2021) — lower estrogen, less sensitivity.
The one study that records the reader experience records it as experience: focus groups with 40 women in Ireland, mean age 58, produced a consistent theme of chemosensory change — diminished taste set against heightened smell (O’Donovan et al., 2025). Women’s own accounts, systematically collected. Not a measurement of anyone’s nose.
What your own rating of your nose really tracks
Here is the study that makes the “never spring flowers” observation land. Researchers gave 117 adults with no olfactory disorder the extended Sniffin’ Sticks test, and separately asked how much odours mattered to their liking of new places and people, and how much odours annoyed them. Self-rated smell ability and odour annoyance both lined up with those affective scores. Neither correlated with the smell test results at all. The authors’ own reading is that a tendency to perceive odours in affective terms may be associated with overestimating your olfactory ability (Knaapila et al., 2017). What did predict performance was exposure: how many herbs and spices someone ate correlated with odour identification, but not with threshold or discrimination. Familiarity teaches you to name smells; it does not sharpen your nose.
That is not an oddity of one small sample. The 2,491-person study above measured self-report alongside its odour test, and the two came apart worst in the group whose noses had changed most: self-reported impairment ran at 9.5% against a measured 24.5%, and among 80- to 97-year-olds the sensitivity of self-report — how often people whose test said impaired said so themselves — was 12% for women and 18% for men (Murphy et al., 2002).
So people are poor witnesses to their own sense of smell in both directions at once: slow to notice a real decline, and inclined to overestimate acuity when odours bother them. Which gives the asymmetry a plain reading. Genuine improvement in detection would be indiscriminate — jasmine and coffee would sharpen along with the bins. When the change runs only in the unpleasant direction, the economical explanation is that the reaction changed, not the receptor.
The headache nobody mentions in these threads
There is one well-evidenced mechanism for a sudden, one-directional intolerance of strong smells, and it came up in none of the threads we read. Osmophobia is aversion or hypersensitivity to odours during a headache attack. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 58 studies covering 22,299 patients with migraine and put its prevalence at 47.8% (95% CI 42.0–53.6%). Attacks triggered by an odour occurred in 40.1% of patients, with perfume as the primary trigger, and people with osmophobia were at greater risk of light sensitivity, aura and nausea, with odds ratios of 1.45, 1.66 and 1.73 (Briggs et al., 2025). The authors caution that true prevalence is hard to establish, because studies were selected on whether they reported osmophobia at all.
It is also where this literature and the menopause literature almost touch and then do not. Pairing osmophobia with menopause returns three records, all three headache epidemiology: sex differences in migraine, cluster headache and sex hormones, and a characterisation of allodynia. Not one studies smell sensitivity in menopausal women; the connection exists only from the headache side.
None of which is a diagnosis. It is a question worth taking to an appointment: strong smells arriving with headache, light sensitivity or nausea is a recognised pattern with recognised management, and has nothing to do with how often you wash.
Three things that are not a sharper nose
Smelling something that is not there. A search of one perimenopause subreddit for phantom returned 29 threads, nine of them about smelling things nobody else could: exhaust fumes, musty or mildew odours, blue cheese, burning and, in one thread, soap. The NHS lists “smelling things that are not there (phantosmia), like smoke or burnt toast” among changes to the sense of smell, and advises seeing a GP if your sense of smell has not returned to normal in a few weeks. A clinical route, not a shopping one.
Being convinced you smell when others cannot detect it. A different question again, with a name and a research literature, written up separately in can you smell your own body odor. And if the two smells worrying you are your own sweat and your own skin oil, those come apart too — the subject of perimenopause body odor.
A medication. Google’s suggestions here now carry a GLP-1 variant, so: the published evidence is one case. A 41-year-old woman on semaglutide for 24 weeks had stable objective scores and normal taste testing, yet afterwards reported marked subjective olfactory discomfort — 48 out of 50 on a visual analogue scale — with parosmia. The authors titled it a case of symptom–test discrepancy and called for large studies (Lee & Min, 2025); a 2026 review of the drug class goes no further than “recent evidence suggests clinical implications for chronic sinusitis and olfactory disorders” (Anderson et al., 2026). One patient is a reason to mention it to whoever prescribed it, not to stop a medicine. Hormone therapy raises the same question from the other side, measured in does HRT cause body odor.
What a bar of soap can do here, ours included
A lot of these threads are quietly about washing. People describe triple-washing their hair and still smelling scalp, showering twice a day, scrubbing. That is the part we have a commercial interest in, so here is the honest version.
A rinse-off bar removes oil and whatever is sitting on the skin surface. If what changed is how smells are perceived, nothing on your skin is the variable, and no amount of washing will move the number. Our own bar is aimed at 2-nonenal, the aldehyde identified in older people’s skin surface lipids and described in the original paper as greasy and grassy (Haze et al., 2001); the published descriptions are collected in what does nonenal smell like. Cooking meat, cigarette smoke, unwashed hair and perfume are not that molecule, or even that chemistry. A persimmon tannin bar is the wrong tool for every smell named in the threads above, ours included.
The one useful product implication points away from buying more rather than towards it: while strong smells are bothering you, a scented wash works against you. Fragrance-free is the safer side of that line — a point that applies across the category, as our persimmon soap comparison sets out.
TanniBar Persimmon Tannin Bar
If you want a fragrance-free bar while smells are bothering you, TanniBar is the only one of the five we compare that is sold with no fragrance at all.
Check price →We own TanniBar and earn from sales. 30-day refund, no return needed.What to do instead of buying something
- Run the pillowcase comparison above rather than sniffing yourself, and get a second nose to judge it blind.
- Keep two weeks of notes. What the smell was, when it arrived, whether headache, nausea or light sensitivity came with it, and where you were in your cycle if you still have one. If it clusters, you have something concrete for an appointment.
- Change the air before you change the soap. Extraction while cooking, laundry done sooner, less scent in the house. These cost nothing and address the only part of the system you can adjust.
When to see a doctor
The NHS advises seeing a GP, though not urgently, if body odour has not got better after treating it yourself and it is affecting your self-esteem, you notice a change in how it usually smells, or you suddenly begin to sweat much more than usual. It names conditions such as diabetes, kidney disease and liver disease, and medicines such as antidepressants, among things that can make body odour worse. Separately, if you are smelling something nobody else can, or familiar things smell wrong, it advises seeing a GP if your sense of smell has not gone back to normal in a few weeks. And if strong smells arrive alongside headache, nausea or light sensitivity, say so. Nothing here is medical advice or a diagnosis.
The bottom line
The sentence people reach for — my sense of smell has got stronger — compresses three claims: that detection improved, that intensity rose, and that tolerance fell. Only the first is what the words literally mean, and it is the one with no supporting measurement in this group at all. The second has been measured moving in the opposite direction from detection, in the same people. The third has a large, well-evidenced literature behind it that nobody in these threads mentions.
The three have different answers. A nose that detects more needs nothing. A reaction that has got stronger needs less perfume in the house and, sometimes, a conversation about headaches. A conviction that you smell needs a comparison rather than a product. None of them needs a stronger soap, and we would rather say so than sell you one.
See how the five persimmon soaps compare →
Frequently asked questions
Is a heightened sense of smell a menopause symptom?
It is very widely reported and almost entirely unmeasured. A title-and-abstract search pairing hyperosmia, the clinical term for an abnormally acute sense of smell, with menopause returns no records at all, and widening it to perimenopause, estrogen and oestrogen still returns none. The NIH's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders defines four smell disorders on its smell disorders page — hyposmia, anosmia, parosmia and phantosmia — and hyperosmia is not among them, although its list of causes of smell disorders does include both aging and hormonal disturbances. Where noses have actually been tested around menopause, the measurements point the other way.
So why does everything smell so strong?
Because detecting an odour and judging it strong are two separate measurements, and they can move apart. In a study of 80 people given the Sniffin' Sticks battery twice, women in the luteal phase of the cycle had higher detection thresholds — meaning they needed more of the odour before noticing it — and at the same time gave higher intensity ratings to n-butanol. Detecting less, rating it stronger. The sentence people use, everything smells stronger, is an intensity statement, not a detection one, and intensity is the part that is easiest to shift.
Does it happen before periods too?
The cycle has been measured more than menopause has, and the results do not fully agree. One study of 332 women tested at a single cycle phase, plus 15 tested at all four phases of one complete cycle, found detection thresholds for amyl acetate lowest at ovulation and highest during menstruation. A later study found higher thresholds in the luteal phase. A 2021 study was designed specifically to clarify these conflicting findings, measuring women across four consecutive phases alongside male, postmenopausal, contraceptive-using and anovulatory control groups. The honest summary is that cycle phase does appear to affect olfactory performance and that the direction depends on which aspect you measure.
Why is it always bad smells and never nice ones?
That pattern is itself a clue, and there is a study about it. Researchers gave 117 adults without olfactory disorders the extended Sniffin' Sticks test, and also asked how important odours were to their liking of new places, things and people, and how much odours annoyed them on average. Self-rated smell ability and odour annoyance both tracked those affective scores. Neither correlated with the actual smell test results. The authors suggest that a tendency to perceive odours in affective terms may be associated with overestimating your own olfactory ability. If a nose had genuinely sharpened, pleasant smells would sharpen with it.
Could this be connected to headaches?
It is worth raising with a doctor, because the overlap is large. Osmophobia — aversion or hypersensitivity to odours during an attack — was found in 47.8% of people with migraine in a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 58 studies covering 22,299 patients, with odour-triggered attacks in 40.1% and perfume named as the primary trigger. People with osmophobia were at greater risk of other sensory disturbances including light sensitivity, aura and nausea. The authors caution that the true prevalence is hard to establish because studies were selected on whether they reported osmophobia at all. If strong smells arrive with a headache, light sensitivity or nausea, that is a pattern a clinician can work with.
Can weight-loss injections affect your sense of smell?
The published evidence is currently one case. A 41-year-old woman taking semaglutide for 24 weeks was tested before and after with a validated olfactory questionnaire, psychophysical testing and chemical gustometry. Her test scores stayed stable and her taste testing stayed normal, yet after treatment she reported significant subjective olfactory discomfort, scoring 48 out of a maximum 50 on a visual analogue scale, with reduced quality of life and parosmia. The authors present it as a mismatch between subjective and objective assessment and call for large long-term studies. One patient is a reason to mention something to a prescriber, not a reason to stop a medicine.
Will persimmon soap help?
Not with this. A rinse-off bar removes oil and whatever is sitting on the skin surface, which does nothing at all if what changed is how smells are being perceived. Persimmon tannin soap is aimed at 2-nonenal, whose published odour descriptions are greasy, grassy and fatty — and the smells readers describe in these threads are cooking meat, cigarette smoke, unwashed hair and perfume, which are different molecules entirely. If anything, a scented product is the wrong move while smells are bothering you; fragrance-free is the safer choice.
Sources
- Derntl B., Schöpf V., Kollndorfer K., Lanzenberger R. (2013). Menstrual cycle phase and duration of oral contraception intake affect olfactory perception. Chem Senses 38(1):67-75. (80 healthy participants: 20 women taking oral contraceptives, 40 women without, divided into follicular and luteal phase, plus men. Olfactory performance assessed twice with the "Sniffin' Sticks" battery, with intensity and pleasantness ratings of n-butanol collected. "In the luteal phase, higher thresholds and higher intensity ratings for n-butanol emerged." Duration of oral contraception correlated positively with olfactory performance. Cited here for the dissociation between threshold and intensity in the same people.)
- Navarrete-Palacios E., Hudson R., Reyes-Guerrero G., Guevara-Guzmán R. (2003). Lower olfactory threshold during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle. Biol Psychol 63(3):269-79. (332 women aged 13-49 tested once in the follicular, ovulatory, luteal or menstrual phase, plus 15 women tested at each phase across one complete cycle. Control groups: 83 post-menopausal women aged 47-86, 60 pre-pubertal girls and 183 men. Detection thresholds determined with sniff bottles of amyl acetate. "Thresholds differed significantly across the cycle and were lowest during the ovulatory and highest during the menstrual phase. Thresholds for all control groups were higher than for the cycling women during the ovulatory phase.")
- Stanić Ž., Pribisalić A., Bošković M., et al. (2021). Does Each Menstrual Cycle Elicit a Distinct Effect on Olfactory and Gustatory Perception? Nutrients 13(8):2509. (Designed explicitly to "clarify conflicting findings on the influence of the menstrual cycle on olfactory and gustatory perception". Women assessed during four consecutive phases of one complete cycle (n=21) compared with women measured across the same phases over two cycles (n=29), alongside control groups of men (n=17), postmenopausal women (n=14), oral contraceptive users (n=10) and women with an anovulatory cycle (n=8). Olfactory threshold, discrimination and identification tested with the "Sniffin' Sticks" kit.)
- Knaapila A., Raittola A., Sandell M., Yang B. (2017). Self-Ratings of Olfactory Performance and Odor Annoyance Are Associated With the Affective Impact of Odor, but Not With Smell Test Results. Perception 46(3-4):352-365. (117 adults without olfactory disorders, 83 women and 34 men, aged 18-69, mean age 32. Objective performance measured with the Sniffin' Sticks Extended test; odour importance measured with the Affective Impact of Odor scale alongside average odour annoyance. "Self-rated olfactory acuity and odor-related annoyance were associated with the Affective Impact of Odor scores, but neither correlated with the smell test results." "Our results suggest that a tendency to perceive odors in affective terms may be associated with overestimation of olfactory abilities." In a subset of 44 participants, the number of herbs and spices consumed correlated with spice odour identification (r = .50) and with the identification subscore of the Sniffin' Sticks test (r = .49), but not with threshold or discrimination.)
- Briggs E.E., Shah A.H., Nguyen S.A., Curtis C.J., Duffy A.N., Soler Z.M., Schlosser R.J. (2025). Osmophobia in Patients With Migraine: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. World J Otorhinolaryngol Head Neck Surg, online ahead of print. (Fifty-eight studies included, n = 22,299 patients. "The prevalence of osmophobia among patients with migraine was 47.8% [95% CI: 42.0%-53.6%]. Migraine attacks triggered by odor occurred in 40.1% [95% CI: 32.7%-47.8%] of patients with perfume as the primary trigger. Patients that experienced osmophobia were at greater risk of experiencing other sensory disturbances, such as photophobia, aura, and nausea (OR = 1.45, 1.66, 1.73, respectively, all p < 0.0001)." The authors' own caveat: "true prevalence of osmophobia is hard to discern as studies were selected based on reporting of osmophobia".)
- Atalay M., et al. (2025). Is there a relationship between olfactory dysfunction and duration of menopause? Acta Otorhinolaryngol Ital. (Eighty women, twenty in each of four groups: reproductive period, and postmenopausal 0-5, 6-10 and more than 10 years. All had a full ear, nose and throat examination followed by an odour threshold test and an odour identification test. "There was a statistically significant difference between the groups in terms of age, odour threshold test and odour identification test (p < 0.001, p = 0.016, and p < 0.001, respectively). Age adjusted results indicated that there were no statistically significant difference in odour threshold test scores between groups compared to the reference group 1. However, women in group 3 were 90% less likely to have higher odour identification test scores.")
- Clarós P., Remacha J., Clarós-Pujol A., Pujol C., Clarós A. (2021). Why the olfactory acuity to Exaltolide test is different in women? Acta Otolaryngol 141(10):1-6. (Sensitivity to Exaltolide, a synthetic musk used in perfumery, tracked blood estradiol across 60 women: an average score of 5.8 at ovulation, when estradiol averaged 368 pg/ml, against 0.3 after menopause, when it averaged 14 pg/ml. One musk molecule rather than body odour, and lower estrogen went with less sensitivity, not more.)
- O'Donovan C.B., et al. (2025). From Disruption to Control: Insights from Focus Groups Exploring Nutrition and Chemosensory Changes During Menopause. Nutrients. (Focus groups with 40 women in Ireland, mean age 58, produced a consistent theme of chemosensory change: diminished taste set against heightened smell and selectively intensified sweetness, prompting compensating habits such as more salt, more spice and stronger coffee, plus new aversions. Women's own accounts, systematically collected and analysed — not a measurement of olfactory function.)
- Lee H.J., Min H.J. (2025). Subjective Olfactory Impairment in a Patient Undergoing Anti-Obesity Pharmacotherapy: A Case of Symptom-Test Discrepancy. Life (Basel) 15(9):1349. (A single case report. A 41-year-old woman received the GLP-1 receptor agonist semaglutide for 24 weeks, assessed before and after with the Questionnaire of Olfactory Disorders, the Yonsei Olfactory Function Test and chemical gustometry. "At baseline, the patient had no olfactory complaints and showed normal test results. After treatment, she reported significant subjective olfactory discomfort (visual analog scale score: 48, maximum: 50), with decreased quality of life and parosmia, despite stable Yonsei Olfactory Function scores and normal gustatory function." The authors state that "further large-scale long-term studies are required".)
- Anderson B.J., Van Daele D.J., Claussen A.D., Tanenbaum Z., Owen S.R. (2026). Implications of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists in Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery: A Review. Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol 135(10):801-809. (A review of effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists across the head and neck. On smell specifically: "GLP-1 receptor signaling is involved in sinopulmonary inflammatory cascades and recent evidence suggests clinical implications for chronic sinusitis and olfactory disorders." Cited here only to show that chemosensory effects of this drug class are an active review topic rather than a settled finding.)
- Murphy C., Schubert C.R., Cruickshanks K.J., Klein B.E., Klein R., Nondahl D.M. (2002). Prevalence of olfactory impairment in older adults. JAMA 288(18):2307-12. (Population-based, cross-sectional study of 2,491 Beaver Dam, Wisconsin residents aged 53 to 97, tested with the San Diego Odor Identification Test and also by self-report. "The mean (SD) prevalence of impaired olfaction was 24.5% (1.7%). The prevalence increased with age; 62.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], 57.4%-67.7%) of 80- to 97-year-olds had olfactory impairment." And on self-report: "Self-reported olfactory impairment was low (9.5%) and this measure became less accurate with age. In the oldest group, aged 80 to 97 years, sensitivity of self-report was 12% for women and 18% for men." Cited here both because the measured trajectory of olfactory ability with age runs downwards rather than upwards, and because self-report tracked it poorly.)
- PubMed title-and-abstract searches on heightened smell and menopause, run on 2 November 2026. (hyperosmia[TIAB] AND menopause[TIAB] returns 0. Widening it to hyperosmia[TIAB] AND (menopause[TIAB] OR perimenopause[TIAB] OR estrogen[TIAB] OR oestrogen[TIAB]) also returns 0. olfact*[TIAB] AND perimenopaus*[TIAB] returns 1, and it is a study of essential oil exposure measuring salivary estrogen concentration — the opposite causal direction to the one readers are asking about. osmophobia[TIAB] AND menopause[TIAB] returns 3, walked in full: a nationwide home-based study of sex differences in migraine, a study of gender differences in cluster headache and sexual hormones, and a population-based characterisation of allodynia in migraineurs. All three are headache epidemiology; none is a study of menopausal smell sensitivity.)
- NIDCD (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, NIH): Smell disorders (accessed 2 November 2026). Defines hyposmia as "a reduced ability to detect odors", anosmia as "the complete inability to detect odors", parosmia as "a change in the normal perception of odors" and phantosmia as "the sensation of an odor that isn't there". Hyperosmia is not defined or listed on the page. The causes listed are aging, sinus and other upper respiratory infections, smoking, growths in the nasal cavities, head injury, hormonal disturbances, dental problems, exposure to certain chemicals such as insecticides and solvents, numerous medications including some common antibiotics and antihistamines, radiation for treatment of head and neck cancers, and conditions that affect the nervous system such as Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease.
- NHS: Lost or changed sense of smell (accessed 2 November 2026). Lists "smelling things that are not there (phantosmia), like smoke or burnt toast" among changes to the sense of smell, and advises seeing a GP, non-urgently, if "your sense of smell does not go back to normal in a few weeks". The GP will check for obvious causes such as sinusitis or nasal polyps and may refer on.
- NHS: Body odour (BO) (accessed 2 November 2026). Advises seeing a GP, though not urgently, if body odour has not got better after treating it yourself and "it's affecting your self-esteem", "you notice a change in how it usually smells", or "you suddenly begin to sweat much more than usual". Names "having a condition like diabetes, kidney disease or liver disease" and "certain types of medicine, such as antidepressants" among things that can make body odour worse.
- Haze S., Gozu Y., Nakamura S., Kohno Y., Sawano K., Ohta H., Yamazaki K. (2001). 2-Nonenal newly found in human body odor tends to increase with aging. J Invest Dermatol 116(4):520-4. (2-Nonenal, "an unsaturated aldehyde with an unpleasant greasy and grassy odor, was detected only in older subjects (40 y or older)". The molecule was generated when omega-7 unsaturated fatty acids in skin surface lipids were oxidatively degraded. The authors were affiliated with Shiseido, a cosmetics company.)
- r/Menopause, "Super smeller", posted 3 September 2026. (A 47-entry thread in which readers describe an unusually acute sense of smell during and after the transition. Read for this article as evidence of how the experience is described; the smells named are almost entirely unpleasant ones, several readers report phantom smells alongside the heightened sense, and several describe smelling themselves and washing repeatedly in response.)
- r/Menopause, "Food smells", posted 3 October 2026. (A thread in which readers describe nausea and aversion triggered by cooking smells rather than a general improvement in smell detection, including readers who have stopped cooking at home. Read for this article as evidence that much of what gets called a heightened sense of smell is described in terms of aversion.)
- r/Perimenopause: subreddit search for "phantom", sorted by new over one year, run on 2 November 2026. (Returned 29 threads, of which nine are specifically about smelling things that are not there, posted across twelve months: two titled simply "Phantom smells", plus threads on exhaust fumes, musty or mildew odours, blue cheese, phantom smells and noises, soap, and two general "is anyone else" and "any tricks to stop" threads. Cited as evidence that the phantom-smell question recurs rather than for any claim made in the threads.)
