Is it true that smelling coffee beans can help your nose forget the scent of perfume?

It's something that happens and is frequently encountered: after listening to and smelling the second popular perfume recommended by a cosmetics store employee, a jar of coffee tucked away in a corner of the shelf will be offered to "clear your nose" from the scent you just smelled, preparing it for the new fragrance that's about to be recommended.

It's something that happens and is frequently encountered: after listening to and smelling the second popular perfume recommended by a cosmetics store employee, a jar of coffee tucked away in a corner of the shelf will be offered to "clear your nose" from the scent you just smelled, preparing it for the new fragrance that's about to be recommended.

The scent of coffee beans is therefore automatically understood to have the property of clearing our noses.

The question is, is that really true?

The human sense of smell is a system adapted for survival. We can distinguish smells of certain changes that are dangerous to life, such as the smell of rotten food, leaking gas from a kitchen, and anything that feels "abnormal."

Our nasal cavity contains more than 5 million olfactory neurons, allowing humans to distinguish up to 10,000 different smells.

However, dedicating energy to this vast amount of information overworks the brain. When we repeatedly smell something that, while different, has the same chemical composition, the brain detects that nothing is changing and it's harmless. Our brain then stops paying attention to it, and we become accustomed to the smell, to the point where we can no longer detect it the same way.

This condition is called "olfactory fatigue" or "odor adaptation," and it's one of the reasons why perfumers use certain scents that seem "unpleasant," such as extracts from the perineal glands of musk, a substance used to attract the opposite sex, or extracts from the anal glands of beavers in Canada, Europe, and Siberia, to create intrigue, depth, and a sense of contradiction in the narrative of a fragrance.

It is also the condition that fragrance creators use to test perfumes. They smell the perfume they want to test after their noses have become tired from smelling a comparison sample. If they cannot detect any odor in the second perfume they smell, it means that the two perfumes have similar components.

This technique is called "Inducing Temporary Selective Odor Fatigue" (ITSOF) and can be applied in various ways, such as checking the quality of two identical batches of the same perfume, or verifying the authenticity of a perfume by comparing its smell to an authentic one you already own.

But is it true that the aroma of coffee beans can help relieve nasal fatigue?

In reality, "there is no scientific research to confirm that coffee beans can do that."

It may only distract us temporarily, but it's not true healing. Perfumer Mandy Aftel, author of "Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent," uses three deep breaths through wool to relieve nasal fatigue, hypothesizing that the lanolin in the fabric might absorb and neutralize odors, giving the nose a break from the surrounding scents.

While Matvey Yudov, a writer and editor at Fragrantica, one of the world's largest perfume references, suggests we take a break and have a "day off" from perfume to allow our bodies to relax from this situation.

Reference: Morrin, Maureen. Scent Marketing: An Overview in “ Sensory Marketing Research: On the Sensuality of Products” , edited by Aradhna Krishna, New York: Routledge, 2010. Reference: Aftel, Mandy. “The Mysterious World of Fragrance”. Translated by Ploysang Ekkayati. Bangkok: Open Worlds Publishing, 2017. Reference: https://www.fragrantica.com/news/Take-a-Break-Olfactory-Detox-17364.html