Biography old person smells

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However I Smell

One of the problems of ageing is knowing when to start complaining about being old. I received an email not long ago from a woman who had read something of mine in which I described myself, at 66, as old. She said she worked with elderly people and her 85-year-olds call people my age young. What’s more, they never refer to themselves as old. The point of my piece (written for a Swedish newspaper) was to report that I supposed I must accept that I was old because my hairdresser says, ‘Ah, bless,’ in response to whatever I say in answer to her questions. ‘Are you busy today?’ ‘Just regular working.’ ‘Ah, bless.’ ‘How was the weekend?’ ‘A friend came to stay.’ ‘Ah, bless.’ The other day, when she asked, I said: ‘I’m being interviewed by a journalist from Poland.’ ‘Ah, bless.’ I hear it too from shop assistants as they call out that I’ve

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Distillations magazine

Melanie A. Kiechle. Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. University of Washington Press, 2017. 352 pp. $35.

We sophisticated, modern Americans do our best to ward off suspect odors. Whole supermarket shelves are crowded with liquids that diffuse silently in our rooms, promising alpine freshness or flowery camouflage. Even more shelves offer row after row of products to be rubbed on or sprayed to ensure we smell like cucumbers or pine or menthol—anything but sweaty human beings. Teenaged boys have recently seized on sexy scents as the way to make themselves irresistible to intimidatingly female people. Entire households have thrown open their fönster to defumigate the enthusiastic dousings of earnest and insecure teens trying to scent themselves into coolness. (If a bit of body spray is good, surely a good, long burst will be better?)

Hasn’t it always been this way? Haven’t people always wanted to make things smell a

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Body odor

Odor produced by a living animal

Body odor or body odour (BO) is present in all animals and its intensity can be influenced by many factors (behavioral patterns, survival strategies). Body odor has a strong genetic basis, but can also be strongly influenced by various factors, such as sex, diet, health, and medication.^[1] The body odor of human males plays an important role in human sexuell attraction, as a powerful indicator of MHC/HLA heterozygosity.^[2]^[1] Significant bevis suggests that women are attracted to men whose body odor is different from theirs, indicating that they have immune genes that are different from their own, which may produce healthier offspring.^[3]

Causes

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