Anybody who gets to know that I am a Nose, usually asks me how I survive public transportation with such strong capacity of smelling?
I usually tell them that bad smell for me has no meaning anymore. "Bad" became rather interesting, or let's say what average people call 'bad smell' just challenges my mind work together with my nose to understand more the particular odor's structure.
Moreover, I tend to hate some fragrances or scents that are considered normal or even pleasent for others. As I have mentioned it many times before, tarragon's essential oil makes me want to throw up.
It's weird green sweetness along with metallic cold and disharmonic overwhelming heavy stickiness is probably the worst thing my nose have ever encoutered -including my famous horse stable visit where I almost prefered to die than breathing.
That said, public transport is actually one of my favorite experimental field, where scent-trails are changing with each station, some sources of smells ( i.e. travellers ) changing position, some getting off, some new ones coming into my scentmap. Apart from humans, I find the real metro scent not very sexy. The heavy, oily smelling cold metal handrails are carrying a rather faint olfactive prints of recent attempt to disinfection.
A few days ago in Paris, I took the metro to go to see a great new show in a theatre. Jammed inside along with a hundred parisians, I closed my eyes and let the mixture of scents, odors and smells get me.
The first thing that hit me was the breath of a young man, talking to his girlsfriend. His mouth smelled lacerated by nicotine and tar, mixed with a cheap red wine. The girl was also a smoker but she probably didn't consume wine, I could not detect that.
She smelled of a tired menthol chewing gum, and a really expensive niche perfume dried off on her skin totally unmatching her own scent and personality.
Apart from the obvious surface scents, both of them were envelopped with heavy mud and fresh cut grass - olfactively speaking of course, perhaps they were coming from a park. ( ....Or they both wore Thierry Mugler's 'fig-mud' smelling Womanity?! :)
On the other side, a lady in her 40s smelled like the latest flanker of Dior's Hypnotic Poison but her nice scent-harmony was distorted by a cheap, J'adore-trickle-down fabric softner that infected her clothes - hence her aura as well.
A dude sitting near to me, smelled so intensly familiar and comforting to me as if I was around my family. Weirdly, it made me remind of night too. I instantly saw myself in my shared bedroom in our cottage, and than it still took me few minutes to realize that the fragrance is simply very similar to a certain insect killer product called VAPE that my family keenly uses during summertime in our cottage...
A guy entered, and I got hit by his hair's smell ( and probably his feromones too... ) from a few meters far and I felt weak in the knees instantly. He smelled like a forest after rain. I tried to get closer to him with each station passed. When he was only a meter away, I had to close my eyes and control facial expressions, while olfactive orgasm was ramping in my brain.
He got off just two stations too early to fill my appetite. Before the doors closed behind him, I hesitated to become his stalker for 'another round', but I really had to hurry up for the theatre. It was only a 'One station stand'.
I got off at the Sentier. ( I would love that but the word "sentier" has nothing to do with scent, it means trail or pathway in French. )