Certain smells can really help to calm and soothe me. On the contrary other smells can make me feel quite unwell. For some autistic people the sense of smell can be so strong that it feels like you are being force fed.
Carly, quoted in Smell | Local Government Association, collected on Neuroception and Sensory Load
As many autistic people do not ‘habituate’, a smell will remain distinct and present, though neurotypical people might only notice a smell when they initially experience it, for example when entering a room.
This week Norah and Ryan are co-hosting a scent night. Ryan has a Scentbird subscription and a queue of little vials to work through. Norah is bringing some of her favorites. Neither of us is a perfumer, and that is rather the point — this is two people who like smelling things, sitting in a room with everyone else who likes smelling things.
Norah put it best when she pitched the session: “An invitation for the community to take a whiff.” So take one. Then tell us about it. What scents do you enjoy? That question is the whole evening.
Here is why it is not a small question. Someone in our family is a scent stimmer. As a kid he sniffed everything he picked up — everything — including things that gave off fumes, like markers. Onlookers took a child exploring his world through his nose and read it as a child getting high off fumes. Sensory curiosity went in; a vice came out. He got questioned and pathologized for using a sense well.
We are going to sit with that for a while tonight, and then we are going to smell things anyway. Bring a scent you love. Bring a scent that ruins your day — those count too, and we will get to why. Or bring nothing and come to listen. Lurking is a real and honored way to show up.
Date and Time: Thursday, August 27 at 7PM Central
What We’re Sniffing
No video this week. This one is show-and-tell where the thing being shown does not travel through a screen, which turns out to be a feature.
Ryan’s Scentbird queue. A monthly fragrance subscription delivers small vials of things Ryan would never have walked into a store to buy. We will go through some of them out loud — what they claim to be, what they actually smell like, which ones are unbearable, and which ones turned out to be a glimmer.
Norah’s favorites. Her picks, her reasons. Curator’s privilege.
Whatever is in your house. This is the part that matters most. You almost certainly own something with a smell you love: a spice jar, a bar of soap, a candle, coffee grounds, an orange, vanilla extract, a book, a particular hoodie, a cat. You do not need a fragrance collection to have a relationship with smell. Go get the thing. We will wait.
And a myth we are going to take apart. Why there is a bowl of coffee beans at every perfume counter in the world, and why it has never done what everyone says it does.
The Stimpunks Frame
He wasn’t getting high. He was reading the room.
Smelling things is how some of us find out what things are.
“In Our Own Words: The Complex Sensory Experiences of Autistic Adults” — Keren MacLennan, Sarah O’Brien, and Teresa Tavassoli, in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders — surveys sensory reactivity across six modalities — visual, auditory, tactile, interoceptive, gustatory, and olfactory — and across three directions: hyperreactivity, hyporeactivity, and seeking. Olfactory seeking is a named, documented thing. It sits in the literature right next to olfactory hyperreactivity, as a way of engaging the world rather than a failure to avoid it. Our own glossary entry on stimming says the same in a single clause: “some autistic people are hyposensitive to smell and may enjoy smelling pungent objects.”
Now look at what happened to the kid. He was engaged in olfactory seeking, which is stimming, which is self-regulation and sensory seeking and expression all at once. What the adults around him saw was a suspicious behavior in need of a cause. So they supplied one, and the one they reached for was a moral panic about huffing.
Solvent abuse is real, and it is a genuinely different activity from a child holding a marker to his face because markers are interesting. The two are not hard to tell apart if you ask. Nobody asked. That is the tell.
This is the pathology paradigm doing what it does: take a sense being used competently, and reclassify it as a symptom — or, worse, as a character problem. It is also behaviorism in its native mode, fixed on the observable behavior and indifferent to the reason for it. If the goal is to stop the sniffing, you never have to find out that the sniffing was information-gathering. You just have to make the child stop, and masking will do the rest.
The framing cost far more than the fumes ever could have. It always does.
Scent is sensory hell and stimmy joy, and it is the same sense
We are not going to pretend tonight is uncomplicated. Smell is the sense with the fewest doors on it.
Smell is pervasive – it is not possible to close our nostrils as we can close our eyes.
The same modality that delivers a glimmer delivers sensory hell. From the participant quotes we keep on Neuroception and Sensory Load: “Smelling a strong smell is like being tortured, time stops and I’m nearly sick.” And: “I have had to quit jobs and refuse assignments due to my being hyperreactive to scents… I have tried but have no control over it.” That is not a preference. That is sensory trauma, and it costs people their work.
Here is the part that resists tidying up. The same person is often both. The scent stimmer in our family is olfactory hyperreactive and olfactory seeking — sniffing everything with habitual curiosity, and regularly flattened by perfume and pollution. That is a spiky profile inside a single sense. It is not a contradiction and it is not inconsistency. Seeking the input you choose and drowning in the input you did not choose are the same nervous system doing two different jobs.
Which is why “are you sensitive to smells?” is a bad question, and “what do you want to smell right now, and what do you need out of the air?” is a good one.
Our own access page says go fragrance-free. We meant it.
Time to name the obvious problem with hosting a sniffing night.
Our access work says, in the plainest possible terms: “Develop a scent policy — going scent-free will enhance accessibility.” We list fragrance-free policies alongside noise-cancelling ear muffs and CART. We are not softening that now, and we are not asking anyone to trade it away.
We do not have to, because nobody in this room shares air.
A virtual gathering is the one room where scent stimming and fragrance-free access are not in conflict. You dose yourself. In your own house. At your own pace. With your own things. You choose the intensity, you choose the distance, you choose when to stop, and you can put the lid back on mid-sentence and nobody will even know. Meanwhile the person for whom perfume is a shutdown risk can attend an entire scent night with a completely neutral nose, because our vials are seventeen hundred miles away from their sinuses.
That is a Cavendish Space move. Conflicting access needs are a design failure, not a ranking problem — so you change the design instead of picking a winner. Tonight the design does the work for free, and all we had to do was notice it.
Two things follow, and both are load-bearing:
- Nobody has to smell anything. Bodily autonomy is not suspended because the theme is scent. Coming to hear other people describe smells is full participation. Reading the chat with your nose entirely out of it is full participation.
- Descriptions are not neutral either. Vivid scent talk can turn the stomach of someone who is olfactory hyperreactive. If you are about to describe something genuinely rank, say so first. We will hold that norm out loud on the night.
The coffee beans never worked, and the reason is more interesting than the trick
There is a bowl of coffee beans on nearly every fragrance counter on earth. Sniff the beans between perfumes, you are told, and they will clear your nasal palate. Reset the nose. Start fresh.
It does not work. Somebody actually checked.
Grosofsky, Haupert, and Versteeg ran the test at Beloit College and published it in Perceptual and Motor Skills: “An Exploratory Investigation of Coffee and Lemon Scents and Odor Identification” (2011). Participants smelled three fragrances repeatedly across nine trials, then sniffed coffee beans, lemon slices, or plain air, then tried to pick out which of four fragrances was the new one. Coffee beans did no better than lemon slices, and no better than plain air. Smell scientist Avery Gilbert laid out the numbers on First Nerve: participants picked the new fragrance correctly 57% of the time after plain air, 62% after coffee beans, and 86% after lemon — with the differences between “palate cleansing” treatments not statistically significant. We are quoting the lemon number too, because hiding it would be the same sin as the beans. It is an exploratory study with a small sample, lemon is not vindicated by it, and the one thing it does show is that coffee bought you nothing over breathing. The authors put it politely: “fragrance sellers may wish to reconsider the practice of providing coffee beans.”
The mechanism was never plausible in the first place, and this is the part worth the detour.
The thing beans are supposed to fix is olfactory adaptation — the ordinary process where repeated or prolonged exposure to an odorant makes you less sensitive to that odorant specifically. Pamela Dalton’s review in Chemical Senses, “Psychophysical and Behavioral Characteristics of Olfactory Adaptation” (2000), lays out how it actually works: the magnitude and timing depend on concentration and duration of exposure, sensitivity recovers on its own once exposure stops, and — crucially — adaptation happens at multiple levels, peripheral and central. Feed an odor into one nostril and both nostrils adapt. Perceived intensity can drop a long way while the peripheral response barely budges.
So there is nothing in the nose to rinse. You are not adapting with your receptors alone; you are adapting with your brain. A strong smell cannot flush that, because that is not what is clogged. Adding coffee to a nose full of perfume gets you a nose full of perfume and coffee.
And nobody can tell you where the practice came from. Not a founding study, not a documented origin, not a perfumer’s name — a retail tradition that rose with the department-store counter and got repeated with total confidence for roughly a century.
Sit with the shape of that. An undocumented origin. A confident, universal delivery. No evidence. Survives indefinitely because everyone has always heard it.
That is the exact shape of the story told about a kid sniffing markers. Deficit ideology does not travel on evidence — it travels on repetition and confidence, and it is full of claims nobody has ever traced back to a source. If the beans could last a hundred years on a perfume counter with a whole research literature quietly next door, imagine what an unexamined story about a child can do inside a family, a classroom, or a file.
There is an honest olfactory reset, and it is already on our schedule
Here is the good news, and it is properly good: what actually restores your nose costs nothing and you already own it.
Time and clean air. Dalton’s review is clear that sensitivity recovers once exposure ends. That is the whole protocol. Minutes, not products.
Things you can do at home tonight, all of them free:
- Step outside, or open a window. Moving air is the only real palate cleanser in the building.
- Sniff your own sleeve, or the crook of your elbow. This is what perfumers actually do — and note what it is: not a strong smell to override the last one, but a familiar one you are already thoroughly adapted to. A stable baseline, not a scrub. Industry practice rather than a tested protocol, but at least the logic is the right way round.
- Drink some water and go do something else. Leave the room. Come back.
- Wait five minutes. That is it. That is the trick.
And now notice what that last one is. A five-minute pause, away from input, doing whatever your body wants — that is a bodymind break. We already put one in the middle of every Infodumplings, for entirely unrelated reasons. It turns out the evidence-based olfactory reset and the thing we schedule out of care for each other are the same five minutes. We will use ours for both.
One honest caveat, and it is the Autistic one. This entire framework — adaptation, fatigue, reset — assumes a nose that fades. Ours often does not. Many Autistic people, as the Local Government Association guidance says plainly, do not habituate: the smell stays “distinct and present” instead of dropping into the background the way it does for the person who only notices a room when they first walk into it.
So if you are waiting for a scent to fade and it never does, you have not failed at resetting. You are having a different experience of smell than the perfume industry designed its folklore around. The fix is not a better bean. It is leaving, or opening a window, or asking someone to stop wearing it — which is precisely why the fragrance-free policy exists, and why we will keep saying so on a night dedicated to loving fragrance.
Join Us
Infodumplings happens every Thursday at 7PM Central in the Stimpunks Learning Space.
Bring a scent. A perfume, a spice, a soap, a candle, a hand cream, a book, a sharpie, a plant, a cat. Bring the smell that means childhood. Bring the smell that means safety. Bring the one that ends your day on contact, because that is data too. Or bring nothing at all and come to listen — lurking is a real and honored way to show up.
- Cameras optional. Chat-only participation fully valid.
- Stims, movement, and fidget tools encouraged.
- No one will be called on. Silence is participation.
- Nobody has to smell anything. Sniffing is entirely opt-in, at whatever intensity you choose, and you can stop at any point without explaining.
- Flag it before you describe something genuinely foul.
- Screen sharing available if you want to show the bottle rather than describe it.
Want to curate a future session? Get in touch →
How the Hour Goes
| Time | What’s happening |
|---|---|
| 7:00 PM | 👋 Welcome & housekeeping — set the theme, and the norms: sniffing is opt-in, flag the foul ones |
| 7:05 PM | 👃 Norah’s favorites — her picks and her reasons |
| ~7:15 PM | 💐 Ryan’s Scentbird queue — going through the vials out loud |
| ~7:25 PM | ☕ The coffee bean myth — the study, the mechanism, and why we don’t habituate |
| ~7:35 PM | 🧠 Bodymind break — 5 minutes, do whatever you need. Also, as it happens, an actual olfactory reset |
| ~7:40 PM | 🎤 Open floor: what scents do you enjoy? |
| 8:00 PM | ✨ Cozy overflow + next week’s reveal |
Sessions run approximately one hour with cozy overflow after. Camera optional, chat always open, safe foods and stimming always welcome.
Related Glossary Entries
- Stimming
- Sensory Hell
- Sensory Trauma
- Autistic Joy
- Glimmers
- Spiky Profile
- Neuroception
- Interoception
- Bodily Autonomy
- Cavendish Space
- Access Intimacy
- Pathology Paradigm
- Deficit Ideology
- Behaviorism
- Masking
- Samefood
- Infodump
- Special Interest
- Radical Inclusivity
Reflection Questions
On the scents themselves
- What is a smell you go looking for on purpose? How long have you been quietly doing that?
- What smell means safety to you — and can you name why, or is it older than the reason?
- Is there a scent that ends your day on contact? What does the world usually expect you to do about that?
On being watched while you smell things
- Have you ever been questioned, corrected, or diagnosed for how you use one of your senses?
- What explanation did onlookers supply for something you were doing, without asking you first? Where did that explanation come from?
- Are you a seeker, an avoider, or both in the same sense at once? What does the “both” cost you when other people insist on picking one?
On the beans
- What is something you have believed and repeated for years that you have never once checked?
- Who benefits from a confident explanation that has no source behind it?
- If the honest reset is five minutes and clean air, what else in your life is being sold a product where the answer is time?
Resources
- Neuroception and Sensory Load: Our Complex Sensory Experiences — our long-form page on the eight senses, sensory load, and the participant quotes throughout this post
- Access — including the scent policy and fragrance-free guidance we are not walking back
- Stimming — the five external and three internal senses, and why we stim
- Bodymind Break — the five minutes in the middle
- Creating Cavendish Space on a Budget — sensory considerations, room by room
- Smell | Local Government Association — the non-habituation point, and a practical table of household smell sources
- MacLennan, K., O’Brien, S., & Tavassoli, T. (2022). In Our Own Words: The Complex Sensory Experiences of Autistic Adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52, 3061–3075 — hyperreactivity, hyporeactivity, and seeking across six modalities, including olfactory seeking. Open access
- Sarah O’Brien, Autistic sensory experiences, in our own words — one of the study’s authors, writing it up for the rest of us
- Grosofsky, A., Haupert, M. L., & Versteeg, S. W. (2011). An Exploratory Investigation of Coffee and Lemon Scents and Odor Identification. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 112(2), 536–538 — the coffee bean study
- Avery Gilbert, The Coffee Bean Meme: Olfactory Palate Cleanser? — First Nerve, with the numbers
- Dalton, P. (2000). Psychophysical and Behavioral Characteristics of Olfactory Adaptation. Chemical Senses, 25(4), 487–492 — adaptation is peripheral and central, and it recovers on its own
- Helen Edgar, Glimmers: Autistic Joy and Monotropism — Autistic Realms, on the moments when sensory needs, focus, and emotion align
- Helen Edgar, Building Neurodivergent-Affirming Cultures of Regulation — Autistic Realms, including the sensory sock ball with its optional few drops of scent
- Scentbird — the monthly fragrance subscription feeding Ryan’s queue
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Part of Stimpunks Recurring Events. See also: Solidarity Sesh and Watering Hole Hangs.