Image of Fenugreek: from Flaevor website - credit goes to creator Bonchan.
It’s rumoured a lot of perfumers don’t eat certain ingredients, or they have a restricted diet. I would assume this is to avoid any factors that would interfere with their line of work and their ability to work which is to compose and analyse a fragrance in terms of formations. I mean there are several perfumers and evaluators I have met that don’t even wear fragrance themselves- so yes they take their job very seriously. (As they should)
So because I was so bored and I literally had nothing to do I decided to explore this further - what things can we eat in our diets that effects our natural body smell? There was one place to go for this and this was Reddit of course: This specific discourse appeared on r/fragrance Thread.
Image: all credits goes to Reddit - image taken from r/fragrance Reddit sub thread.
This thread was SO hilarious yet informative, there was a lot of comments from people saying to stay away from onions/garlic (any form of aliums) as one user commented they could “swear they smelt it coming out their pores the next day (after eating)”. I find this very interesting as in the Islamic religion, Muslims have been advised to stay away from prayer congregations in the mosque if they have eaten onion or garlic as apparently even the “angels” can smell it! Fascinating stuff.
Another user commented to stay alway from dairy and cheese as they were told they smelt like “sour milk and cheese” 😭😭😭 what? I laughed then but I later experienced this effect to be true……
This hypothesis was proved when I ate a fenugreek dish and refused to go out. My grandma had made “methi” (recipe taken from a friend) which is a blended purée type dish of fenugreek leaves, I had never eaten fenugreek in a large amount of quantity like this btw . The dish itself was delicious however once I ate it and I swear not even 2 hours later I could smell a distinct annoying maple syrup smell just emulating from my pores - I showered twice every day but this smell didn’t go until, I guess my body didn’t finish it’s metabolism of it, which was 2 days. However my siblings ate it and they didn’t seem to smell like maple syrup. The cloying sweet borderline maple-ly smelling smell of fenugreek had put me of it for LIFE. It’s why I also hate anything pumpkin spice scented as they overdose a maple syrup accord, and to me? It just smells like fenugreek and spices from the kitchen cupboard. So I guess I would say this is my villain origin story.