You and I have been a part of the urban, contemporary folklore – a tale full of mystique with its genesis in the magic beans, not of Jack, but from the exotic land of Ethiopia. The magic beans that transport your senses to another world just with a whiff.
In the esoteric world of perfumes, these magical coffee beans are believed to help you glide from one fragrance to another, supposedly eliminating olfactory fatigue in an instant. Here, you can indulge your senses in a million different fragrances sans difficulté.
The folklore of coffee beans is about as true as the rabbit in the moon. This hocus-pocus has led many to believe that your olfactory, or nasal palette, can be endlessly reset to normal with a simple sniff of coffee beans. The truth is quite the opposite. Olfactory fatigue, or ‘nose blindness,’ as it is commonly called, occurs when your olfactory senses are overloaded. When you smell one too many perfumes, you lose the ability to distinguish one scent from another; your olfactory senses essentially go on a temporary vacation.
And then, someone—we don’t know who—came up with the idea that coffee beans might trick the nose. But our bodies are far too smart for such trickery. A study conducted in 2011 by the National Library of Medicine disproved this premise. Participants in the study were exposed to specific scents multiple times, leading to nose blindness. They were then asked to sniff coffee, lemon, or plain air before identifying another scent. According to the study, people who inhaled coffee didn’t perform any better at scent identification than those who had inhaled lemon or plain air.
Fun fact: No perfumers use les grains de café magiques to reset their olfactory palette, but use the inside of their elbow instead
So, what should you do when shopping for perfume?
Firstly, limit the number of perfumes you sniff. Don’t smell more than four in a go there’s only so much your nose can handle. Start with paper sniffing, using unperfumed strips, rather than spraying directly on your skin. This minimises olfactory interference and allows you to smell each perfume individually. Once you have paper sniffed them, try a maximum of two on yourself - one each on either wrist - and go promenade. Perfumes need about thirty minutes to develop, and how a perfume smells in the bottle versus how it smells on you can be quite different (more on this later).
Take breaks in between, and if you’re short on time, sniffing your own elbow is a much better bet than using coffee beans to reset your nose. We are constantly exposed to our body’s scent, so our olfactory sensitivity to our skin is minimal, making it the perfect neutral baseline—provided you’re not wearing any perfume.
So, I believe it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee—though not literally—because now we know it doesn’t work. You might as well enjoy a cuppa!