VIDEO. Françoise-Marie Santucci, anosmic for five years

Before her car accident, Françoise-Marie Santucci did not know that it was possible to lose her sense of smell, until she suffered from anosmia. “I was a smell lover. My nose still smells, my brain still deciphers, but the link between the two via the new cells isn’t terrible, that is to say, it simply doesn’t take the right branch. Now when I eat melon or tangerine it smells like curry”, she explains.

Smell, an essential sense in everyday life

Despite the fact that she no longer perceives any smell, these memories help her to overcome this lack. But sometimes they turn out to be useless when it comes to a new scent. “We realize that the smell of the person we love is no longer there either. My wife, I no longer smell her odor, nor her perfume. Recently, she changed perfume and asks me what I think. Nothing, I don’t feel anything”. Not smelling the smell of others or even your own can be disabling on a daily basis and sometimes lead to ocds. “VSAmong people who have lost their sense of smell, we are afraid of smelling bad, so sometimes we develop somewhat compulsive behaviors. We take five showers a day, we recover from the deodorant. It is special”, adds Françoise-Marie Santucci.

Apart from the pleasure that the sense of smell gives us, it alerts the brain to imminent dangers such as the smell of gas or the start of fire. “There is a great loss, that’s for sure. You have to get used to this sanitization”. From her smell disorder, Françoise-Marie Santucci has made a story about it in which she testifies to her daily life as an anosmic. “I absolutely wanted to understand how it worked before pretending to write a book. So it wasn’t easy to understand, because I’m not a scientist at all.”, says the journalist.