Oh! Olfactics...

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This is my favorite type of communicating and one of the most understudied. It's based on using your sense of smell to give a message. Turns out smell can trigger emotions like fear, hunger, and those related to sex, according to pg 123 in the book. More commonly smell can be used to speak for someones social status, or living conditions. I know I may see someone who's dressed like Donald Trump of something, but as soon as I smell them they have B.O. covered by a heavy scent of Armani Black cologne. Automatically, I know either this person is living out of their car, or perpetrating to get some panties. To me if you don't have good hygiene, you don't like to take care or yourself much. Smell is one of my strongest physical strengths, so people often communicate to me without even knowing it just by walking past me. A person with a strong Irish spring scent or Japanese cherry blossom makes me turn my head every time, and this often makes me initiate a complement and conversation with them. The most common research done on olfactics is still on animals though, generally on snakes, dogs, elephants, bees, and other creatures with dominant smell receptors. We as humans like to use smell to test the value of things too, such as wines, cheese, milk, and food in general, perfumes, situations like fires, and even people. To me, we use smell as a universal tool of judgement and the determining factor of whether something, or one, is good or not. Smell is still a subject among communication that needs to be explored more closely on humans before really determining it's most important influence on our communicating skills. It's important to me though!