When Smell Betrays You (And What That Says About Humans)

Shopping while blind kind of sucks.

Yeah, we’ve got AI now. Glasses, phone cameras, apps that swear they can identify products. They help, no question. But let’s be real: they’re nowhere near perfect. Stores are loud, crowded, chaotic, and sometimes you’re in a hurry. Sometimes there’s a line of people behind you. Sometimes the AI takes forever or gives you the wrong damn answer.

Image: Busy supermarket checkout with long lines of shoppers waiting. Two women sit at closed registers, distracted by phones or papers. Overhead signs read closed and 1005. Shelves of products fill the background.

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So yeah—sometimes you grab the bottle that sounds right and move on, because standing there asking your phone “IS THIS STRAWBERRY OR FUCKING MENTHOL?” while people sigh around you is exhausting. That’s how accidents happen. That’s how strawberry shampoo happens.

I didn’t notice it at the store. I didn’t care at home. Shampoo is shampoo, right? It cleans your hair. Mission accomplished. Practical guy. Wrong bottle? Whatever. Keep moving.

Image: Muscular man showering, water streaming down his body. He’s washing his hair with a sponge, holding a pink bottle of shampoo, and standing in a tiled shower.

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Except… then we were fucking.

And Desi stops, deadpan:

“Yeah, no. You need to ditch that shampoo. It’s like having sex with a girl.”

😂

Boom. Lesson learned: men and women experience the world differently, especially when it comes to sensory stuff.

Image: A digital illustration shows a romantic couple embracing. The man holds a curvy woman in a red bra and white shirt, both appearing affectionate in a cozy, warmly lit room.

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For me: wrong shampoo? Meh. Problem solved. Moving on.

For her: smell = identity, identity = mood, mood = whether your brain even stays in the room.

Strawberry shampoo isn’t just a scent. It’s sweet. Playful. Young. Feminine. And no matter how much she loved me, her nervous system was like: Why does my man smell like a teenage girl’s shower?

Fair.

That little experience made me realize something deeper. Smell isn’t just decoration. It’s memory. Expectation. Chemistry. It communicates before the brain can even process what’s happening. Some scents feel like home, some feel wrong, and some just… tell your partner the wrong story.

And here’s the part that made me pause afterward.

People have called me chauvinistic my whole life because I’m old-fashioned about gender. If you’ve got breasts and a vagina, my brain files you under woman. I’ll respect how you want to be addressed—I’m not trying to be an asshole—but instinctively, subconsciously, that’s how my wiring works.

Image: A blue cartoon car with smoke and flames says, "I IDENTIFY AS A TESLA." Other cars drive nearby, with trees, clouds, and power lines in the background.

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And apparently… I’m not alone.

Because if a fucking shampoo scent can instantly get labeled “girl” in someone’s nervous system, then this isn’t just about me being some caveman. That reaction didn’t come from ideology. It didn’t come from politics. It came from something way older and deeper: pattern recognition, memory, culture, biology, conditioning—whatever you want to call it.

Strawberry = feminine.

Apple cinnamon = masculine.

Nobody voted on that. It just… happened.

Which tells me something important: gender labeling isn’t just something people like me do. It’s something humans do, quietly, constantly, even when we swear we don’t.

You can challenge it. You can override it. You can choose how you behave. But you don’t get to pretend those associations don’t exist—especially in sex, where the body reacts faster than the brain can correct itself.

That doesn’t make anyone bad. It makes us human.

And sometimes, it means the difference between a great night… and realizing your shampoo smells like it belongs to someone else.

If you enjoy unfiltered reflections on relationships, disability, intimacy, and the weird little moments that teach us who we are, you can find more of my work here:

👉 johnnytiger.com

👉 tigertactile.com

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