For an extra layer of toughness, I tend to gravitate toward leather fragrances. It helps to feel protected by the idea of a thicker skin that shields the body from the elements. However, leather is just that—a skin, and one that can be damaged easily. Last week, I went to an event and everyone was given a name tag sticker. It wasn’t warm enough for me to want to take my leather jacket off, so I stuck the tag right on it. I was there to listen to a panel discussion and didn’t even do any networking the whole time. An hour and a half later, I peeled the sticker off and to my dismay, the adhesive side was covered in black dots… and, you guessed it, the corresponding area on my jacket was now a patch of white dots where the material had come off.

I tried some temporary tattoo body paint that has seldom been used for its intended purpose, which has helped, but the sheen doesn’t quite match the rest of the jacket. I’ve ordered some leather conditioner that contains a resin to bind the fibers, so will see how that goes. It promises to be leather scented, too.

Now on to the topic of the title. Current guidance in the United States is for everyone aged 5 years and older to get an updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine. I asked the pharmacist who gave me my jab if it was going to become an annual thing and he said it was. This was on Saturday afternoon and I got Spikevax (the mRNA vaccine by Moderna). The next day, my arm was sore at the injection site as expected, but I had no other reactions.

Yesterday—Monday—I woke up and realized almost immediately that I couldn’t smell the usual things I smelled, such as bathroom scents (both pleasant and unpleasant ones) and coffee brewing. Or any weak scents up close. I could smell stronger aromas up close. My nose was not congested at all. My diminished sense was accompanied by that strange and familiar (from when I lost my sense of smell for a few days when I had COVID last year) hollowness on my palate.

This made me wonder whether it was an immune response to the virus that caused this symptom, and I started looking up information. It turns out that evidence does suggest this, as a postmortem study of patients with COVID-19 showed that inflammation in response to viral infection damaged nerve cells that send odor signals to the olfactory bulb for brain processing. Also, this damage was severe in patients who had reported changes in their sense of smell, but was not associated with the severity of illness, timing of viral infection, or the presence of the virus in the olfactory tissue.

More relevant to my situation, a report from 2021 described 2 people who had hyposmia (diminished sense of smell) after their second dose of Comirnaty (the mRNA vaccine by Pfizer). Both were “healthy female subjects, nonsmokers, and had no history of nasal disease or previous nasal surgery.” One had had COVID 4 months before and had hyposmia from that, which had improved before the vaccine; the other had not had COVID before and experienced hyposmia 5 days after the second dose of the vaccine. Both women had antibodies against the spike protein. The first partially recovered her sense of smell after a month, while the second fully recovered within a week.

In addition, at the time of the 2021 report, there were 70 cases of anosmia (loss of smell), 58 cases of parosmia (distorted smell), and 6 cases of hyposmia already reported in the UK for that vaccine.

I was grateful to see that this was a documented adverse event, and I also reported my experience to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Happy to update them—and you—that my sense of smell recovered within several hours of first noticing the change, by the afternoon the same day. I wore Tom Ford Tuscan Leather as an olfactory marker precisely because it was a strong fragrance and I could smell it wafting from my chest even in the morning. Gradually, throughout the day, I was able to detect more and more diffusive scents from my environment. As far as I can tell, it’s back to normal, and I didn’t have any more symptoms today. It seems a bit bizarre that the whole thing lasted such a short time, but I’m certainly not complaining!

Have any of you experienced something like this with a vaccine?