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How does she NOSE that?

"You can't fool THIS nose!"

A common superpower, especially among characters with animal themes: super-powerful smell abilities.

They Have the Scent! may come into play.

The werewolf is likely to have them, along with other canine or lupine characters.

They are a particular danger to those with a Secret Identity.

May be a form of Charles Atlas Superpower. Often used to handwave the Scarily Competent Tracker and sometimes Kung-Fu Clairvoyance as well. Detecting blood may make them the Violence Detector. If food is involved, see Follow Your Nose. Nose Tapping may be used to indicate that they do know. If this ability is inherent in one's species, it's a case of Bizarre Alien Senses. See Visible Odor when the smell trace is made visible to the audience.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • Toucan Sam, the mascot of Froot Loops, has the ability to smell out his cereal from up to several miles away. This probably counts, as most toucans probably don't have nearly so well honed a sense of smell.
  • There was a pair of commercials for Saranwrap that demonstrated the ability of their product using an animal's keen senses. One commercial had a caged tiger, the other a bear. The unseen testers wrapped one piece of meat with Saranwrap and another with the rival brand. Then the cage door opened. In both cases, the animal went for the one not wrapped in Saranwrap; because neither animal will eat what they can't smell, this shows Saranwrap is a better "barrier" to substances that would cause odor (and spoilage).
  • Raid featured commercials for its Ant & Roach spray where the cartoon roach couldn't smell the Raid, either because it came in a Country Fresh scent, because it had no lingering chemical odor, or because it was made with natural plant oils. Either way, by the time the bugs figured it out, it was too late. RAAAIIIDDD!!!

    Anime & Manga 
  • Mike Zacharius from Attack on Titan is said to have a nose so sensitive that it can track Titans further than human sight. He can even smell how many Titans will appear.
  • The Baoh parasite has an extremely capable sense of smell, able to detect Killing Intent via scent, among other abilities. There's a catch, though: when the parasite is in control of the host, it is completely blind, so disabling its sense of smell renders the host utterly unable to detect their surroundings.
  • Multiple characters in Beastars, most often Legoshi (a wolf) uses scent to track down recurring Damsel in Distress Haru, he can even tell if somebody has touched her and if they've hurt her. While romantic rival Juno uses scent to stalk Legoshi, and one time verifies that Legoshi and Haru didn't have sex after they spent a night away from school by sniffing her.
  • Black Butler: Devil in Disguise Sebastian has a keen sense of smell as good as or better than a dog's, and can detect people, corpses, and blood from a distance. It's so acute, he can even detect a needle prick.
  • Bleach:
    • On one occasion early in the story, Orihime can tell where Ichigo is because she can smell him. This may be a deliberate clue to the reader that she's developing spiritual powers because shinigami tend to describe detecting spiritual power as "catching the scent" of a being's spiritual presence. It's very common to see shinigami commenting on the fact they can "smell" hollows nearby as a result of this.
    • Yumichika sensed the coming of Grimmjow's group by catching the unusually strange hollow scent they gave off. When he alerted Ikkaku, he was told to ignore it, but he continued to privately think it strange. When Hitsugaya's team is finally attacked, Yumichika is the only one who is not surprised. Later on, he claims to have uncovered the secret that Giselle is a man because she smells of semen. It drives Giselle into a fury and, for the rest of their fight, Yumichika continues to bait her with the subject. Amusingly, the zombified Charlotte Chuhlhourne makes a similar accusation through the same method, further driving Giselle into a rage.
  • Diva and Saya from Blood+ are both vampires. They can smell good, and when Diva says to someone that he smells delicious, it's time to flee.
  • Fuuko in CLANNAD. Good God, when she said that she'd memorized Ushio's scent, she wasn't kidding. She tracked her down by scent even in an alternate timeline.
  • Clare from Claymore once said that she smelled the smell of a yoma on Raki, so she knew she had to follow him to find the yoma. She also constantly smells blood on her body because the process of transformation has so messed her up. Later, an Awakened Being says that Raki smells delicious, and she wants to eat him that way.
  • Tanjiro from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba has a practically supernatural sense of smell that can detect not only the locations of demons from their distinct odor, but also someone's personality: according to him, fellow slayers Zenitsu and Inosuke give off kind and honest scents.
  • Son Goku from Dragon Ball has a strong sense of smell that allowed him to find a rock thrown off of a cliff by Kame-Sennin ("Master Roshi") and know Bulma is approaching from a great distances only by sniffing her scent. It also cause poor Goku to collapse on the floor when he met Bacterian, since the stench was so horrible that Goku's very sensitive nose couldn't stand it.
  • Fairy Tail:
    • The Dragon Slayers all have a very good sense of smell due to their brand of magic giving them the senses of dragons. Dragons of course also have keen senses of smell, or at least the ones that actually have noses.
    • Ichiya has a good sense of smell as well, probably because of his perfume magic, but his extends all the way to being able to Detect Evil by scent alone.
  • Fate/Apocrypha:
    • When Mordred and Semiramis meet for the first time, although they were on opposite sides of the room, Mordred is able to tell from her scent that Semiramis is similar to her mother, Morgan Le Fay. She's right as Semiramis and Morgan are both black witches known for treachery.
    • Jack the Ripper is able to tell if someone is male or female by sniffing them (for example, Mordred who disguises her identity and gender with her armor). This is significant because one of Jack's abilities only works on women.
  • Kasumi Kenshiro of Fist of the Blue Sky invokes this trope. He is said to have a sense of smell equal to a dog, and it is an important plot element in several episodes, as Kenshiro uses his sense of smell to detect poisons, bomb chemicals, and track people across an entire city. Apparently, this is just him, as none of the other Hokuto style practitioners display this ability.
  • Franken Fran's Gavrill has a sense of smell so developed that she can deduce the perpetrators of a crime as well as exactly what happened just by smelling the crime scene.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
    • Dolcetto is a human chimera who had his genetic material combined with that of a dog, giving him a very heightened sense of smell.
    • We later see two other chimera who can fight by smell. Ed counters it by finding some old dynamite and overwhelming them with the smell of the ammonia he converts the ammonium nitrate into. They also use this to fight Gluttony and Pride when the lights need to be turned out to make it easier to fight Pride.
    • Gluttony himself has a very good nose. Pride eats him to get his nasal sense, so he's less in disadvantage.
  • Reipin from Fushigi Yuugi: Byakko Ibun has such a good sense of smell that she can find her newfound friend Nirusha solely by his scent. It's one of the first hints to her identity as the daughter of a Shapeshifter.
  • In Hunter × Hunter, all of Gon's senses, including smell, are supernaturally heightened, which allowed him, among other things to detect a normally odorless laxative.
  • In Kemono Jihen, Kemono give off a distinctively bad smell that distinguishes them from humans. In Kabane's case, he was relentlessly teased for it and was sent to work in the rice fields as a result, getting compared to an earthbound spirit covered in manure, a Dorotabo. To address this, Kemono have developed a special cologne that masks their smell.
  • This was Apollo's special 'psychic power' in Genesis of Aquarion. While it might seem like a rather poor ability when compared to those of his comrades, (like Pyrokinesis, Telekinesis, Super-Strength and Teleportation) it proves to be one of the most useful powers on the course of series, being capable of smelling things like microscopic organism (from several feet away, when inside a cockpit!) and immaterial beings.
    • This ability is also present in Kagura from Aquarion Evol, which shouldn't be surprising given that he's reincarnated from the above, though his actual power is much more... abusable. This series also explains that their heightened sense of smell is not so much an Element power as much because Apollo is the reincarnation of a dog.
  • In Guardian Fairy Michel, Lady Salome can smell out treasure.
  • Heterogenia Linguistico: Much of werewolf communication is based on smell rather than sound or body language. Hakaba, having a human's limited sense of smell, finds it tough to keep up.
  • Inuyasha:
    • Inuyasha has a keen scene of smell, occasionally having him track enemies by scent and be able to tell that there's trouble in a nearby village because he can smell human blood. It's also caused Sensory Overload a few times, but no enemy has deliberately attempted to exploit it.
    • Sesshoumaru's sense of smell is even better than Inuyasha's. He once caught the scent of something that was many miles away and produced only by a tiny sliver of flesh. He can also smell spirits that are in the area but haven't even manifested. Unlike Inuyasha, Sesshoumaru has never been put in a position where the sensitivity of his nose can be used against him except in situations where the Big Bad has deliberately set up a scent trail for him to follow in an effort to lead him into a trap.
    • Koga also has a good sense of smell. It is implied that it is the case with many youkai.
  • Yuya Fungami from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4. He has a strong sense of smell which he acquired from siphoning energy from others. He could tell if a peach has gone bad from across the room, and track down a person with scent.
  • Kirakira Pre Cure A La Mode: Cure Chocolat has an extra-strong sense of smell as part of her dog motif.
  • Morgiana from Magi: Labyrinth of Magic can smell good enough to find humans around her that way. She can also hear well.
  • Medaka Box: Zenkichi is able to detect Medaka's former holding location in the South Pole through scent alone.
  • Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid:
    • Tohru is able to track down Kanna and Saikawa when they get lost in Kanna's Daily Life by following Kobayashi's scent on Kanna's backpack charm.
    • In the main series, Ilulu does this at Kobayashi's suggestion in order to find the owner of a lost doll. However, the rain washes away the scent before she can find them.
  • Naruto: This is one of Kiba's special abilities (eventually said to grow to the point that it's better than the dogs he would fight with), though it blows up in his face spectacularly (pun intended) during the Tournament Arc battle against Naruto.
    • Him and his clan are really only the most outstanding example, as both the Third Hokage and Kakashi have shown to have rather acute sense of smell, the latter of which became critical to finding Akatsuki member Sasori.
  • In what can only be described an... odd variation, Negima! Magister Negi Magi has Chamo and Jack Rakan locating an enemy in an enormous barrier dimension... by tracing the scent of her panties which Rakan stole earlier. With alarming precision.
  • Sanji from One Piece is able to discern the ingredients and even recipe of any food simply through its fragrance, such as that of Struesen's secret wedding cake.
  • In Pokémon Adventures, Sapphire, among her various Super-Senses, has such an enhanced sense of smell to the point that she can somewhat navigate even when blinded. Marlon also has a good sense of smell, though specifically to water. He can tell where a water-based Pokémon originally came from.
    • In Pokémon: The Series, when Ash's Pokémon were lost in a huge pile of Pokéballs, Pikachu was successfully able to sniff them out.
  • Several youkai in Rosario + Vampire can do that too, because they say several times that Tsukune, posing as a youkai, smells like a human being.
  • Saki has the Tsuruga Mahjong Club's president, Kanbara, who was revealed in the bonus chapter of Volume 7 to be capable of detecting people by scent. This even bypasses Momo's stealth mode, which works by making people ignore her presence.
  • For a guy whose head is just a helmet Kikuchiyo from Samurai 7 has damn good sense of smell. The Emperor found out the hard way.
  • In one episode of Sasami: Magical Girls Club, Sasami and the others are lost in an underground labyrinth, until Amitav arrives. He tells Sasami that he recognized her scent, causing the other girls to wonder if he has a really good sense of smell or if Sasami just stinks.
  • In Sands of Destruction, Wolfmen are shown to be Scarily Competent Trackers thanks to a canine's sense of smell, and Rhi'a tracks down the World Destruction Committee thanks to Kyrie's scent lingering on Morte.
  • Goku from Saiyuki has an enhanced sense of smell. Mostly he uses it for finding food, but he manages to search for other things as well, such as when he tracks down Gonou/Hakkai by the scent of blood after his wound reopened. At one point he also comments on the arc's villain Chin Yisou "not smelling alive", giving Hakkai a clue about the villain's nature.
  • Shimoneta:
    • Anna's so crazy for Tanukichi, that she can track him by his scent, especially in regard to his underwear. Despite his hygiene, she can still detect the scent of his boxers from halfway across campus. Which is why, during episode 11, he has to repeatedly scrub himself with soap and water to keep Anna from seeing through his disguise.
    • Likewise, White Peak has such a fetish for women's underwear that his nose can literally detect the scent of freshly worn panties from over a mile away! Ayame uses it to SOX's advantage in episode 11, by using her own panties as bait to lure White Peak to them.
  • Tsujido, Suitengu's right hand man from Speed Grapher has a super sense of smell as his euphoric power.
  • In Sweat And Soap, Kotaro Natori's highly developed sense of smell has made him a celebrity at his soap-making company. It also allows him to track his girlfriend as well as tell if she's happy or sad.
  • In Tokyo Ghoul, Ghouls inherently have better senses than a human, allowing them to identify each other by scent. But some individuals are noted to have an exceptional sense of smell, often serving as trackers and lookouts when members of a gang. Nico and Hinami are both noted for their abilities, allowing them to effectively track the faintest scent for miles. In the sequel, Urie's keen sense of smell gives him an edge in hunting Ghouls, while Takizawa's nose is so keen that Kurona jokes that he might have some dog mixed in there.
  • Toriko: At one point, Toriko picks up the tracks of someone who had been there years earlier, through the vast amount of other creatures that had been there since.
  • In Wolf Children, Souhei is somehow able to smell dog-like scent coming from the half-wolf Yuki when he first meets her, prompting him to ask her if she owns a dog. This leads Yuki to become self-conscious about herself and try and distance herself from him.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Joey's nose is apparently so good he can smell the perfume Mai uses to tag her cards from the opposite side of a dueling arena. Good thing he'd managed to get over that cold he'd caught at the beginning of the episode.
    • Mai's ability to identify 60 or so cards apart by different perfumes is pretty impressive itself. It's Truth in Television — Veteran perfume-makers are often capable of recognizing hundreds of different scents.
  • Nozomi from Yes! Pretty Cure 5 has a so good nose that she smells a crépe's smell on a little part of a flyer.

    Asian Animation 
  • Noonbory and the Super 7: Fitting with the Super-Senses theme, Pongdybory's power is an enhanced sense of smell, which he uses to locate people and items. Unfortunately, he also has really bad allergies.

    Comic Books 
The DCU
  • Justice Society of America: Dr. Mid-Nite II has an enhanced sense of smell. In JSA Classified when a villain took the goggles which allow him to use infrared vision he was able to use his sense of smell to detect a flameable gas in the room that the two villains couldn't detect.
  • Sensor Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes, who is actually Princess Projectra.
    • Timber Wolf too, seeing he's the Legion's resident feral.
  • Part of the reason Lobo is one of the greatest bounty hunters in the DC Universe is that he can track people by smell across interstellar distances. Once he has your scent, there is nowhere in the universe you can hide from him.
  • Superman has a super-sense of smell as well; it's just that with his other super-senses, he rarely needs to use it. (Probably the only sense of his that isn't enhanced is his sense of touch, as it conflicts with his invulnerability.)
  • Krypto the Super-Dog has a keen sense of smell, being a dog. He's saved the day tracking Poison Ivy's scent, or that of other villains, many times.

Marvel Universe

  • Black Panther: T'Challa's powers include a preternaturally accurate sense of smell.
    • During one altercation, he defeats a foe while blinded by using his superior sense of smell to track the villain's location.
    • Avengers: Back to Basics: In the second story arc, T'Challa realizes that Carol isn't a Skrull imposter like they'd been led to believe because she still carries her own scent, and there's no trickery in the universe that can fool his nose.
  • Blade's sense of smell is slightly superhuman and he's especially good at sniffing out vampires.
  • Daredevil. Matt's sense of smell is sometimes exaggerated beyond all credibility, especially when they're downplaying the radar sense. His sense of smell is so acute that he can distinguish between identical twins at twenty feet by minute differences in smell. He can detect odors of an atmospheric concentration of thirty parts per million note . Further, his ability to remember smells enables him to identify any person he has spent at least five minutes with by smell alone, no matter how he or she might try to camouflage his or her natural odor. His powers of concentration are such that he can focus upon a single person's smell and follow it through a crowd of people at a distance of fifty feet.
  • Fantastic Four villain the Mole Man has this, along with excellent hearing, both to make up for his poor eyesight.
  • Puma in the Spider-Man comics. He easily determined Spider-Man's secret identity. As did Wolverine.
  • Wolfsbane, a werewolf in the original New Mutants, has this.
    • As does Catseye, a were-giant purple cat in the original Hellions.
  • In Werewolf by Night, Jack Russell's werewolf curse grants him an enhanced sense of smell even in human form, which also enables him to smell emotions. Once he uses it to sniff out a pedophile simply by the scent he gives off around children, seeing right through the man's feigned disinterest.
  • Wolverine and Sabretooth have this as a major ability. Wolverine's makes him the go-to person for identifying impersonators; it seems that even if you can change everything from your voice, hair color, and the shape and color of your body, you can't change how you smell.
    • He's even used a lack of smell to identify that something's fishy, likening it to a big dark spot in the middle of an otherwise well-lit room.
    • His daughter/Opposite-Sex Clone X-23's senses may be even better. Laura's been able to smell a man lying when even Logan couldn't, was able to isolate the scent of her cousin and her kidnapper even after the room had been contaminated with other searchers, and rapidly locate them in the middle of San Francisco. Since Logan and Laura's enhanced senses are a side effect of their Healing Factor, this may be because Laura's is much stronger since hers isn't constantly fighting adamantium poisoning.
    • Daken demonstrates this, as well

Other

  • Angel Catbird: The cat-people have a heightened sense of smell.
  • Doctor Who Magazine: In the comic strip "The Love Invasion", the Doctor is able to work out that the Lend-a-Hand girls aren't human because they smell odd. Rose even refers to his sense of smell as "the infallible space nose".
  • The F1rst Hero: One extrahuman that Jake meets is a red-headed man who calls himself Catalogue. His power is that he's able to track other extrahumans by sniffing out their powers.
  • Bigby from Fables, being the Big Bad Wolf, has a very strong sense of smell. According to him, the reason he's such a heavy smoker is that cigarettes help deaden his sense of smell so that he can cope with the information overload of smells that come from living in a city.
  • Zato-Ino, "The Blind Swordspig" from Usagi Yojimbo, can "see" things thanks to his sense of smell, even after he lost his nose in a duel against Usagi and replaced it with a wooden prosthesis.

    Comic Strips 
  • The titular character from Big Nate has a keen sense of smell, able to pinpoint exactly what anything smells like — for example, he claims his science teacher is "a bewitching blend of chalk, rubbing alcohol, teaberry gum, formaldehyde, shoe polish, 'Old Spice', and unidentified" (either body odor or a dead animal). He also once managed to track a missing earring entirely with his sense of smell.
  • In Calvin and Hobbes, Hobbes has a good sense of smell, and has unique words for different smells, such as "snippid" for burning leaves. (When Calvin asks what the word for his smell is, Hobbes says "terrible", causing Calvin to chase after him.)
  • Peanuts
    • In a very early strip, Snoopy is able to smell someone who is just thinking about food! In a later strip, catching a whiff of his favorite food — pizza — enables him to make a fast dash out of his doghouse before a huge icicle crashes down on it.
    • In a later strip, Snoopy's brother Spike "can smell a plate of fudge from a mile away", according to Charlie Brown.
  • In Prickly City, when Winslow claims a Superman origin (in a Multiple-Choice Past), he says his super power is "smell, of course," pointing at his nose.

    Fairy Tales 
  • In Asbjørnsen and Moe's collected tales, a common trait of trolls is that they can smell humans, usually phrased as "I smell the blood of a Christian man."
  • In Joseph Jacobs's Jack and the Beanstalk, the giant smells Jack.
  • In most early versions of Hansel and Gretel, the witch is described as being nearly blind, but having a powerful sense of smell that can sense prey coming from far away.

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon):
    • Godzilla notices that Monster X's scent smells partly the same as the scent from Vivienne Graham when she was human which Serizawa had on him when he made his Heroic Sacrifice to Godzilla.
    • With the baby Manda, it's by scent that he recognizes Monster X following their Metamorphosis into their final form, and it's by their scent being on Thor that he identifies the latter as an ally.
    • In this non-canon crossover post by the author, Monster X notes that an autonomous, draconic Vivienne from the Shi AU (Titanus Athena) has a human smell indicating that she's also a transhuman Titan like Monster X's Vivienne half herself is.

  • In The Beast Of Gusu, a shifter’s superior sense of smell allows them to discover other shifters, read other’s emotions, track certain scents and gives them a good sense of who’s trustworthy. The exception (at least initially) is Lan Wangji, whom Wei Wuxian notes he can’t read.
  • Feral in Bird has a powerful sense of smell (in addition to nightvision and several other minor powers). Her sense of smell is specifically described as much stronger than a bloodhound's, and is powerful enough to serve as a mild empath sense and lie detector. It's enough to count as a minor Thinker power by itself.
  • In Code: Half Demon, Inuyasha's nose is used for tracking. He track's Odd's scent at one point, which was mainly Odd's feet... The authoress hit two or three birds with one stone there. Inuyasha was surprised that the stench of Odd's smelly feet didn't knock him out considering those feet knock out almost everyone,and said everyone were all HUMAN.
  • Besides Tracker's sensing abilities through enhanced sight, smell, and hearing, Duncan McSmurf of Empath: The Luckiest Smurf can detect through his own unique sense of smell whether a Smurf just had sex or "the Smurfette dream".
  • In Farce Contact, a Star Trek: Enterprise Parody Fic, T'Pol's dislike over how humans smell is due to its similarity to the scent a rutting Vulcan male emits every seven years. It can be smelt for vast distances by the sensitive nose of a female Vulcan, and is therefore known as the pong farr.
  • I'm Nobody: According to Axel, he, Zexion, and Riku are able to sense magic via smell - as in, magic registers as a scent to them. He compares it to being able to smell smoke from a campfire from a very long distance.
  • In 'Nexus' This is how Jack was able to realize he was about to get attacked by Scarecrows. He also deduces that while in the Demon World, that if he could smell the demons, they could smell him. More specifically they could smell his Sparda blood.
  • Queen of All Oni: At some point after her encounter with Lung, Jade develops a heightened, animalistic sense of smell.
  • The Rigel Black Chronicles: Harry and Archie get concerned when Remus announces that he's becoming a teacher at Hogwarts, because as a werewolf, he'll be able to tell them apart by scent, especially near the full moon, and realise that Harry is at Hogwarts instead of Archie. They eventually settle on Harry making a perfume from Archie's sweat to use before Defence class.
  • Whatever Cangse Sanren is is Skin A Cat, she has a very strong sense of smell. She uses it in-story to smell both period blood and even a pregnancy.
  • That Weird Feeling: In this Fanfic based on the classic Universal Monsters, and specially focused on Dracula's Daughter Marya Zaleska and The Bride of Frankenstein as protagonists, Countess Marya Zaleska have a great sense of smell, by being a vampire. She can detect individual scents from anything, as she smelled The Bride of Frankenstein's scent which is described as sweet, musky, and healthy, but with a bit of death and electrical burns. Also, Marya can detect the scents from foods as bread and tell if they are able to eat (for mortals).
  • In the Worm x Bloodborne crossover Hunter, Sophia manages to smell a number of scents off of Taylor... including one that shouldn't exist.
    A sweet, coppery smell, not quite hiding a more musky odor, like she'd been rolling around with dogs. And under that... Sophia took a sharp breath as something in her brain pulsed, twisting like the start of a migraine. It was the faint scent of the color of moonlight, so completely impossible to think of because it didn't exist.
  • When George becomes an animal in With Strings Attached, he gains that animal's sense of smell, though he only had need of it a few times (mostly to track Ringo when he disappeared into the forest).
    • George finds more use for a sense of smell in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, mostly when he's a centaur, and he also becomes a bloodhound to track the missing Kyran Datoro.
      • Also, the Svenjaya know that the disguised George and Ringo really are outworlders because Ringo smells like one. (George doesn't, because he'd turned into a G'heddi'onian, but as Sima points out, they just assumed his disguise was better because they'd never met a G'heddi'onian who vacationed with a disguised outworlder before.)
  • The Red Dragon's Saber: Koneko, a Cat Girl, smells dragon when around Artoria Pendragon, though she mistakes Artoria for a dragon that has taken human form instead of someone with Dragon Ancestry.
  • The Loud House fanfiction The Nightmare House, Lily's nightmare involves a monster smelling her before seeing her.
  • In The Changeling of the Guard, thestrals turn out to be able to detect changelings in disguise because changelings give off a very distinct scent. A scent that thestrals really, really appreciate. Played with in that this ability to detect changelings is revealed long before the Canterlot invasion happens, meaning that none of the thestrals in the Guard have any idea why it is that Idol, a disguised changeling exile, smells so unique.
  • OSMU: Fanfiction Friction: Similar to how he's presented in canon, Todd can identify people by smell. With this ability, he is able to pin scents on the Mobile Unit agents based on their hygiene habits — bubblegum for Opal (as she wears bubblegum-scented perfume), powder for Oswald (since he powders himself), handmade soap for Orla (which she makes herself), and Axe body spray for Omar.
  • In Toonatopia: The Animation Initiation, Clam manages to figure out Gordon, Mr. Blik and Waffle are Nicktoons just by smelling them.
  • Since Maybe Sprout Wings takes place in an A/B/O universe, Dean and Castiel both have super smell as well as emitting scents that only people of certain designations can pick up on.

    Films — Animated 
  • Winnie from the Hotel Transylvania series is a werewolf pup with a ridiculous sense of smell.
  • Trusty from Lady and the Tramp is a bloodhound who used to track criminals before retiring. Jock claims that Trusty's sense of smell has faded with age but the climax of the movie proves him wrong. Trusty's sense of smell is still perfectly good and he's able to pick up the scent of the dogcatcher that's taking Tramp to the pound.
  • The exterminator in Over the Hedge can identify which animals are in the area just by sniffing the air.
  • Ratatouille: Rémy has an excellent sense of smell, and it's useful for both cooking and sniffing out poison, which his father puts him in charge of for the whole clan's food supply.
  • Maximus from Tangled. He snuffles along the ground like a bloodhound.
  • Wolfwalkers: Mebh, being a Wolfwalker, has a highly developed sense of smell, even when in human form. When traveling through the woods with Robyn, she's able to sniff out the "town tasties" two woodcutters have with them, which are located at the very edge of the woods.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Amazing Spider-Man(2012): The Lizard gained this as an effect from the lizard serum. When he is in Oscorp, he search Gwen by sniffing her scent to take the serums she has.
  • Attack the Block: The aliens don't have eyes, so they navigate with a powerful sense of smell.
  • Blood Red Sky. At the start of the hijacking, Psycho for Hire Eightball stabs an air marshal to death. Even though the murder takes place out of sight of Nadja, her nose is shown visibly twitching in response as foreshadowing for The Reveal of her vampirism. When Eightball later gets close to her in his blood-splattered shirt, she can barely restrain herself.
  • Bones and All: Eaters are born with an innate compulsion to eat human flesh and aee aided by a superhuman sense of smell, though it needs to be trained. Sully, a veteran hunter, can smell other Eaters from hundreds of yards away, which is an impressive feat even for them. Eaters can also smell dying people and tell the moment they die. A little encouragement from Sully helps the young Eater Maren to improve her ability.
  • The Childcatcher of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, whose powerful (and rather large) nose lets him enforce the Child Hater regime of Vulgaria.
    Child Catcher: Let me tell you, Toymaker, this nose of mine has never failed me, and if there are children here, my friend, you will die! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
  • In "Crocodile" Dundee, he can smell aftershave when no one else can and changes his plan accordingly.
  • Daredevil (2003). Matt Murdock detects his future Love Interest Elektra Natchios via her scent (rose water) before she even enters the cafe he's in, and later tracks her location through a crowded ballroom via her scent.
  • In The Hangover Part III, the Wolfpack try to trick Chow into drinking a drugged drink, but he sniffs it and is able to detect the drug.
  • Hannibal Lecter in pretty much all his movies (Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, and Red Dragon) is established as having a near-supernatural sense of smell.
  • The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: When Bilbo attempts to use the Ring to turn invisible and sneak by Smaug, it fails because Smaug can smell him and hear his footsteps in the piles of gold. Bilbo eventually gives up and reveals himself, switching to stalling tactics. His sense of smell allows him to discern that Bilbo has been traveling in the company of dwarves, thereby alerting Smaug to his real motive for entering the mountain.
  • In Jack the Ripper (1976), Mr. Bridger — the blind man who 'witnesses' on of Jack's murders — claims that his sense of smell is twice as acute as a normal man's. He says he would recognise the Ripper again from the combination of odours around him: old books, medicinal alcohol, and a rare Indian herb.
  • Jurassic World:
    • Claire snidely tells Owen to change his shirt, as the Indominus rex has a good sense of smell. Fortunately, Owen remembers this when hiding under a vehicle. He punctures a fuel line and douses himself in petrol.
    • The Indominus rex has some abilities that can turn her practically invisible and undetectable for humans and technology. But the Velociraptor pack can track her in the jungle, simply tracking her scent trails. She's camouflaged when the raptors find her.
  • MonsterVerse:
    • Kong: Skull Island: Skullcrawlers' olfactory system can sense warm-blooded life across vast distances, and once they've caught a scent it's like "blood in the water"; according to the creatures' profile in the spin-off graphic novel The Birth of Kong.
    • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Played With by King Ghidorah's three heads. When they have Emma dead to rights and are staring her down before the kill; Ichi (the middle head) notably smells the air with his nostrils and San's (the left head's) nostrils also appear to be moving, as both those heads sense Burning Godzilla's approach before seeing him.
  • In Matilda, Agatha Trunchbull displays the ability to track people by smell, investigating and then sniffing the askew lid of a chocolate box before scenting the air and detecting that Matilda and Miss Honey are still present.
  • In Next, The Accountant has a powerful sense of smell that he uses to track people down.
  • In The Phantom of the Opera (1998), the Phantom has a sense of smell that helps find Christine...somehow.
  • One of the kinds of psychics in the world of Push are call Sniffers. They can tell anywhere an objects been through a kind of scent based Psychometry. The two in the story are used as bloodhound trackers by the nebulously evil government organization that's antagonizing the protagonists.
  • C.D. from Roxanne can smell smoke from a fire across town with his Gag Nose.
  • Run Sweetheart Run: Big Bad Ethan can detect the smell of Cherie's blood and spends the night tracking her and hunting her down. Being on her period does not help.
  • Wolf (Mike Nichols): Will Randall suspects that his wife is having an affair with the young associate who's replaced him at work when he notices the man's scent on her. Sure enough, when he goes to confront the man at his apartment, he finds his wife there.
  • The Wolfman (2010): As a werewolf, Lawrence Talbot wins this. Curiously he only shows it chasing Gwen, following her scent easily in the woods.
  • X-Men: Wolverine can recognize a Mystique disguised as Storm by her scent. Before that, he could even sniff her disguised as a statue.

    Literature 
  • This Alien Shore: The Medusans, who have shake-like tentacles instead of hair, have an extraordinary sense of smell that they can use to pick up on other people's pheromones.
  • All American Pups:
    • In the first book, Tracker, a beagle puppy, follows Rosie's scent all the way back to her city.
    • In Camp Barkalot, Fritz "pretend[s] he's Tracker" and traces the others' scent trails to find them when it's too dark to see.
  • In Animorphs is described several times that different animals in which heroes turn, have a good sense of smell, such as dog, wolf, grizzly bear, polar bear, tiger and hyena.
  • Black Leopard, Red Wolf: The protagonist, Tracker, is a tracker and bounty hunter who finds people with his supernatural sense of smell, which has little to do with their actual scent. He can smell how far away someone is in real time, for example, and is perplexed by how his current target's smell sometimes vanishes entirely only to reappear randomly somewhere else, which turns out to be because he's being dragged around a Portal Network.
  • The canid breeds of Cerberus High have a strong sense of smell which proves how Sherbet was able to instantly tell that Kazuki was human.
    • Rey has a very keen sense of smell and becomes disgusted when he finds out how much Kazuki smells exactly like Rouge.
    • It was implied in Cerberus High: Another Story Another Story that Eden had inherited his ability to sniff out all of Hades's archdemons and their descendants from his father Vincent.
  • In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society, Kirbie, even without changing wholly to wolf form.
  • City of No End: The Wellmen are a blind mutant Human Subspecies whose sense of smell has evolved to cope with their lack of eyes. Kifos is a Wellman employed by House Norn as a sniffer during investigations, and can track blood like a hound over longer distances.
  • In Codex Alera the Canim are Wolfmen and have a wolf like sense of smell. This leads to situational irony as Tavi tells what he thinks is a bluff about his heritage that the Canim Ambassador accept because his smell proves it is true. In the end, the Ambassador knows the truth two books before the reveal.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School: Emilio Mendoza has a keen sense of smell, which more than makes up for his inability to see without any glasses.
  • Dinoverse's tyrannosaurs have powerful senses of smell. The first thing Mike does with his is find the ocean — when his friend tells him to smell for it he even says "Your nose knows." Later he tries to track someone down. It's portrayed as less of a superpower and more of an ability which can fail him — when he tries tracking he gets nowhere since his sense of smell was blunted by too much exposure to strong smells.
  • Sergeant Angua of Terry Pratchett's Discworld has this even in human form, which proves to be very helpful in several cases, notably the investigation in the dwarf mines during Thud!
    • Lance Constable Sally has a similar ability, but she senses blood, and it is in some cases more useful than Angua's nose, which irks her.
    • Unfortunately for them, once the criminals realised there was a werewolf in the watch (although they don't know who, exactly, it is) they started carrying around scent bombs to muddle their trail.
  • The Dresden Files:
    • Sanya, Knight of the Cross, perceives the presence of supernatural evil in the form of foul odors. This has its limitations, as he mistakenly attributes the stench of Nicodemus to a toddler's soiled diaper at the end of Death Masks.
    • The Alphas, a gang of teenage Voluntary Shapeshifting werewolves, track by scent more traditionally, among their other wolfish talents. Little Marcy has the best nose among them, able to identify, say, the age of a car by how much oil it was burning when it drove off several hours before.
  • In The Egg Man, each person has one sense that's heightened to (compared to Real Life) superhuman levels. Lincoln, the protagonist of the story, is a Smell, and at one point casually determines that there are exactly 17 distinct stenches afflicting his crappy apartment, and correctly identifies 16 of them (the seventeenth is one he's never encountered before). As hinted by that example, he finds being a Smell a case of being Blessed with Suck.
  • In the Evie Scelan series, Evie's main ability is to track anything, mundane or magical, by scent.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novels, Ezsrah has powerful smelling abilities. Indeed, in one passage contemplating how strange the Ghosts were, he distinguishes their three homeworlds by smell before considering how different they look, and then that their three commissars also smell different from any of them.
  • Several Kyell Gold novels go into full detail about characters who can detect what species someone is, what someone ate, what mood someone is in, etc., just by using their noses. Out of Position in particular has Dev finding out that Colin has been giving Argonne blowjobs after he smelled Colin's semen on his breath.
  • In John C. Wright's Green Knight's Squire, Ruff cites this trope by name. Then, he can smell such things as that Gil has become a policeman.
  • Barra the Pict from Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon has a keen nose that can sometimes warn her when enemies are sneaking around nearby.
  • Inverted with the Nazgûl in Lord of the Rings, who first appear to be able to detect the One Ring by scent. This is actually an illusion; they detect it due to a bond they have with it that has nothing to do with scent. (Indeed, as undead beings, it is doubtful that they have a functioning sense of smell at all.)
    • They can't detect the One Ring by scent, but according to Aragorn they do have a keen sense of smell.
    Aragorn: And at all times they smell the blood of living things, desiring and hating it.
    • Played straight with Gollum in The Hobbit, however, given that he lived in a cave most of his life; when Bilbo escaped from him, he nearly realized he was there due to his keen hearing and sense of smell, despite Bilbo being invisible. The savage wargs had this too; the narration specifically said that they didn't have to see Bilbo to find him. The dragon Smaug could also detect Bilbo by scent when he turned invisible.
  • In The Lunar Chronicles, the hybrid wolf soldiers, unsurprisingly, have this. In the last book, Wolf is able to smell Scarlet from several blocks away (though accidentally goes for Winter, who's wearing Scarlet's hoodie). Later, Alpha Strom immediately knows that Winter is sick after Levana poisons her.
  • In E.W. Hildick's The McGurk Organization juvenile mystery series, Willy the Nose is one of the kid detectives, with a super-sensitive sense of smell that his leader puts great store by. The narrator is a little dubious about this, but it does seem to come in handy more times than not.
  • The main character of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has the ability to smell things no one else can smell, such as lies or oncoming disaster. However, he only gains this power after doctors cure his perpetual congestion, and he loses his Telepathy in exchange.
  • Moreau Series: Moreaus tend to have very good senses of smell, as do combat frankensteins like Evi Isham.
  • The werewolves and vampires in The Mortal Instruments have a good sense of smell. Later it turns out that the fairies also have one.
  • The heroes of Robert Lynn Asprin's fantasy novel Myth-ing Persons bring in a werewolf tracker to help them find the fugitives they are chasing.
  • Night Huntress series: Vampires have very good noses, to the point where they can smell emotions or whether someone is lying, at least if that someone is human.
  • In Seanan McGuire's October Daye novels, Tybalt. Though he has to remind Toby more than once that he's not a bloodhound.
  • In Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Heroes of Olympus it is canonical that the demigods have sharper senses than humans, including the sense of smell. But that's not mentioned in the books.
  • The main plot point in the novel Perfume is the main character's incomparable sense of smell.
  • In Pinocchio’s Sister, the Pliskas' poodle Lulu uses her nose to find Sparkle Bob after he runs away. Later, she uses her nose to find Martha after she runs away.
  • The Red Vixen Adventures: Foxens place great importance on scent. The Red Vixen wears heavy perfume to prevent identification and Rolas recognizes Melanie as her by taste. And Commander Blacksailor recognizes Alinadar as his long-lost sister by her scent, and the fact that she has living relatives finally breaks through to Ali when he gives her a toy that belonged to his sister which is still saturated with her scent due to being sealed in a plastic bag for twenty years.
  • In Robert E. Howard's Rogues in the House Conan the Barbarian can identify Murilo by his perfume, despite its being scarcely detectable by the civilized.
  • The Saga of the Faroe Islanders: When Thrand and his followers attack Sigmund's farm on Skufoy and they realize Sigmund has got away under cover of darkness, Thrand "walks withershins around the steadings and whistles" (obviously a magical ritual), then "put[s] one hand down on the ground and bring[s] it up from time to time to his nostrils." Thrand correctly determines where Sigmund went and follows him, "sniffing the air as though he was picking up a scent like a dog".
  • In Shadow of the Conqueror, Lifebinders can increase their scent to the point where they can track people like bloodhounds. Lyrah is able to deduce that Daylen is both an old man and someone she met before just by his scent, though his cover story of living with his old father is enough that she doesn't find it unduly suspicious.
  • Solo Leveling 's Cha Hae-in has the ability to smell other hunters' power. The stronger they are, the stronger the smell. Tragically for her, that smell is extremely foul, leading her to avoid being near too many strong hunters. Strangely enough, the only one that smells good to her is Sung Jin-Woo. This is actually Foreshadowing that Jin-Woo's power has a completely different origin.
  • In The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, due to being Semi-Divine, Demane has a superior sense of smell, making him a Living Lie Detector and a Scarily Competent Tracker. He can also smell whenever someone's sick, which is handy as he's acting as the band's medic.
  • Tazuku Mikado, a later addition to Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note's cast, is officially noted to have a strong sense of smell, often requiring wearing surgical masks to avoid sensory overload.
  • In Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, Hugi can track the werewolf, even in the city's smells.
  • In Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians, Lord John Quetzal is a "witch smeller", able to detect black magic with a sixth sense which he experiences as a smell.
  • Return of the Wolf Man: In this novel from the Universal Horror canon, Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man himself, have this from being a werewolf. All His senses are keen, but his sense of smell Is His most prominent Sense, and one of his most powerful abilities alongside with his invulnerability and strength. He can smell human preys from four miles, and track a scent in any surface, from land, to even rain. He also recognize undeads by this, but he prefers to prey on living humans. He can track undeads as zombies, but also humans as Caroline Cooke.
  • Tarzan of the Apes has a nose that is nearly as amazing as his strength. At long range he can easily tell what kinds of animals are around; at short range he can identify individual animals and people just by their smell. Although this power fails him in Tarzan the Terrible, when Tarzan fails to smell the gryf (a heavily modified modern-day Triceratops) that's about to attack him because it doesn't give off much of a smell.
  • In the eponymous final book of the Tower and the Hive series by Anne McCaffrey, Pierre Laney uses his unique Talent to identify individual Hiver queens. As a sideline, he also creates new perfumes and colognes for the crew of the fleet from alien plants.
  • In The Underland Chronicles the rats demonstrate this quality in their first appearance by accurately calculating what Gregor and Boots ate for dinner hours earlier right down to the tiny bowl of greens. They also are shown to be able to estimate human emotions and navigate and fight in complete darkness. In Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane we meet Twitchtip who has such a sensitive nose that she is called a "scent seer." Among other things she can detect the scent of a rager, newly hardened volcanic rock, a whirlpool, and the color of Boots' shirt from outside the castle tower Boots is in.
  • The Wandering Inn:Nothing gets past a gnolls' nose, whether you recently killed somebody, or...sexually relieved yourself.
  • In William King's Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf novels, Ragnar relies heavily on his sense of smell to judge things, to track, and to determine how people feel.
    • In Lee Lightner's Wolf's Honour, at the end, Berek smells Ragnor and tells his men not to ready their weapons.
  • In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novel Dead Sky, Black Sun, their ability to smell "the mothers" on Uriel is what persuades the Unfleshed to listen to him.
    • Earlier in the series, in Warriors of Ultramar, a Deathwatch Space Wolf uses his sense of smell to locate a Tyranid synapse beast.
  • In Warrior Cats, since the cast is made up of feral cats, a lot of attention is paid to their sense of smell, particularly the scents of territory markers, their Clanmates' scent trails, and prey; they can even smell others' moods like fear. Some of the characters are noted to have a particularly strong sense of smell, but special mention goes to Dovewing, who has Super-Senses and can smell cats across the lake.
  • This takes two different forms in The Wheel of Time series. Wolfbrothers are characters with an unnatural affinity for wolves. Among several other abilities, their sense of smell is enhanced so much that they can tell the emotional state of people around them even without any visual cues. They can even detect such things as deception and madness, which is immensely handy. Perrin is one. In case you're wondering, such an ability is biologically impossible, but since this trait is believed to be caused by magic, that's all right. Also, there are "sniffers", a kind of people with an inborn ability to sense violence as a smell on people or places. Sniffers are rare and maybe even nonexistent south of the Borderlands, but still more common — or at least, more socially accepted — than Wolfbrothers.
  • In the Women of the Otherworld series by Kelley Armstrong, a werewolf's sense of smell is incredibly strong to the point where werewolves find it necessary to use specifically non-scented hygiene products if they want their sense of smell to work at full capacity. Elena, a female werewolf, can't even stand to use scented hand soap, as it severely interferes with her ability to smell anything else. She herself has the best nose of her Pack, and once she catches a scent, she'll be able to remember and hunt the person down by it even years later. It's shown in Bitten that newly-bitten and inexperienced werewolves will likely still use scented products if they did so as a human, having not yet learned to rely on their nose just as much as their eyes and ears, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage against other werewolves.
    • This is similarly shown in Darkest Powers, Armstrong's YA trilogy. Werewolves have enhanced senses in general, but those senses aren't very strong until they Change into wolf form for the first time (usually around eighteen). Derek, a sixteen-year-old werewolf, has an incredibly enhanced sense of smell even though he hasn't actually begun to Change into wolf form yet. In a small house that is completely and consistently overlaid by the scents of about eight different people, he is still capable of pinning down the scent of the person he wants to find, determining the most recent trail despite her having just walked all through the house, and track her down into the basement and into a cellar where she was locked inside and physically incapable of doing anything to make anyone aware of her location. Of course, considering she has no idea that he's anything other than human, this causes some awkwardness when he has to explain how he managed to find her.
  • In Andre Norton's The Zero Stone, the natives of Hungry Jungle hunt mostly by smell.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In The 10th Kingdom, Wolf manages to follow Virgina's scent to the middle of a swamp, where she's buried under a mass of vines. Sort of justified in that he's a werewolf.
  • The 4400: In "Till We Have Built Jerusalem", a Super-Soldier named Peters obtained the ability to track scents in the same fashion as many animals after taking promicin.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel:
    • Vampires have a fairly limited version of this. They are able to smell who people have been close to recently, but are rarely shown tracking people in frequently traveled areas. This ability is even called into question at one point. Wesley declares that Angel's nose shouldn't be as sensitive as he claims it to be. Angel takes a good whiff, and informs Wes that he had sex with a bottle blonde the night before.
      Wesley: Good Lord! How did you—
      Cordelia: That's unbelievable. I didn't think you ever had sex.
    • Connor either has a better version, or has been given more incentive to get good at it.
    • Oz, a werewolf who usually seems completely normal when in human form, manages to smell Willow while driving around in a van. He can even tell she's afraid. Later Oz is clued into Willow's relationship with Tara because he can smell her scent on her.
    • In the final episode, Angel gets jealous when he picks up the distinct smell of Spike on Buffy, causing her to make the page quote in Smells Sexy. Subverted when Buffy meets up with Spike later and he immediately starts snarking about Angel. Buffy says, "Let me guess, you smelt him." Spike responds that he also used his "enhanced vampire eyeballs to watch you kissing him." Busted!
    • It is not uncommon for demons to have a good sense of smell. Even half-demons like Doyle and Connor are like this.
    • The werewolves also have a good sense of smell, even when they are in human form. Nina was confused at first because her senses were suddenly so sharp.
  • The aptly titled Castle episode "The Nose" features a witness with hyperosmia, a real life condition causing a hyper-sensitive sense of smell. She could smell Beckett's pheromones when interacting with Castle and identify an oil painting as a forgery through a steel briefcase, yet somehow misidentified Freon (used in air conditioners) as nail polish remover.
  • CSI has David Hodges' super sense of smell. In "In Vino Vertas" he leans into a wine barrel that had held a corpse for a few days and deeply inhales, grossing out a co-worker. He explains that he can deduce the source of the wine from the various ingredients he detects...over the smell of decomp. In another episode, Catherine has him get down on the floor of a victim's bedroom and smell the carpet for evidence. He notices the scent of bitter almonds, which that of cyanide mimics, providing them with a clue as to what happened.
  • The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance: It's revealed that the Skeksis have a very acute sense of smell as the Scientist and the Chamberlain are able to detect the presence of the hiding Rian and Gurjin and even what clans they belong to by smell alone but the Hunter is even better since he can track Rian for miles just by following the scent from a small bit of his clothes.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Poked fun at when a character in "The Empty Child" wants to know how the Doctor managed to follow her. Note: this was when the Doctor was being played by Christopher Eccleston, who has a fairly prominent nose and ears.
      The Doctor: I'm good at following, me. Got the nose for it.
      Nancy: People can't usually follow me if I don't want 'em to.
      The Doctor: My nose has special powers.
      Nancy: Really? Is that why it's so... Do your ears have special powers too?
    • "The Poison Sky": One of the things that tips the Doctor off to Martha having been replaced by an evil clone is that she smells, but he's the only one who can tell.
    • The Doctor has sometimes claimed to be able to identify the year by smell. But more often they have to use other means.
    • "The End of Time": The Doctor and the Master both know where the other Time Lord is by smell, although it's implied there may be a psychic component to this.
  • Elementary: Sherlock Holmes often uses his sense of smell to pick up details about crime scenes that others overlook. In one episode he picks up the scent of a killer's deodorant from the chair they were sitting on. While Holmes' sense is highly trained he does admit he's not perfect and occasionally reaches out to an assosciate called "The Nose" who specialises in this.
  • Heightened sense of smell is a species-wide trait of Luxans on Farscape. As such, Chiana expects that D'Argo will figure out she had an affair with Jothee because he will smell her on him and vice versa. D'Argo eventually gets them to confess by asking "What is that smell?" though he may not have actually smelled anything (or he did, plus he already had his suspicions.)
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Tyrion smells lavender oil on his cousin Lancel, a clue that he's bedding Tyrion's sister, Queen Cersei.
      Tyrion: Lavender oil. She always loved lavender oil...
      Lancel: I am a knight!
      Tyrion: An anointed knight, yes.
    • Drogon catches an interesting scent from Jon and subsequently allows him to pet him, strongly implying he can smell his Targaryen blood, though the bond may run deeper than just scent alone.
  • On Grimm, some kinds of Wesen have this ability. Interestingly, they seem to be the ones with canine animal forms (Blutbad, Fuchsbau).
  • The titular character of Hannibal could smell stomach cancer in his teacher before they were even diagnosed, an infection in the brain of one of his patients, the spores of a specific kind of plant on a corpse that was carried several miles in a river, and the personal scent of someone who had only been in the same ROOM as the person he was smelling.
  • The early episodes of Haven imply that Nathan has a heightened sense of smell, an overcompensation of his other senses to make up for the fact his Trouble means he can't feel anything. In the pilot, he's able to identify the variety of flowers Audrey brings to the office with his eyes closed, and Audrey later finds he keeps a small collection of essential oils in his desk drawer.
  • Ice Fantasy: Yue Shen has an unusually good sense of smell, and uses it to work out who poisoned her sister.
  • In Jekyll, Hyde has a superhuman sense of smell as part of his overall Super-Senses package. He can immediately tell that Katherine isn't wearing her normal perfume because another one is underneath.
  • P.T., from the all-but-forgotten 1970s Saturday morning live-action series The Kids from CAPER, had this. He called his nose Seymour. (Well, "smell more" wouldn't have worked, honestly.)
  • M*A*S*H:
    • When Hawkeye gives up drinking in one episode, he develops a very strong ability to smell to the point that he becomes utterly insufferable during chowtime. Oddly, Klinger, whose nose is so big the Army gave it its own serial number, never seems to use it for this purpose.
    • When Hawkeye temporarily looses his sight, Burns assumes he would stay out of the OR. Hawkeye comes in anyway and uses his sense of smell to determine that a patient had his large intestine pierced by shrapnel before B.J. notices.
    • On one occasion, a Supreme Chef private helps out in the 4077's mess tent. Winchester promptly bursts in through the door with a look of rapture on his face.
      Winchester: I smell parmesan! The meat— (sniffs the air)is a mystery, but that is definitely parmesan!
  • Odd Squad:
    • Odd Todd loves to sniff people in addition to having No Sense of Personal Space and getting super close to others. While it's not usually used offensively, "Undercover Olive" has him sniffing Olive, disguised as Kooky Clown, and deducing that something is off about his supposed fellow villain. Later on, he sniffs her before tearing off her wig to expose her true identity.
    • Molly, a Junior Girl Trooper, has an amazing sense of smell, which she uses when helping Olympia and Otis track down Becky, one of her troop leaders.
    • In "Box Trot", when Orla notices her tablet missing from one of the tables in the bullpen, she gives a couple sniffs and immediately grows suspicious, deciding to check the security cameras to see if the Super-Safe Room, where The Shadow's Box is being held, is intact. It is, at least for the time being, but Orla still remains on high alert.
  • Once Upon a Time: This is something that Red retains in Storybrooke after the curse is broken, due to her being The Big Bad Wolf in the Enchanted Forest.
    Red: Lately since things changed, I've been a little more sensitive to odors.
    Gold: You can smell her?
    Red: (gives him a look) I guess it's because of the "wolf" thing.
  • After One Life to Live's Luna Moody runs away from her fiancé Max Holden, he tracks her down to her family's farm. Her brother denies that she's there, but Max sarcastically asks, "So I guess you're the one wearing her perfume?"
  • Psych: Gus nicknamed his nose The Supersniffer, which he seems to have inherited from his parents.
  • The hero of The Sentinel had this ability, along with the other senses. So did at least one villain on that show, his Evil Counterpart.
  • Sherlock appears to have exceptional olfactory abilities — in the first episode, "A Study in Pink", he is able to detect that two different people are wearing the same deodorant, in "The Reichenbach Fall", he is the only one at the scene of a crime to scent spilt linseed oil, and in "The Sign of Three" he takes it even farther by managing to identify that a passing gentleman is wearing two different kinds of deodorant! The man is now bordering on Super-Senses.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • Narissa, a Romulan female note , is able to detect Soji's scent on Narek, and after she bends down to sniff his neck, she observes that the combination of Narek's and Soji's scents is carnal.
    • Mr. Vup, a Beta Annari, has an extremely heightened sense of smell (thanks to 1253 genes devoted to this ability) that allows him to detect the physical cues for lying, among other, more useless facts like the person's last meal or who the person most recently had sex with.
  • Supernatural: Quite a few supernatural creatures have this. Vampires (they can remember your scent for life), skinwalkers, Leviathans, angels, bastard offshoot djinn, Canids, even the Thule.
  • Taxi: In one episode, Louie tasks Alex with choosing the right after-shave for a date, pointing out his large schnozz is the most suitable. Alex is able to select the after-shave with a single whiff not even needing to get close to any of the bottles.
  • On Teen Wolf, the werewolves have a much better sense of smell than regular humans. At one point, Scott can tell that two parts of a dead body belong to the same person because they smell the same.
  • In Torchwood: Children of Earth, Clem can smell that Gwen is pregnant and that Ianto is "queer".
  • In The Witcher Geralt identifies the traitorous courtier behind a princess's curse by his scent on her bedsheets.

    Podcasts 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons has quite a few monsters that are known for an excellent sense of smell. Sometimes this is represented by a bonus on Perception checks to notice things by smell, in other rulesets there is a Scent special ability that allows creatures to detect things they couldn't see or hear.
    • Dragons have exceptional senses of smell. In the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms AD&D supplement Cult of the Dragon, a dragon said it could smell the fear of human beings.
    • Grimlocks lacking eyes altogether and live in dark caves, and thus use their excellent senses of smell and hearing to hunt for prey.
    • One often-overlooked tidbit is that gnomes have better senses of smell than other Player Handbook races. It's not enough to let them detect enemies like the Scent ability, but a gnome alchemist can track the progress of a chemical reaction by the subtle odors it gives off. The kobolds have exploited this by devising the spell gnome blight, which conjures a cloud of arcane pollen to debilitate victims - targets with sensitive noses, like the kobolds' mortal foes, take a penalty on their saving throw against the spell.
  • One of the five "Enhanced Senses" mods in Eclipse Phase, along with vision, hearing, echolocation, and direction.
  • GURPS has the "Discriminatory Smell" advantage.
  • In Hc Svnt Dracones Scent is a proficiency that any character can train in, but its use is limited without the "Reclaimed Olfactory" Surgery that is only available to Canidae. With it one can identify characters by their scent and detect bluffs.
  • Being set in a World of Funny Animals, Ironclaw has a number of Species that get a bonus dice to scent-based Observation checks. Which is improved by the "Keen Nose" gift, which dholes, dogs, and jackals get automatically, though not wolves.
  • Shadowrun adepts are people with magical potential who, instead of learning spells or dealing with spirits, use it to train their bodies to superhuman levels. There are, predictably, five options for buying the enhanced sense power.
  • The Warhammer 40,000 special character Karanak, the Hound of Vengeance, is a three-headed Flesh Hound of Khorne unleashed upon foes who have earned the Blood God's ire. One of Karanak's head can track his quarry's scent across space, the other across time, and the third can sniff out his victim's very thoughts.
  • Werewolf: The Forsaken: Werewolves, of course. Supernaturally good tracking abilities, Rituals that allow them to share an acquired scent between pack mates, and Gifts that allow them to smell things such as lies.

    Video Games 
  • In Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, the world event "Silver Wind Elder" in Jorvik has a baker follow the scent of his stolen pie to a child who stole it. She said it tasted bland and made it taste better with honey. He loves it and offers her an apprenticeship.
  • This is how Intrepid Reporter Luka is able to find the titular witch of the Bayonetta series despite the fact she's running around Purgatorio (another realm parallel to the human world in which she is completely invisible) by picking out her particular perfume that still lingers in the air after her. It also becomes a minor plot point that whenever he smells her perfume he also smells a hint of rosemary... the rosemary being a demon repellent that is actually coming from the evil angels that are always trying to kill Bayonetta.
  • BlazBlue: This is part of what makes Taokaka such an effective bounty hunter. In Act I of Central Fiction, she declares that she can pick up Ragna's scent - even from the other side of the city - and follow it right to him. Not only is she right, but she gets faster than Carl Clover does. If you prefer the Arcade Mode version of events, the chase ends in Area 28, which is beneath a sewer treatment facility. Lampshaded by Hibiki, a professional assassin who can teleport at will, who admits in his win quote that he is impressed Taokaka managed to locate him purely by his scent.
  • In Cereal Soup, while playing as meerkat, canine or feline characters, players can use their nose to find and dig up treasure hidden throughout the world. But more interestingly, they can also use their nose to sniff other players and learn their "scent", which is a trait that's created in the Character Customization menu. Meaning, players can smell like whatever they want, ranging from pretty smells like lavender flowers to something nonsensical and unusual like "existential crisis".
  • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening: Beowulf tracks down Dante because his scent is so similar to that of Sparda's. After being blinded, he retreats, only to follow the scent's trail again... leading him right to Vergil.
  • Devil May Cry 4: Dante can smell Dagon from a mile away, but intentionally screws around with him and pretends to fall for his tricks to humor himself.
    Dante: You can hide that body. But that smell, woo!
  • In Discworld Noir, Lewton becomes a werewolf, then must match scents (distinguished by colored fumes) to other scents in order to track down clues and identify the culprits.
  • The Dog Island the player character is a dog who has this ability. The goal is to learn as many scents as possible so that you may become a Sniff Master and find a cure for your younger sibling.
  • In The Elder Scrolls series, this is a trait of the Minotaur race. They are said to have an incredible sense of smell and are able to track their prey by scent alone.
  • The monsters of Evolve use this to locate prey, track hunters from a distance, and detect any gadgets the hunters deployed in their wake.
  • The console port of Far Cry, Far Cry Instincts, gives Jack Carver a short list of "feral" super powers including the ability to track by scent.
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • When Altera and Brynhild first meet, Brynhild sniffs her and angrily attacks because Altera has a similar scent to Brynhild's lover Sigurd, causing her to conclude Altera slept with him. While fending her off, Altera, Mash, and the others figure out what Brynhild smelled was Siegfried, a being very similar to Sigurd since their legends are nearly identical. And the reason why Altera smells like Siegfried is because Altera had married Siegfried's wife Kriemhild after his death. Given these events happened centuries ago and these characters are Heroic Spirits and thus copies of the original, Brynhild's sense of smell is powerful indeed.
    • Thomas Edison is able to tell a character is a robot by smelling rust and oil on them.
    • Penthesilea can sniff out Achilles and anybody else with Greek blood.
    • Bradamente can smell her husband Ruggiero's scent on the Hippogriff, because in her source material, Orlando Furioso, it had carried him away at least once.
    • Asclepius is able to tell that his father Apollo is possessing Paris' body by his scent.
    • When Kriemhild meets Sieg, she sniffs him and detects her husband Siegfried's scent, since back in Fate/Apocrypha, Sieg had received a heart transplant from Siegfried and inherited his powers. She ends up treating Sieg like her son.
    • Medusa Saber can smell Athena's scent on Odysseus.
  • Sveta in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn can find monster tracks by using solely her sense of smell, although this skill is only used two or three times through the whole game.
  • Cerberus, while taking the form of three attractive women with dog ears and mannerisms in Helltaker instead of a triple-headed dog, can still detect and identify which demon girl is in the level by scent. At least, those with distinct smells, like cigarette smoke and hard liquor.
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories the darkness starts to affect Riku's sense of smell, giving him an ability to sense metaphysical things such as people's auras that way. Zexion also has the ability to smell people's auras.
  • Tom Trow from King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow sports an enormous nose that he uses to identify intruders.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure: The Noble Wolf and police dog Zeit has a superb sense of smell, which is used in a hidden side-quest to track down the Mean Boss Vice-Police Commissioner's lost wedding ring.
  • Link in wolf form In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess can follow scent trails, represented as colored vapor trails in his Predator-vision "sense view".
  • Metal Gear:
  • This is how Boney can determine what an enemy is weak against/susceptible to in Mother 3, though if the enemy has no scent or smells bad enough, he'd only waste a turn using it.
  • Straynap, the Mentor Mascot / Exposition Fairy in Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream, can distinguish disguised characters and and fleeing fairies by smell — but it's not really "smelling" and more like "hunches". Or so he says.
  • Ochette from Octopath Traveler II is a Beastling, a kind of human-animal hybrid race, with an excellent sense of smell. She can detect things like people's emotions and Hikari's Superpowered Evil Side just based on scents.
  • In Persona 4 Teddie literally "smells" the presence of a human trapped in the TV World. He even says the titular phrase.
  • Many Pokémon have this ability. In fact, the move Odor Sleuth takes advantage of this, allowing Ghost Types to be hit with Normal and Fighting type moves and lowering evasion to normal levels, making it quite useful if presented with either scenario.
    • Slurpuff is the greatest example of this trope in the Pokémon world. It's said to have a sense of smell 100 million times that of a human.
    • Nosepass can use its nose like a compass.
  • The Dog from Secret of Evermore can find alchemy ingredients anywhere.
  • In Spiritfarer, Gustav can easily identify the aromas of different kinds of food thanks to his keen sense of smell. He doesn't like fried foods because the scent sticks to him.
  • Salmonids in Splatoon 2 have such a strong sense of smell that they can sniff out Inklings from the other side of the map — even if said Inklings are hiding within their own ink. This is the in-game justification given for the Salmonids' All-Seeing A.I..
  • In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Geralt often uses his enhanced sense of smell to track his quarry for a quest.

    Visual Novels 
  • Vampires in Diabolik Lovers have very keen senses of smell, which poses various problems for the heroine. Above all is that she smells so delicious that they won't leave her alone. It also makes it very difficult for her to keep secrets from them. If they are feeling possessive and detect the scent of another man on her, expect big trouble ahead.
  • Spirit Hunter: NG:
    • Akira has an acute sense of smell, shown off in the Kubitarou case when he was able to pick up on blood that Maruhashi and his companion missed.
    • The Killer Peach spirit has an acute nose to make up for her poor eyesight. She first confronts Akira after he picks up a cologne-soaked shirt from one of her victims, which Ooe uses to her advantage by taking the shirt and acting as a decoy.
  • Ciel in Tsukihime can tell that Shiki has been fighting Nrvnqsr Chaos and that he had an erotic dream by smelling him. She basically just walks up to him and starts sniffing. She has no real animal emphasis, though.

    Web Animation 
  • Etra chan saw it!:
    • Tsutsuji's acute sense of smell make her sensitive towards certain people. She realizes that she can sense deathly omen by the scent, since she recognized it from her deceased father, a dead rat, and the recently hospitalized Karin. The omen comes true when she passes by Tachibana, who is going to be hit by a car.
    • Katsura has an incredible sense of smell, and he can know people's activities just from smelling them. He nearly caused his parents to divorce, when he smelled perfume on his father Tachibana. He decided to hide this ability until he entered college, when he smelled something on Hiiragi which made him suspicious of him. It later turned out that Hiiragi was possessing cannabis and was arrested by the police.
  • Non-Idle Rich: Katsura works part-time at a convenience store despite owning several lands and is rich. He does it so that he can have something to do and show his daughter a good example.
  • Helluva Boss: Loona, being a hellhound, has an incredibly keen sense of smell. In "Spring Broken", it's demonstrated to be so powerful that to track down several targets to kill, all she has to do is sniff a list of names, and the targets appear glow red in her vision. However, it has its limitations; in "Seeing Stars", when Octavia goes missing in Los Angeles, Loona can't trace her scent over the city's strong stench.
  • RWBY: The Hound Grimm lacks eyes, but can smell good enough to track a specific person in a megapolis across miles of tundra. The lack of eyesight and overreliance on smell do prove disadvantageous, though, as the Hound repeatedly loses track of its last target, Penny, and goes after Ruby, Weiss and Whitley who all got Penny's Machine Blood on them after tending to her, and who are able to stall, injure and eventually kill the beast.
  • Shrapnel: The Commandah realizes he and Reznya are being spied on when he detects the scent of an enemy robloxian hiding nearby.

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • In Break Quest Club, party member Robert O. Cop can somehow smell crime. This is more impressive given that, as a Warforged, he has no nose.
  • Dreamscape: Vampire Lord can smell blood, and even differentiate between the blood of individuals. He uses it to find Anjren and Ahjeen in 'Confronting the Dark'.
  • Nimble of Patchwork Magisters can smell magic, with different kinds having unique, identifiable scents.
  • Gnolls in The Wandering Inn could use their sense of smell to tell that Erin had not only killed a Goblin Chieftain, but also the manner in which the Chieftain was killed (burned to death with scalding oil).
  • Several Avatars of animal spirits in the Whateley Universe have this: Mongoose (possessor of a mongoose spirit), Aquerna (has a squirrel spirit), and Kodiak (a bear spirit) are just three of them. There's also the kid with the super-sensitive nose who passed out from the smell when Jade came to class, even though she was sure she had gotten the smell of sewer and monster guts off her already.
  • The supervillain Stormtiger in Worm possesses this power on top of being able to Blow You Away.

    Western Animation 
  • Diesel from 101 Dalmatian Street has an incredibly good sense of smell even by dog standards. At one point he can smell what kinds of flowers a bee pollinated earlier, and at another he can smell where a character has been, what he was doing there, what mode of transport he used to get home, where he was sitting at said transport, and he's still ready to keep going when Dylan interrupts him.
  • Played for laughs in Adventure Time. Jake is a magic dog, but his strong sense of smell tends to be useless because of things like his short attention span, his inability to recognize scents he's never smelled before, and the similarities between certain smells. His nose even ruins a stakeout because he's not willing to hide with Finn in Ice King's dirty laundry basket, even though he likes the smell of a lot of gross things, including poop.
    Jake: Hey, there's a lot of interesting smells in poop.
  • Subversion: A few episodes of The Alvin Show (predecessor to Alvin and the Chipmunks) feature "Sam Valiant, Private Nose". He thinks his enormous schnoz solves mysteries, but he's always way off.
  • The Aardvark from The Ant and the Aardvark has a nose with his mouth at the end that he uses as a vacuum cleaner in trying to catch the Ant. He's never successful at it, and in one cartoon lampshades its dubious aesthetics:
    Aardvark: Check the profile. That's a profile?!
  • June of Avatar: The Last Airbender has Nyla, a star-nosed mole/wolf/giant anteater creature that she rides around on that can follow anyone's scent and can smell their location from hundreds of miles away. If Nyla can't find someone based on their smell, that means they're on a seperate plane of existence.
  • In the Batman Beyond episode "Splicers", a Cat Girl and a snakeman are able to take on an invisible Batman this way. In the same episode, Batman uses Ace to sniff down their boss after one of his claws becomes embedded in his costume.
  • Wildmutt from Ben 10 has no eyes but can still see smelling with the nostrils at both sides of his head.
  • Code Name Kids Next Door: Numbuh 3. In "Operation R.A.I.N.B.O.W.S.", she uses her nose to track down wild monkeys. Though technically, she doesn't do this by scent. In "Operation S.A.T.U.R.N." she is even able to track them through the vacuum of space, because, as she puts it, "I smell them with my heart".
  • Tucker in Danny Phantom claims that eating meat heightens your senses including sense of smell. He’s able to sniff out meat the staff was hoarding in the first episode when Sam made the school go vegetarian.
  • In Gravity Falls, Mabel can detect Robbie's presence by the smell of anger and hormones.
  • The calling card of canine gumshoe the Hunter from King Leonardo and His Short Subjects is "Have Nose, Will Hunt."
  • Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: The one part of Kipo's mute abilities that's always active is her sense of smell. She really does not enjoy it as she points out it means she can smell 'everything'.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Some species seems to have a keen sense smell, most explicit the dragons and changelings. In the first case, Garble, a male teenager dragon, can easily smell a hidden Twilight and Rarity, and can recognize ponies by scent. Only Ember can distract him to no find them. In the second, a changeling mook, disguised as Princess Twilight, can smell Starlight Glimmer and Trixie, even if Starlight hide her and Trixie by an invisibility spell. He almost discovers both unicorns, but he didn't see them, only their scents, so he continued the searching on another part, giving them a chance to escape.
  • Candace is apparently so obsessed with her brothers Phineas and Ferb that she can smell them. When one character quips "what do they smell like", she replies:
    Candace: Motor-oil and competence.
  • In the animated Punky Brewster episode "Double Your Punky", this is how her dog Brandon is able to pick her out from the obnoxious clone of her Glomer accidentally created. He recognizes Punky's scent while the clone has none, being artificially created.
  • In several versions of Scooby-Doo, the gang will sometimes use Scooby to sniff for clues.
  • An episode of Seven Little Monsters is actually titled this.
  • The Simpsons: Homer Simpson has demonstrated the ability to smell from afar, such as in "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner?", when he smells frosting decorations on a cake in another room.
    Homer: Wait, I can smell a cake... Frosting says, [sniffs] "Farewell... and... [sniffs, gasps] BEST WISHES!"
    Nelson: Your old man has an awesome nose.
    Bart: That's nothing. He can hear pudding.
  • Ferret of Static Shock. When you compare him to guys who can throw fireballs or turn their hands into buzz saws, it gets pretty easy to see why he didn't do a lot of solo work.
  • Various characters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) have a heightened sense of smell. Two characters shown to use it frequently are Dogpound/Rhazar (a mutant dog) and Tigerclaw (a mutant tiger). There is also the mutant box turtle Slash who can detect mutagen by smell, saying he's got a nose for the stuff, and Bebop the warthog, who easily tracks down the turtles.
    Bebop: This nose is better than a bloodhound's.
  • A Thousand and One... Americas: Even for a dog, Lon has an exceptional sense of smell, as exemplified in the tenth episode when he can trace the distant whererabouts of a priest's missing son by smellling his stray clothes (the search begins in a sacred temple and ends in a cistern within Chavín de Huántar at the other end of the village). The previously-skeptical priest acknowledges the dog's skills, but has no time to congratulate him because the place where the missing son turns out to be is a very dangerous one.
  • Total Drama:
    • In one episode of World Tour, Izzy leads Owen and Noah around in circles during a maze challenge because she "smells something lucky."
    • A more definite case of this power comes during All-Stars, when she's immediately able to tell that there's something wrong with "Mike" because of his scent.
      Izzy: You smell weird! Like a honey-cruller wrapped in rotten ham. Good on the inside, poison on the outside.
  • In Turtles Forever, Beebop and Rocksteady grab a giant nose to detect the Ninja Turtles' base. They say this in response.
  • In one episode of Winx Club, Knut is trying to lead the heroines through a cavern system to a secret entrance to the Cloud Tower, only for them to become lost. Bloom mentions that she heard once that ogres have a very good sense of smell, which might help. It clearly does, as Knut is quickly able to pick up the smell of a box of donuts he remembers leaving in his room at the Tower.
  • In one Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Woody's foil is a taxidermist who has an appropriately named bloodhound called Strongnose, who not only can do this, but use his nose like a super-vacuum cleaner. Woody gets the better of the taxidermist by turning Strongnose against him, but the hound gets the last laugh in the end, using his nose to steal Woody's roast chicken.

    Real Life 
  • Some sources about Native Americans claim that there had indeed been rare individuals amongst them who could smell as well or better as dogs.
    • Humans in general, if they hone their sense of smell and live outside of the olfactory kaleidoscope of cities, can learn to track and identify individuals by smell alone.
    • According to this Cracked article, you can detect fear, sexual arousal, and even whether someone is more dominant or submissive from smelling their sweat. Yeah. Wonder why that's not better known.
  • Women generally have better senses of smell than men, but during menstruation some women have a heightened sense of smell due to all the hormones flooding their system. (It's not as awesome when you consider smelling all the blood that's been seeping out of you for a week.) Pregnancy can also drastically increase one's sense of smell, and possibly hearing.
    • Like morning sickness, this is possibly an adaptation to help expectant mothers avoid foods which could be toxic to a fetus.
    • In fact, the phrase "a mother always knows" is more accurate than one may think. Tests have shown that a mother, if blindfolded, can correctly identify her own newborn child simply by scent far easier than the child's father can.
  • Autistic people tend to have more sensitive senses of smell, as part of the general "hypersensitivity" symptom.
  • Spraying a small amount of water vapor up one's nostrils is an effective way to heighten one's sense of smell, as it liquifies the mucus layer over the olfactory epithelium and allows odorants to penetrate more easily. This method is extensively used by wine-tasters, coffee-ground testers, people who check fish for freshness, etc.
  • Animals with keen senses of smell (commonly dogs, but sometimes others such as pigs or rats) are routinely trained for tracking and detection work. In fact, contrary to what you see in movies, someone who tries to wade through a stream to fool a bloodhound who's tracking him won't throw the animal off at all. Nor will spraying yourself with a strong-smelling substance fool a dog, as their brains are very efficient at picking out individual components of scents: it's said that a dog doesn't actually smell "pizza", it smells tomato sauce, cheese, crust, mushrooms, oregano, pepperoni, the cardboard delivery box...
    • Although, if you can get right underwater for a bit there'd be nothing left to smell.
    • Exploited Trope for dogs and pigs being used by humans to find truffles by smell. Also, for dogs trained to smell when a human is about to have an epileptic fit and make a gesture to warn them.
    • The MythBusters have tested most of the techniques above — and several more — for throwing off bloodhounds and sniffer dogs. None of them were completely effective, and attempting to mask one scent with another was never proven effective. The only things that worked at all to throw off the bloodhounds were inner-city tracking (due to the overwhelming kaleidoscope of scents distracting the bloodhound; additionally, this particular bloodhound was not trained for urban environments) and literal Red Herring (though that was as much due to Delicious Distraction as masking the scent).
  • People who work in emergency medicine develop this after a while and can tell by smell alone if a patient is having a G.I. bleed. Many also claim they can smell methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C. diff), two highly infectious diseases that are unfortunately quite common in hospitals and other healthcare settings like nursing homes.
  • Dogs have been known to smell cancer in a human even without being specifically trained for it, and the hostile reaction one dog showed to an apparently innocuous spot on its owner's skin allowed her to get the tumour checked and dealt with before it became dangerous, as well as suggesting that the dog could not only identify the cancer but instinctively know it was harmful. The smell of cancer is so distinctive that it's been shown that dogs are able to smell blood samples from humans and identify cancerous ones, which is now being used as a way to improve cancer screening.
    • While this remains a rare trait, cats have been known to do this too. It's theorized that these animals smell the decay of cells caused by cancer.
  • There are dubious reports that certain humans can smell cancer in other humans.

Alternative Title(s): Superhuman Sense Of Smell, Super Olfaction

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Ravage

Primal and his team are shocked to see that their new arrival is none other than the former Decepticon, Ravage.

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