Up until the age of 13, Laura Wilson kept a big secret from her friends at school. While her peers drowned themselves in intoxicating perfumes such as Britney Spears’ Fantasy, Impulse and So…?, she could never tell one scent from the other – or smell them at all. “If someone at school said “Oh that smells amazing” I would just nod my head in agreement. But I had no idea.”
Laura is one of 6,000 people in the UK who are born without a sense of smell, a condition known as anosmia. Others lose their smell following an accident, much like football manager and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here contestant Harry Redknapp who recently confessed to losing his sense of smell following a car accident. Although Laura realised early, at the age of three, that she couldn’t smell anything, she was accused of attention-seeking by her incredulous parents.
“It’s such an uncommon condition that no one believed me – so instead I pretended I could smell. It was easier,” says Laura, 24, from Leeds. However, by the time she entered her teenage years, Laura started to panic about how much she was missing out on: “Smell is a big part of everyone’s life. And I had no idea what it was like.”
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