Most people who lose their smell and taste after a viral infection will recover on their own, with about 81% reporting full recovery within six months. But if you’re still waiting, there are proven techniques to speed things along, starting with a simple daily exercise called smell training. Understanding what’s actually happening in your nose, and what you can do about it, puts you in the best position to get back to normal.
Why Taste Disappears With Smell
What most people experience as “losing taste” is actually losing smell. Your tongue can only detect five basic sensations: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (umami). Everything else you think of as flavor, the richness of coffee, the complexity of a curry, comes from odor molecules traveling from your mouth up through the back of your nasal passage to your smell receptors. This is called retronasal smell, and it’s responsible for most of what you perceive as taste.
If you can still detect sweetness, saltiness, or sourness but food tastes “flat” or “like cardboard,” your tongue is working fine. The problem is in your nose. That’s good news, because recovering your smell will bring your sense of flavor back with it.
What Happens Inside Your Nose
Your sense of smell depends on specialized nerve cells lining the upper part of your nasal cavity. When a virus, injury, or inflammation damages these cells, the signal to your brain gets disrupted. The encouraging part is that smell neurons are one of the very few types of nerve cells in your body that can regenerate throughout your entire life. New smell neurons are constantly being born from stem cells at the base of the nasal lining, even in old age.
What makes this regeneration possible is that the smell center in the brain, unlike most of the central nervous system, actively welcomes regrowing nerve fibers. Specialized cells in that region guide new axons back to their targets, allowing the connection between nose and brain to be rebuilt. This is why recovery from smell loss is the rule rather than the exception, though the timeline varies from weeks to over a year depending on the severity of the damage.
Smell Training: The Most Proven Recovery Method
Smell training is currently the only treatment with strong evidence behind it for post-viral smell loss. The idea is simple: by repeatedly exposing your nose to specific scents, you encourage those regenerating nerve cells to reconnect properly. Think of it like physical therapy for your nose.
The standard protocol, recommended by Johns Hopkins and other major medical centers, uses four essential oils chosen from different scent categories:
- Flowery: lavender
- Fruity: lemon
- Spicy: clove
- Resinous: eucalyptus
Twice a day, morning and evening, hold each oil close to your nose and sniff gently for about 15 to 20 seconds. While you sniff, actively try to remember what that scent is supposed to smell like. Repeat three to four times per scent before moving to the next one. The whole routine takes about 10 minutes.
Stick with the same four scents for the first three months, then switch to four different ones for months four through six. This progression challenges your recovering system with new stimuli. Consistency matters more than intensity. Even if you can’t smell anything at first, the exposure is still stimulating the nerve pathways. Most guidelines recommend continuing for at least three months before evaluating your progress, and six months of training is common for people with persistent loss.
Other Approaches Worth Knowing About
Short courses of oral corticosteroids have shown promise for smell loss caught early, particularly within the first month. Two randomized controlled trials found that more patients regained function after steroid treatment compared to a control group. The logic is straightforward: if inflammation is compressing or damaging the smell nerves, reducing that inflammation early may prevent lasting harm. This is the same reasoning behind using steroids for sudden hearing loss or facial nerve paralysis. Steroids aren’t appropriate for everyone, so this is a conversation to have with your doctor if your loss is recent.
Omega-3 fatty acid supplements are being studied based on their anti-inflammatory and nerve-protective properties. Researchers at Mount Sinai are testing a six-week daily regimen, building on earlier findings that omega-3s helped patients recover smell faster after skull surgery. Results from ongoing trials aren’t final, but omega-3s carry minimal risk for most people.
Adding oral vitamin A to smell training, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to help. A double-blinded trial that followed patients for 12 months found that combining daily vitamin A with smell training produced no better results than smell training alone.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections
For people whose smell loss has persisted for many months despite other interventions, a newer option is gaining ground. Researchers at Stanford Medicine tested platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections, where a concentrated portion of your own blood is injected into the nasal tissue near the smell nerves. In a trial of 26 participants, those who received PRP were 12.5 times more likely to improve than those who received a placebo. At three months, 57% of the PRP group showed clinically significant improvement compared to just 8% in the placebo group. Stanford now offers this procedure to patients outside the trial setting. It’s still relatively new and not widely available, but it represents a meaningful option for stubborn cases.
Staying Safe While You Can’t Smell
Living without smell creates real safety risks that are easy to overlook. Natural gas and propane are odorized with a sulfur-like chemical so people can detect leaks, but that system is useless if your nose isn’t working. Install fuel gas alarms near any gas-burning appliances, in basements with a gas entry point, and outside bedrooms. These alarms trigger at concentrations well below dangerous levels, giving you time to evacuate. Even people with a working sense of smell can experience “olfactory fatigue” and stop noticing a gas odor after a minute or two of exposure, so these detectors are a good idea for any household.
Beyond gas leaks, you also lose the ability to detect smoke, spoiled food, and chemical hazards. Check expiration dates carefully rather than relying on the sniff test. Make sure your smoke detectors have fresh batteries. If you cook with gas, consider a visual timer and stay in the kitchen while burners are on.
When Smell Loss Needs Medical Attention
If your smell hasn’t returned after three months and there’s no obvious cause like a recent cold or head injury, a referral to an ear, nose, and throat specialist is warranted. Certain symptoms call for faster evaluation: blockage on only one side of your nose, bloody nasal discharge, facial numbness or tingling, changes in vision, or any neurological symptoms alongside the smell loss. One-sided nasal symptoms in particular can signal something structural that needs investigation.
A specialist can examine your nasal passages for polyps or other obstructions, test how well your smell is actually functioning (since self-assessment is often inaccurate), and recommend targeted treatments. Some causes of smell loss, like nasal polyps or chronic sinusitis, respond well to specific medical or surgical treatment that general smell training won’t address.