Most people who lose their sense of smell after a viral infection will recover it naturally, with about 81% reporting full recovery within six months. But if yours hasn’t come back on its own, the most effective thing you can do right now is start smell training, a simple daily exercise using essential oils that helps your olfactory system rebuild its connections. Beyond that, several other strategies can support and speed recovery.
Why Smell and Taste Disappear Together
What most people describe as “losing taste” is actually a loss of smell. Your tongue can only detect five basic sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory (umami). Everything else you experience as flavor comes from odor molecules traveling from the back of your mouth up into your nasal cavity while you chew and swallow. This is called retronasal olfaction, and it’s why food tastes “like nothing” when your nose is blocked or your smell receptors are damaged.
If you can still detect sweetness, saltiness, or sourness but food just seems bland and flavorless, your taste buds are likely fine. The problem is your smell. Fix the smell, and the full experience of flavor comes back with it.
What Happens to Your Smell System During Infection
Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 don’t typically destroy the smell-detecting nerve cells themselves. Instead, they infect the support cells surrounding those neurons, called sustentacular cells. These cells express the receptors that the virus latches onto to enter your tissue. When the support cells are damaged, the nerve cells they maintain can’t function properly, and the signaling pathways that carry scent information to your brain get disrupted.
The good news is that olfactory neurons are among the few nerve cells in your body that can regenerate. Your nose is constantly cycling through new smell receptors throughout your life. The challenge is that this regeneration can take weeks to months, and sometimes the new connections wire up incorrectly, producing distorted smells (a condition called parosmia) before full function returns.
How Smell Training Works
Smell training is the closest thing to physical therapy for your nose. It’s the most well-supported home treatment for post-viral smell loss, and it works by repeatedly stimulating your olfactory neurons to encourage proper regeneration and reconnection.
Here’s the protocol recommended by UW Medicine:
- Buy 4 to 8 small bottles of essential oil with scents that are familiar to you. Common choices include lemon, eucalyptus, lavender, clove, orange, and peppermint.
- Open one bottle and hold it under your nose. Breathe softly for 15 seconds. Focus on the memory of what that scent should smell like, even if you can’t detect anything yet.
- Take a 15-second break, then repeat with the next oil.
- Cycle through all four scents. The whole session takes just a few minutes.
- Do this one to two times a day for at least three months.
Consistency matters more than intensity. Many people notice subtle improvements starting around 4 to 8 weeks, though full recovery can take longer. Even if you detect nothing for the first several weeks, keep going. The training is still working at a cellular level, encouraging your nerve pathways to rebuild.
Other Strategies That May Help
Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Omega-3s have well-established anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties. Researchers at Mount Sinai have investigated their use for post-viral smell loss based on earlier findings that omega-3 supplementation helped patients recover their sense of smell more quickly after skull surgery. The theory is that reducing inflammation around the olfactory nerve gives regenerating neurons a better environment to heal. You can increase your intake through fatty fish like salmon and sardines, or through a fish oil supplement.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections
For people whose smell loss has persisted for many months, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections are an emerging option performed by ENT specialists. The procedure involves drawing a small amount of your blood, concentrating the healing factors in it, and injecting it into the olfactory area inside your nose. Across ten clinical studies involving over 500 patients, the results have been promising. In one study, patients with reduced (but not completely absent) smell saw a 60% improvement within three months, with many reaching normal smell function. Multiple other trials found statistically significant improvements in objective smell tests compared to control groups. PRP appears to work best for people who have partial smell rather than complete absence, and it’s still considered investigational at most centers.
How to Maximize Flavor While You Recover
Since your tongue still works, you can lean into the five basic tastes to make meals more enjoyable. Add acid (lemon juice, vinegar) to brighten dishes. Use more salt or umami-rich ingredients like soy sauce, parmesan, and mushrooms. Play with texture and temperature contrasts: crunchy toppings, cold and hot elements on the same plate, spicy foods that activate pain receptors rather than taste or smell. These won’t replace what you’re missing, but they make eating feel less like a chore.
Safety Precautions You Shouldn’t Skip
Living without smell creates real safety risks that are easy to overlook. You can’t detect smoke, natural gas leaks, or chemical fumes. You also can’t tell when food has spoiled just by sniffing it.
- Install smoke detectors on every level of your home and check their batteries regularly.
- Consider a natural gas detector if you have gas appliances.
- Read expiration dates on all food, every time. Don’t rely on the “smell test” you used to trust.
- Ask someone else to check leftovers or anything you’re unsure about before eating it.
What Recovery Typically Looks Like
Recovery from post-viral smell loss is rarely a light switch. Most people experience a rapid initial improvement within two to three weeks of infection as the acute inflammation fades. After that, the pace slows. By six months, roughly 81% of people with COVID-related smell loss report full subjective recovery. For the remaining group, improvement can continue for a year or longer, though some people do develop long-term changes in how things smell.
Parosmia, where familiar scents smell wrong or unpleasant, is actually a sign of recovery in most cases. It means new olfactory neurons are growing and making connections, just not the right ones yet. Coffee smelling like sewage or onions smelling like chemicals is deeply unpleasant, but it typically fades as the nerve pathways mature and sort themselves out over the following months. Continuing smell training through this phase is especially important, as it helps guide those new connections toward their correct targets.