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Originally Posted by Wetdogeared
There's truth in what you say. But just walking through the perfume section in a department store (which is always located at the door on the ground floor), we have to hold our breaths and walk fast to the elevator/escalator, or we break out sneezing and nose running and eye itching. Could be psychological, we're all mental in out household. 
*edit* As far as I know, they don't use pollen in perfume. |
No .... but the reason you can smell the perfume is because people are spraying it into the air. There are all sorts of particulate chemicals (aside from the actual scent) that are contained in perfumes. The chemical you could actually be allergic to might not even have a scent.
If perfumes were just scent, they would not spray very well, would not package well, and would not last on the body as well. They used to use ambergris in perfumes, not just for its scent, but because it extended the scent that you wanted to smell. (It is non-reactive to acids, so the natural body acids on the skin don't degrade the scent so quickly.)
The immune system is a weird thing. People have a lot of misconceptions about it. I still encounter people all the time who think they are allergic to "cat hair." They aren't. They are allergic to a protein in cat saliva, which the cats put on their hair and dander when they wash themselves. The hair and dander are really just a transport mechanism for the allergen.
Same thing with perfumes and scents generally. The thing you are really allergic to is probably some part of the chemical used in making the scent into a commercially useful product or some particulate matter that is associated with the scent (such as pollen), not the scent itself.