Human skin can recognise scents

Human skin is capable of detecting odour, according to a new study which identified five different types of olfactory receptors in the epidermis.
Researchers have found the first direct evidence that olfactory receptors exist within the epidermis, which is the skin's outermost layer.
Daniela Busse, a researcher in the Department of Cellphysiology at Germany's Ruhr-University Bochum, and her team identified five different types of olfactory receptors in human skin keratinocytes (the predominant type of cell in the epidermis), and they also cloned one of them, called OR2AT4.
The scientists next exposed the target smeller cells to the compound Sandalore, which is a synthetic sandalwood odourant.

Busse and her team focused on sandalwood because, for at least 4,000 years, oil from the East Asian sandalwood tree has been prized both as a perfume and as a medicinal agent for the skin, 'Discovery News' reported.
The researchers found that Sandalore activated the cloned smeller cells in skin, thereby inducing a calcium-signalling cascade that dramatically increased the proliferation and migration of cells. This process is characteristic of wound healing.
Researchers are not exactly sure why the synthetic sandalwood appears to be so beneficially potent, but they suspect that it somehow facilitates interaction between the predominant human skin cells and neurons (nerve cells), also found within skin.

The study was published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.