Sorry for the long time away. Life is happening. I got a wife and baby and job and stuff. But anyway, here I am.
While my wife is sleeping off her night shift, I have spent most of the day working on my current novel in progress, which happens to be volume 3 of Jake and the Dynamo, currently under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.
Anyway, as I was working, I happened to find myself asking a trivial question—why do we typically describe blood as tasting like copper?
This question led me to an interesting article on LiveScience. Although some speculation appears to be involved in the article’s conclusion, the apparent answer is that copper and other metals, including iron, don’t actually have the metallic odor we attribute to them. Rather, the smell comes from an oil in our skin, which breaks down in the presence of metal.
So, when you grab a piece of metal, the breakdown of the oil in your hands leaves behind the “metallic” smell. Naturally, since metal coins get a lot of handling, this makes coins smelly. Thus, the distinctive odor of copper pennies.
Similarly (this part appears to be more speculative), the iron in blood can produce the same smell for the same reason, and (this part is conjecture) we may be sensitive to this metallic smell specifically so that we can be alert to the smell of blood.
So, we smell blood because blood reacts to skin oil in the same way coins do, and then we turn around and attribute the smell of coins to blood.
So there you go.
