Health And Wellness

The Reason Your Boobs Smell Different During Pregnancy

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The Reason Your Boobs Smell Different During Pregnancy

When my best friend was pregnant, I endured it by proxy. When she got cravings for Sprite with drops of soy sauce in it, I joined her in said cravings. When she got headaches, I made sure that the lights were dimmed and made soothing sounds until she said something like, "Jesus Christ, you are the world's most annoying person." (Not an entirely direct quote.) 

I wanted to be in sync (not the band) with her. I wanted to be a source of support or understanding, and for the most part, I was. She had a lot of concerns about what was happening to her body during pregnancy, and we tried to discover the answers together.

However, there were some things I just couldn't couldn't wrap my head around. "Did you know that the amount of blood in my body has like, doubled?" She asked me at one point during her pregnancy.

I looked at her belly and stopped picking names and started imaging squishing bloated mosquitos during the summers of my youth. I had to sit and put my head between my legs for that one while my heavily pregnant comforted me in TJ Maxx, usually the safest of all my safe spaces. 

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Another one that sounded more like horror movie fodder than a thing that could ever happen in real life? BLOODY SHOW. "It's like the cork on a bottle of wine.

Only, instead of a cork, it is a plug of mucus usually tinged with some blood." If I were an old-timey Japanese warrior, surely this would have been enough to drive me to seppuku. Thankfully, while I am many things, a Japanese warrior is not one of them.

All of my shivering fear aside, there was one thing she was worried about that absolutely fascinated me: "Why do breasts smell during pregnancy?"

She was totally flummoxed.

Until her third trimester, other than a thickening and darkening of the nipple, she had not noticed any real change in her breasts. In fact, it had gotten so that she was worried about whether or not her breasts would even produce milk.

Not being a doctor (another thing I am thankfully not) I suggested we take to the internet.

Her husband had wisely locked her out of WebMD during the start of her pregnancy, but I wasn't bound by any such strictures. I offered to dig through the results and filter out the more terrifying findings, letting her know if I found anything helpful out. ​

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I very quickly did! During the third trimester of pregnancy, it is not at all abnormal to become aware of a specific smell coming from your boobs. In fact, it's usually a sign that your breasts are getting ready to produce breast milk. 

But there's a little bit more to it than that. In fact, a lot of doctors don't think that the smell of the breast milk coming in is all that strong, but rather that a pregnant woman's sense of smell is totally heightened.

Combine this with the fact that during pregnancy a woman produces more sweat and it might just be that if you're pregnant thinking, "Why do my boobs stink?" what you're picking up might not just be your milk coming in: it might be *gasp* your own body odor! 

RELATED: 9 Cartoons That Sum Up EXACTLY What It Feels Like To Be Pregnant​

Being able to smell your breasts during pregnancy isn't bad or dangerous or unusual. If the smell bothers you, baths or showers (with your favorite bath time potions, but of course) are your friends.

So if you are with spawn and you catch a whiff of your breasts and finding yourself thinking, "Do boobs smell different during pregnancy?!" You aren't going crazy, they CAN smell, though it's a heck of a lot more likely that it's your heightened sense of smell at work. Rock on, hot mama! ​


Rebecca Jane Stokes is a sex, humor and lifestyle writer living in Brooklyn, New York with her cat, Batman. 

Editor's Note: This article was originally posted on August 4, 2017 and was updated with the latest information.​