How to Get Smell and Taste Back After a Sinus Infection

Most people who lose their sense of smell after a sinus infection will get it back, but the timeline ranges from a few weeks to many months, and active treatment speeds things up. About 60% of people with post-upper-respiratory-infection smell loss eventually recover, with younger patients and those who start treatment sooner faring considerably better. The good news is that several evidence-backed strategies can help the process along, from structured smell exercises to medicated nasal rinses. The less good news is that some popular home remedies carry real risks, and recovery is not always linear.

Why a Sinus Infection Knocks Out Smell and Taste Together

During a sinus infection, two things conspire against your nose. First, swollen, mucus-clogged nasal passages physically block odor molecules from reaching the olfactory nerve endings high in the nasal cavity. Second, the inflammation itself can damage those nerve cells directly. The blockage part resolves fairly quickly once the infection clears; the nerve damage is what keeps smell suppressed for weeks or months afterward.

Most people describe losing “taste” during a sinus infection, but what they usually mean is that food has become bland and flavorless. True taste, the ability to detect sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami on your tongue, typically stays intact. What disappears is retronasal olfaction, the process by which aromas travel from the back of your mouth up into your nasal cavity while you chew and swallow. This is what gives food its richness and complexity. Research on patients with chronic sinus disease found that retronasal smell scores strongly correlated with patients’ self-reported “smell and taste” complaints, confirming that what people call taste loss is really smell loss experienced through eating.¹ So if you can still detect whether something is salty or sweet but food seems like cardboard, your tongue is working fine. Your nose is the bottleneck.

How Long Recovery Typically Takes

Among people who lose smell after a respiratory infection, roughly 60% eventually show meaningful improvement.² That’s encouraging but also means a substantial minority face prolonged or permanent loss. Two factors consistently predict who does better: how quickly treatment begins and how old you are.

Patients who started treatment earlier after losing smell showed significantly better recovery rates, and this held true across multiple causes of smell loss.² Age plays a role too. In one large study, recovery rates dropped continuously with each decade of life: about 47% of patients under 40 improved, compared with roughly 33% of those in their 50s and 60s, and only about 7% of those over 69.³ Sex did not significantly affect recovery odds in the same study, despite the fact that post-infection smell loss is far more common in women. The practical takeaway is straightforward: don’t wait months hoping things resolve on their own before trying the treatments below.

Olfactory Training

This is the single most widely recommended first-line therapy for smell loss, and it costs almost nothing. The idea is simple: you sniff a set of distinct, strong-smelling substances for about 20 seconds each, twice a day, every day, for at least three months. The classic protocol uses four essential oils representing different odor categories, often rose, eucalyptus, lemon, and clove. You hold each jar close to your nose, sniff gently, and try to recall what the scent should smell like, even if you can’t detect it yet.

Why would this help? Repeated exposure to odors promotes the survival of newly generated nerve cells in the olfactory system, and olfactory training appears to harness this mechanism by encouraging immature neurons to mature and integrate properly.⁴ Think of it as physical therapy for your nose. Just as damaged muscles need targeted exercise to rebuild, damaged smell pathways benefit from structured, repeated stimulation. After 12 weeks, some people rotate to a new set of four scents to expose the system to different types of olfactory input.

Olfactory training is not a quick fix. Improvements tend to be gradual, and some people notice little change during the first month or two. But the evidence is consistent enough that it has become the foundation onto which other treatments are layered.

Nasal Rinses and Steroid Irrigations

Saline nasal rinses, done with a squeeze bottle or neti pot, help by physically clearing mucus, inflammatory debris, and residual congestion from the nasal passages. On their own they provide modest relief, but the bigger payoff comes when a corticosteroid is dissolved in the rinse. A systematic review found that topical steroid rinses improved smell function in a select group of patients, while standard steroid nasal sprays, the kind you buy off the shelf, showed no improvement across multiple levels of evidence.⁵ The distinction matters. Sprays deposit medication mainly on the lower nasal surfaces, while a high-volume rinse can reach the olfactory cleft, the narrow area high in the nose where smell receptors live.

Budesonide, a corticosteroid that comes in a nebulizer form, is commonly added to saline rinses for this purpose. A randomized trial found that patients using budesonide irrigations experienced clinically meaningful symptom improvement about 79% of the time, compared with 59% for saline alone.⁶ And when budesonide irrigation was combined with olfactory training, about 44% of patients saw meaningful improvement in smell, compared with 27% who did olfactory training with plain saline rinses.⁷ Budesonide rinses typically require a prescription, and your doctor will need to show you the proper technique for dissolving the medication in the saline.

When Oral Steroids Are Considered

A short course of oral corticosteroids like prednisolone can provide a more powerful anti-inflammatory punch than topical rinses. In one study, about 24% of patients experienced a clinically significant improvement in smell scores after a course of prednisolone, compared with 10% in the control group. Even among patients whose smell loss had persisted six months or longer, about a quarter still responded to the treatment.⁸ Patients who started with worse smell function tended to show the greatest improvement.

Oral steroids come with well-known side effects, including insomnia, mood changes, blood sugar spikes, and immune suppression, so doctors typically reserve them for cases where the smell loss is severe and other approaches haven’t helped. They’re sometimes used diagnostically as well: if a burst of oral steroids restores some smell, that signals ongoing inflammation is part of the problem, which helps guide the next steps.

Intranasal Vitamin A

Vitamin A supports the regeneration of olfactory receptor neurons, and applying it directly inside the nose has shown promise specifically for post-infectious smell loss. In a study comparing patients who did olfactory training alone versus olfactory training plus intranasal vitamin A drops, 37% of the vitamin A group showed clinical improvement compared with 23% of controls. The vitamin A group also had significantly greater improvement in their ability to detect and distinguish odors.⁹ The protocol involved 10,000 IU of vitamin A applied inside the nose daily for two months.

This is not the same as taking a vitamin A supplement by mouth, which would not deliver the vitamin directly to olfactory tissue. Intranasal vitamin A drops need to be compounded by a pharmacy, and the approach is still considered somewhat experimental. It does, however, appear safe at the studied dose and represents one of the simpler add-ons to a baseline olfactory training regimen.

What Not to Put in Your Nose

The internet is full of suggestions for things to sniff or spray into your nose to restore smell. Some are harmless, some are useless, and at least one is genuinely dangerous. Intranasal zinc products, including gels and sprays once widely sold as cold remedies, are directly toxic to olfactory tissue. Zinc ions destroy smell receptor neurons on contact.¹⁰

Patients who used zinc-containing nasal gels reported an immediate burning sensation lasting minutes to hours, followed by complete or near-complete loss of smell within 48 hours.¹¹ Laboratory research confirmed the mechanism: zinc-treated nasal tissue showed severe cell death, and mice exposed to zinc-based products had long-term olfactory damage with no recovery after two months.¹² The FDA issued a warning about these products, and the major zinc nasal gel was eventually pulled from the market, but similar products still circulate online. If you are trying to get your smell back, zinc inside the nose is one of the worst things you could do.

Castor oil drops in the nose are another popular recommendation on social media. While castor oil is not toxic in the way zinc is, there is no clinical evidence that it restores olfactory function. If you want to try it, the risk is low, but so is the expected benefit. Stick with approaches that have actual trial data behind them.

Distorted Smells During Recovery

Some people regain smell only to find that familiar things now smell terrible. Coffee smells like sewage. Onions smell like chemicals. Perfume becomes nauseating. This condition is called parosmia, and while deeply unpleasant, it’s generally considered a sign that olfactory neurons are regenerating, just not quite correctly yet.

The leading explanation is miswiring. After a viral infection damages olfactory neurons, new neurons grow back and extend their axons toward the brain. But these regenerating nerve fibers don’t always connect to the right targets. A neuron that used to carry “coffee” signals might now project to a brain region that processes foul odors. This miswiring pattern typically emerges about 45 to 60 days after the initial infection, which aligns with the timeframe required for olfactory receptor neurons to regenerate.¹³ Animal models have confirmed that cutting the olfactory nerve disrupts the organized “odor map” in the brain, leading nerve fibers to project to incorrect locations.¹⁴

Parosmia can be profoundly disruptive. People with severe distortions report dreading meals, losing dangerous amounts of weight, and experiencing significant mental health consequences from being unable to eat normally.¹⁵ The condition usually improves over months as the miswired connections gradually reorganize, but the timeline is unpredictable. Olfactory training is recommended for parosmia as well, on the theory that structured exposure helps guide regenerating neurons toward correct targets. In the oral steroid study mentioned earlier, about 18% of patients with parosmia saw improvement after a short course of prednisolone, and about 28% of those with phantosmia, the perception of smells that aren’t there, also improved.⁸

When Sinus Trouble Becomes Chronic

If your sinus infection wasn’t a one-off but part of a pattern of recurring or never-quite-resolved sinusitis, you may be dealing with chronic rhinosinusitis, a condition where inflammation persists for 12 weeks or longer. Chronic inflammation poses a different challenge for smell recovery than a single acute infection. Research has shown that while short-term inflammation triggers olfactory stem cells to regenerate damaged neurons, sustained inflammation flips these same stem cells into a defensive mode where they stop producing new neurons altogether and instead focus on immune defense.¹⁶ In other words, the body’s own protective response ends up blocking the repair process.

For people with chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps, a particularly stubborn form of the disease, a newer class of injectable medications called biologics has shown striking results for smell recovery. A meta-analysis found that biologic treatment produced moderate to large improvements in objective smell scores. Dupilumab, the most studied of these drugs, showed the largest effect. Other biologics like benralizumab and tezepelumab also helped, though the magnitude varied. Patients with higher blood eosinophil levels, a marker of a specific type of inflammation, responded best.¹⁷ These drugs are expensive and require ongoing injections, but for patients who’ve exhausted other options, the smell improvements have been among the most dramatic seen in the field.

Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections

One emerging treatment involves injecting platelet-rich plasma, a concentrate derived from your own blood, directly into the nasal lining near the olfactory area. Growth factors in PRP may promote nerve cell repair. A pilot study found that patients with reduced but not absent smell improved by an average of about 6 points on standard smell tests after PRP, with 60% reaching normal smell scores by three months.¹⁸

A recent meta-analysis pooling controlled studies found that PRP produced a significant, moderate improvement in smell scores compared with controls, and the average improvement exceeded the threshold considered clinically meaningful. Benefits were observed in patients whose smell loss followed viral infections, COVID-19, and even head trauma.¹⁹ PRP is not yet widely available for this purpose and is not typically covered by insurance, but the data is accumulating enough that it may become a standard option in the coming years, particularly for patients who haven’t responded to training and steroid rinses.

When to See a Doctor

Smell loss after a routine sinus infection often resolves on its own within a few weeks. If it hasn’t improved at all after three to four weeks, that’s a reasonable point to seek evaluation. A clinician can rule out structural problems like nasal polyps, deviated septum, or persistent infection that might be physically blocking airflow. The clinical exam, combined with your history of how and when the smell loss began, is typically more useful for diagnosis than formal smell testing alone. Standard smell tests can measure how much function you’ve lost but don’t reveal the underlying cause or predict whether you’ll recover.²⁰

Red flags that warrant earlier evaluation include smell loss after head trauma (which carries a much worse prognosis, with only about 12.5% recovering), smell loss accompanied by persistent one-sided nasal obstruction, or nosebleeds.² And if you develop parosmia severe enough to interfere with eating or daily life, a doctor can discuss whether a steroid trial or referral to a smell disorders clinic is appropriate.

The Nasal Microbiome and Smell Function

An increasingly interesting area of research involves the bacteria living in your nose. People with normal smell and people with reduced smell don’t just differ in their nerve function; they harbor measurably different communities of nasal bacteria. A study comparing microbial communities found that the bacterial makeup of the nose differed significantly between people with normal smell and those with reduced smell. People with poorer smell actually had more diverse nasal bacterial communities, which runs counter to the general assumption that microbial diversity is always a good thing.²¹

Whether these microbial differences are a cause or consequence of smell dysfunction is still unclear. It’s possible that inflammation-related changes in the nasal environment shift the bacterial community, which then further impairs olfactory function in a feedback loop. Or the bacterial changes might simply be a marker of a nose that’s been inflamed for a while. Either way, the finding opens up the intriguing possibility that future treatments might target the nasal microbiome directly, perhaps through specialized probiotics or antimicrobial approaches, as part of a strategy to restore smell. For now, this remains firmly in the research phase, but it helps explain why recovery from smell loss is so variable from person to person: the ecology inside each nose is different.

1
PubMed Central. Retronasal Olfaction in Chronic Rhinosinusitis
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PubMed Central. Olfactory training assists in olfactory recovery after sinonasal surgery
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PubMed Central. Restoring the Sense of Smell: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Biologic Therapies for Chronic Rhinosinusitis with Nasal Polyps
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