A childhood belief about periods

My mom used to only occasionally go to the beauty parlor to have her hair done up into a bouffant hairdo. As a sensitive and somewhat impressionable child, I remember the somewhat chemical smell of the beauty parlor's caustic dyes and bleaches, and in my furtive imagination, I put those smells together with the preponderance of women in those establishments and came up with the idea that women, especially women on their period, smelled like that, at least "en mass". My father also had a very definite "man smell" that today I remember as distinctive. I knew that someday, as a male of the species, I too would sport that "funk". It was a shock when I formulated my theory about the females of the race. They stunk too, like the beauty parlor, even as my mom didn't. I'm glad to say that adulthood and sexual discovery dispelled that notion that ladies smelled like hair dye. I have to say that a few of the gals that I have been with have had, let us say, a "fragrance of their own" post coitus (as we all do), but none have had that distinctive smell of hydrogen peroxide, thank god...