Best smell ever - I worked at a Kraft factory as security and they had a water purification room for crystal light drinks, that room smelled incredible, like a clean rainy day but in a purely indescribable way. It smelled so good 😊
Worst smell I ever experienced was an elderly lady in surgery whose infarcted bowel was so foul every single person dry heaved. We were all professionals so nobody actually vomited. That was 30 years ago and I still think about that smell and the withered geriatric partially alive human this smell came from and it made me sad, nauseated and terrified at the same time .
My brother had a twisted bowel so bad that he lost 90% of his small intestine. He was in a coma for 2 weeks (maybe? It was years ago) and almost died. When he finally woke up, he had a colostomy bag for a week or 2. The first time he changed that thing was the worst smell, but thinking about it brings me to tears because it reminds me of how happy I was that he was going to be ok. I'm literally crying right now just writing this comment.
@@trybunt Thank God he's ok...Had a very good friend who- because of colon cancer- had to get fixed up with a colostomy bag setup. Unfortunately, we lost Matt a year later. (lol...I remember him telling me how bad it smelled when he had to change it out)
That's literally how my grandmother went, and the timing is about right. She died a couple of days after the surgery, iirc. "Partially alive" really describes her last while on Earth.
@@trybunt my BFF’s son was born prematurely, and had an underdeveloped blood flow to his intestines. He has had to have them resected a few times (he’s only 5!) and had an ileostomy bag for a long time.
I used to work with mercaptan at a hazardous waste lab. The smell gave me literal nightmares. A smell. That gives you wake up shouting nightmares. I wore my optional respirator after that.
if its any consolation i would very much pay to swap my wake up shouting nightmares with ones where i didnt wake up with visions in my head of violence.
My worst smell (yet) was when cleaning a marginal hoarder house in Charleroi: the city ordered them to leave after their smallest child got the gangrene after being bitten by rats. In their cellar, there was a freezer full of meat that had liquefied after being there without electricity for at least half a year. That combined to the 20 cm of poo on the floor because the pipe of their toilet was broken and had leaked there filling the cellar slowly but surely. Opening that freezer in that cellar...
@@natesmodelsdoodles5403 I was working for a private. The situation was that the hoarders house was the very last in the street with a garden next to it and an organization of supermarket planned to build there a parking and then demolish the house to build a shop. The guy living next to the garden bought the hole property instead because he didn't want to have a parking next to his home. We cleaned the house just to make it safe, hygienic and dry but it's just an abandoned building right now and the neighbour still has his tranquillity ;)
The worst smell I probably ever experienced was when I had to get my tonsils removed.... and they used a laser. So for a solid 1-2 days I was both smelling and tasting burnt and decayed flesh constantly, which wasn't fun.
I had my tongue clipped that way and I totally agree that shit is nasty. Who would have thought human flesh would smell and taste so horrid when charred.
@@RejoiceYardley it only smelt like that because of a cauterizing machine, at least that's how I understand this person's comment. If you have that without having any procedures done I would definitely talk to a dentist and see what's going on because that's not natural. Best wishes and take care in life.
My primary school was in the middle of hundreds of sugar cane fields. When they would prepare the lands they'd use blood and bone manure. It is one of the worst smells I've ever experienced. Literally the smell of corpse's and poop, all day for weeks in class. You could never escape it.
If you take that smell and multiply it by 10, you have the trace smell that foxes leave behind to mark their territory. They're cute, but they stink like hell
Slaughter houses stink for miles from my experience. Took a bus everyday that would stop at a train crossing near one and it was the longest wait. *gag
Before the pandemic, I was a frequent volunteer in my local nature museum's specimen prep lab, where I worked on turning mostly small songbirds into study skins to be added to the museum's research collections. It was incredibly cool work, but it was in the prep lab that I encountered the worst smell I've experienced to date - a bird that neither I, nor my supervisor, nor the other volunteers in the lab that day knew was actually in an advanced stage of decomposition until we thawed it and opened the ziploc it was in. Pure, intense, eye-watering rot wafted out into the lab that day. It was so bad that I could taste it, and all of us were racing to get data from the specimen - measurements, weight, information about where and when it died - as fast as we could so that it could go into the trash, and then out to the dumpster behind the museum. The only thing we could do in the face of such a horrible, unexpected stink was laugh. Just thinking about the smell made me gag for weeks afterward.
As a kid, I brought home a dead bird's head I found on the train tracks. It didn't seem too bad when I wrapped it in a plastic bag. I didn't know how to get to the pure skull and beak I was after, so I scraped off what I could from the already stinking thing, and put the head in a jar filled with water and a bit of soap, closed it and left it in a cupboard for a day or two. Man, what a series of unfortunate decisions 😅
There is a smell i like to think of as "sun" smell. It's when the sun comes out and heats up your living room, there is a smell that does not come from heat (like radiator) - but from the sun rays warming the room directly. Another smell i like is campfire. Fresh wood, burning wood ... smells nice.
My mom passed away in 2015. Somehow, every time she took a shower, the whole house would smell of soap and shampoo but it never did when anyone else would shower and use the same products. And it didn't matter what products my mother used, it always smelled the same to me. I can still remember exactly what it smelled like. Thanks for the Memories, Joe! 💞
Sounds like your mom used waaayyy too much soap when she was showering. :P Possibly combined with showering with very hot water, making the water vapour carry the soap smell all over the house.
Decompositional slurry is pretty bad, when a human has decomposed over a 2-3 week period. That is how a lot of bodies are discovered. The smell is really horrible and very strong. Then there was a chemical made from sulphur called "Apple Blossom". It was applied to the radiator heaters in the high school I attended ( 1969 or so ) and the school was evacuated due to the sickening smell.
I’m asking random people in the comments, have you ever smelled Magic shaving powder? It’s at any drugstore pretty much. Take a sniff next time you’re in a dollar general I promise you’ll be smelling it for weeks, it’s one of those very strong chemically smells mixed with a sulfur, shitty smell, so don’t sniff too hard lol, but I wonder if that’s what your school may have smelled like
@@emsa5034 I will have to check that out next time I see that product...."Nair" hair remover is pretty nasty also, but the "Apple Blossom" stink bomb was REALLY nasty !
I have a buddy who works for police rescue, and he frequently has to recover bodies from inconvenient locations. First time he had to bring up a body from the bottom of a cliff, hauling it up on abseiling ropes, the body bag burst halfway up, and he was showered with decayed fat and flesh.
The smell of old wooden houses is one of the best smells ever imo. The combination of the flooring, paneling, trim, etc, aged to perfection. Also some cedar helps. When i step into an old house or building with that smell, i don't want to leave.
One thing I've noticed with smells is their seemingly instantaneous ability to recall memories of mine from decades ago. People talk about how music can take them back to a time and place but with smells I find that effect to be a lot stronger. I'll open a new brand of washing detergent and immediately recognise it as the smell of my friend's house which I haven't visited in 15+ years or something like that
That's because the part of the brain that controls your sense of smell is literally right next to the part that is responsible for memories. So when one part is stimulated some of that neural excitement extends out to the surrounding areas intrinsically linking them. Sort of like if there's a party next door your gonna hear the music/ruckus wether you want to or not.
I get that too from specific laundry detergents. One memorable thing I smell strongly that I can't explain is the smell of outside air. Not the smell of air while outside, but the smell of outside air blowing indoors. Sometimes people say it's the smell of dust being picked up maybe around the window, but the thing is, the smell happens non stop. I can crack the front door and smell the air coming at head height where there shouldn't be any dust, close the door and it goes away. As soon as I step outside though, It becomes a bit more intense for about a second then dies down over the next minute. The more outside air I get all at once, the more quickly it goes away, hence why cracking a door or window helps it last longer.
Scent is the most powerful sense tied to memory. Things like you’re mothers cooking or a lover’s perfume can trigger flashbacks. One time I was grocery shopping with my mom and I opened a bottle of aftershave near her and she started sobbing uncontrollably because it was the same brand her dad used.
@@GrizzlyTank I think it's probably because smells are not really pattern based like sight, sound, or even touch. There are spectrums and patterns of the kind of stimuli you can experience with vision (color/contrast/form), hearing (pitch/volume/direction), touch (temperature/stress/location), and in taste there are categorical stimuli that have respective gradients of intensity in each category (flavor groups). Smell is the one sense that is hardest to assign a predictable pattern to. You can't say, imagine the smell of eggs but with 15% pumpkin smell added. It's unquantifiable. There's no way to foresee a smell that you've never received yet, but as long as you don't have Aphantasia, you can imagine at least sights, maybe sounds, and feelings that you haven't had yet. You may even be able to recall tastes, but only those you've experienced before. I think this means your brain has to manually record every vivid detail in accordance to every single smell you've ever had. You brain can't reference one smell as a template in order to save space and compress information. Every smell is therefore a separate experience. The more serotonin you have at the time of smelling or re-smelling something, the more acuity your brain can have to record the smell. In his video about Aphantasia, he also mentioned that with vision, there's a negative correlation between brain activity with processing what your eyes see, and imagining previously recorded visual information. This means your ability to imagine images and daydream (if you have the ability to) can hurt your focus on what your eyes are actually seeing in the moment. With smells, imagining them isn't much of an option as they're much harder to recall with no reference, so your acuity to smell is much more focused on actually taking in the real life information to remember it, but you can't access that vivid information again by just imagination since there's no pattern, only when you find that smell again in real life can you experience the smell and the other feelings that were packaged with it come along.
@@Dragonfly9307 I wonder if you can relate to my observation that this smell of fresh air is very similar to how the air smells on certain summer days, often times, after there was a storm. The best explanation I have for this wonderful freshness is ozone (O3). I feel the same smell when I leave my laundry outside for couple of hours and then smell it (it's faint if I add too much detergents or a softener). The reason that it goes away pretty quickly is almost for sure because your nose gets used to it fast.
when i was about 12 or 13 my family moved to a new place. the underground storage room wasn't very clean. lots of stuff were left there by the previous owner. amongst the rubbish was a 2 litre milk carton just standing there by itself with a hole on top. i went to have a look. imagine "i can smell it with my eyes" isn't a joke. imagine having flashbacks every time you see a milk carton. imagine an interrogation tool 10 times more effective than waterboarding. so let me describe the content i saw before my body involuntarily recoiled all the way upstairs. there's gooey brown liquid that probably was once milk, 1/4 full. there's a mouse floating on top half decomposed. there are maggots in the liquid and on top of the mouse, all dead and decompsing too. what i think happened is the mouse bit into the carton, fell in and drowned. then maggots started eating the corpse but probably died of lack of oxygen sometime later (the only opening is at the very top of the carton. gas from decomposing are all heavier than air, like CO2, H2S etc). anyhow. the family therapist at the time suggested sharing is the best way to deal with trauma. so here i am. hope you lot enjoyed my story of smell.
While I hate the mental image your story has burned into my imagination, I love the way you write and can paint such a vivid image. Putrid, but vivid nonetheless
I had Covid this week and 100% lost my sense of smell. So weird sticking your nose in a box of incense and not smelling a thing. Luckily unlike most people I know (who couldn't smell anything for months) it was only a few days. I've never been so happy to experience the smell of urine (I noticed it start to come back while I was in the loo haha).
I thought I lost mine in January when I tested positive. Never had any symptoms, but while I had myself quarantined I was washing my hands and couldn't smell the soap. I always get strongly scented soaps for my bathroom. Went to my room, a little freaked out, when my dog farted and the smell made me dry heave. Turns out my son had refilled the soap bottle with unscented soap. 🤦
I, fortunately, also had a relatively short run in with the virus and lost my smell for about a week. The first smell I noticed was the pollution from cars, that was a very ambivalent feeling. For some reason pollution and smoke smelled really sour for a while.
everything tasted extremely salty but to be exact, everything smelt absolutely of bicarbonate soda (Natron in german). Not exactly sure if it was Covid but i never experienced something like this since everyone sais you loose taste i'm sure it was. I tried to eat a salami sandwich i couldn't eat it was so disgusting thats probably when it was worst
Due to chronic sinus infections which started when I was an infant, I have permanently lost my sense of smell. I have no memory of what smell even is. So I have been very interested in speaking with covid sufferers who suddenly have no smell and how they react to food. I salt almost everything I eat because it's one of the few things I can taste.
That’s rough. I lost my smell and taste from Covid. It made it kinda boring to eat. Salt did help a lot. But it was weird it didn’t matter what I made as long as I was getting sustenance like my brain was like eh you can’t taste it just eat it. I craved enchiladas but when they taste of nothing it was soo frustrating. Helped me clean my fridge and pantry out though. I did scrub my tongue with my toothbrush and honestly it kinda helped to bring my taste back.
I also suffer from chronic sinus infections, there's only certain things I'm still able to smell and taste. Most of what I eat is based on texture, lol. When covid first started, I was constantly having to explain that because people would get all scared when I said I couldn't smell something they did.
There is a perfume - don't know the name, never learned it - that whenever I smell it, I immediately think of a good childhood friend's mother who passed away when we were still kids. Audrey was almost like a second mom to me at the time. I smell this perfume on strangers from time to time and I'm transported back to her house. A great way for me to remember a tremedous woman.
I don’t remember Elizabeth Taylor having a perfume out until late 80s. Jovan Musk was popular in the 70s, & it’s still the most nauseating perfume ever.
I was a winemaker for 15 years: mercaptans can form in wine that isn't properly managed, and the stench is utterly foul, similar to rotting garlic. I hate to think how bad it would be at higher concentrations.
I've had wine that was spoiled and tasted of garlic. Apparently the liquor merchant's cask I decanted port from to take home was contaminated. To call it vile in smell, taste and aftertaste is beyond mere understatement. Even the glass flagons I transported it in had to be throw away. The glass could be cleaned but the seals of the caps were contaminated.
I think the worst thing I have ever smelled was when I was a kid me and my friends made these stink bombs where we put milk, egg, vegetables, fruits, and just a bunch of stuff that would spoil into Gatorade bottles then we left them out in the back of our yard for 2 years in the sun and everything, we both puked when we opened them up… the things we do as kids 😂
Yep... A friend and I did the same thing using very similar ingredients. Milk, eggs and the like. To it, we added canned clams with the juice, some random fish.....and shrimp. We opened it, we vomited...both of us. We were going to use it in retaliation during a neighborhood kid prank war. We did not. Not because our consciences told us not to, rather neither of us would open the second bottle. That first one was enough.
I always loved the smell of my grandmas house. She always had a nice candle burning, but she also had an immaculate large garden that she worked in every day, so there was a lovely earthy smell all of the time. Fresh tomatoes mixed with spices is something that comes to mind the most.
I used to work in a lab and one time someone tipped over a 25 mL (less than an ounce) bottle a 2-mercaptoethanol. The entire building was evacuated until the spill was cleaned up because the HVAC system spread the stench to nearly every room. I wonder if that HVAC system was routed properly, because it probably wasn't a good thing that lab air was being mixed with office air.
My dad collected all kinds of stuff, kinda in a hoarder type of way. And in his collection was two 12kg bottles of mercaptan. Later he moved out and he left the mercaptan at my place and I absoultely have no idea what to do with it. Even if I move the cilinders they leak some of the mercaptan and it is the most foul smelling thing I have ever encountered. It is so bad that sometimes I can randomly smell it even if im nowhere near it.
@@lucid_sound_design I mean, I don't want to commit chemical warfare against the postal service, but if you want to pick it up it is all yours for free. :D
During my undergrad days, I had some procedures that used 2-mercaptoethanol. Up close the stuff was indeed vile, but if you kept it in the hood properly, that tiny bit that leaked out into the room reminded me of bok choy cooking and actually made me hungry for the Asian noodles they served in the cafeteria. Funny little memory there.
When I was a kid I was snorkeling at a breachway in RI, and there was a giant 42 gallon barrel of chum that was just rotting in the sun. A group of other kids decided it would be a good idea to tip it over. I'm 37 now and just thinking about it forces that smell back into my nose somehow.
Yikes, I still remember back when my pal of mine left a turkey (the dead packaged kind) in the trunk of his car for over a week because he forgot about it and called me to help him get it out. I will never ever forget that smell it makes me gag just thinking about it.
I worked in a call center. One coworker had left a cup of coffee with creamer behind their computer. They were fired and we were unaware of the cup. We don't know when the cup was left we only knew that it was found weeks after she was fired. She probably just forgot about it as she was being fired. The warm fans from the computer had been blowing on it for weeks. It was only discovered when somebody tripped and bumped into the desk and caused the coffee to spill all over the desk. We had to evacuate the call center for the rest of the day it smelled so bad. The next day the room smelled of really strong cleaning supplies, but it was at least bearable.
When I was in paramedic school, we went to a cadaver lab to explore anatomy and practice intubation. Intubation, if you're not familiar, is when a tube is placed down your throat and into your airway. There at the lab they had one cadaver specifically being used to practice this skill because he was still "fresh". While the others had been treated with formaldehyde. You'd think that the worst smell was maybe the smell of a rotting body or the chemicals to preserve them. However for me, it was the cotton ball soaked in mouthwash stuffed in the intubation cadaver's mouth. You had to get right at face level and look directly down his throat to place the tube correctly. Something about the feable attempt of the mouthwash and polarity of such a generally normal smell in such an abnormal situation caused me for months to have to switch to cinnamon toothpaste i could only find online. I still can't smell moothwash without thinking of corpse's 🙃
That’s kind of like my aversion to the smell of blakhaus liquor because it induced my first ever hangover. I can’t even smell raspberry seltzer without my face contorting into an expression of utter disgust. And that was more than 20 years ago!
Not sure I have a favorite smell, but I totally have a most nostalgic one-the ambient smell of my house's garage. Wood and sawdust from my father's wood shop, mixed with grass and gasoline from an old riding lawnmower. I have fond childhood memories attached to both.
My most reminiscent and favourite smell is that sweet/earthy/fruity aroma that you get when entering a greenhouse growing tomatoes in summer. It always reminds me of my Granpa who died when i was about 8, he grew nice tomatoes.
@@cybersentient4758 and those fresh tomatoes sandwiches. Two pieces of toast, mayo salt and pepper and some fresh sliced juicy tomatoes. One of my favorite comfort foods. I basically live off that while tomorrow are in season. Occasionally I'll add lettuce and bacon for the classic B.L.T. but when the tomatoes are perfect I don't want anything to cover the taste.
The worst smell I've ever smelled was during a physics class in high school, we'd mush a piece of banana, mix it with some lukewarm water and let it sit for a week in a sealed jar, except we forgot the experiment for 2 months. Multiple pupils vomited when the jars were opened.
Good answer, but what's a 'physics call'? Did you mean 'physics class'? And I'm curious what the experiment was about, because it sounds more like something we would've done in biology or chemistry. (Some physicians think those disciplines are just applied physics, but a lot of people think they're wankers.)
For me it's probably Lavender. My Mom used to wear it as perfume and in lotions, as she always found the smell calming. Whenever even just a small amount hits me, it has this simultaneous effect of being calming, but, at the same time I start to have to fight back tears as all of these memories of her come back, and the sting of her being gone is felt again. It was actually a very long time before I could stand being around, what was then, and is again now, one of my favorite smells.
One of my favorite smells is burning butter in a pan. My dad used to make crepes every Christmas morning, and the browning butter smell used to fill the whole house. Another of my favorite smells is vaporized vinegar. I work as a cook and use vinegar to clean the flat-top grill every night... I love it. One of the worst smells I've encountered was rotten chicken that was left in a thermos for a few months. Uncorking that thing left a smell that lingered for days in my apartment... it was awful. Sorry neighbours!
Heh, though I was the only one who instantly love vinegar aroma on air. i wanted to dye clothes and boil plentiful of vinegar. Somehow it reminds me of grape juice... strange i love it ever since. but when i told my brother to smell it, he doesn’t liked it 🤷♀️
As an urban explorer I regularly come into some really foul smelling places, mostly from molds, rotting tissue or homeless people's shitrooms. However the worst smell I remember was the inside of a smoke purifier of an abandoned powerplant. I have no idea what chemicals they were using in there, but it was just this really artificial, slightly metallic, volatile substance smell combined with a bit of sulphuric odor. I actually got a bit disoriented by it and my head started to hurt, fortunately I kept myself on the narrow catwalk which lead me to this purifier's hatch. The second worst smell I remember was in an abandoned yeast factory where they dumped hundreds of liters of unfinished product into some outdoor trench. The smell itself was not so terrible, it was really just an amplified yeast smell, but it catched onto everything, including my own skin and cavities. So even weeks after the visit the smell ocassionaly just went back into my nose from somewhere deep inside my body...
That's what I loved about motorcycling the first time I started doing that. The smell of the neighbourhood. Knowing who was having a bbq. Or a firepit. Or who was doing their laundry. The smell of fresh cut grass. Or a spring rain on pavement. You don't get that from driving a car. I loved biking the minute I took my first leisurely ride through the city. It was awesome.
When I was in high school (1965), I had my own home chemistry lab, an 8 ft x 10ft building in the far corner of our large (ish) suburban lot. I had read about methyl mercaptan (methyl thiol), the stuff used to give an odor to natural gas. With dubious wisdom, I decided to try to make some and it was surprisingly easy to do using chemicals I already had (don't ask how, I won't tell you). Anyway, not long after that, a supposed friend at school had taken it upon himself to intentionally smear ice cream on my back really messing up my jacket. I wanted revenge and had the means to get it. The next day, I took a tiny vial (about 0.5 ml) and half-filled it with my noxious liquid. I then encapsulated the vial in multiple layers of wax (like how dipped candles are made). I put the encapsulated vial in a glass jar and again sealed the top with more wax. I made the mistake of carrying it through the house which didn't endear me to my mother. At school (strangely, it didn't smell up the bus), I took the vial out of the bottle, removed the was at the top, and casually walked by his locker which had several air vents in the door. I quickly poped the top off the vial, dumped the contents into his locker, and continued walking away. After my first class, I happened to walk by the tainted locker only to see the principal and several of the janitorial staff close to the aforementioned locker with blueprints of the building and heard them say something like, "but there ARE no natural gas lines in this part of the building." I just looked straight ahead and walked by. I didn't say anything about it for years. Good times.
I had about the same idea, but it was a little later, and it was ethyl mercaptan I thought of making. Yes, the process was quite easy. It would lead to instant divorce, so I won't try.
@@walterbrunswick Keep in mind that I was 14 or 15 at the time. Passive-aggressive? Perhaps, but I have gotten a lot of amusing mileage out of the story.
Another bad smell story, but not of my making. In the early 70s, I had a part-time job at an American Cyanamid chemical factory in Azusa, California. It sat adjacent to a mostly dry riverbed. During WWII, the company was making chemical warfare agents (mustard gas, I believe) and they buried the chemical waste in the riverbed in metal drums. During my employment, the company had to remove the waste and it caused a horrible stench you could smell for miles around. They tried to cover it up with some nauseatingly sweet smell. At least it lasted only a couple of months.
My favorite smell is a smell that comes off of a steam locomotive while it's hot and running. I think it's a combination of hot iron, coal fire and the lubricants they use, but it always reminds me of going to tourist railroads when I was little.
When I woke up this morning I thought "Gosh I miss Joe's Thursday videos" and here you are! So great to see a Thursday new video! Happy holidays to you, the wife and fur babies!!
Joe: "If you tipped over an entire oil tanker filled with vanilla, it would be enough to make the entire planet smell like vanilla." Me: "...... Let's put that to the test then. Get the boys back in town; we're pulling one last heist!"
Sounds all fun and games until you experience the stuff firsthand. I used ONE little pinch of vanillin for about a kg and a half of sweets for last new year's eve's party, and by the end of the evening I was feeling almost sick. The smell of vanilla stuck to my hands no matter how much I washed them. I almost didn't eat that evening.
My first job was at a little mom and pop bakery, they specialized in sweets; cupcakes, turnovers, pies, lots of wedding cakes. They were proud to make everything from scratch and used zero preservatives. I was the dish washer and every month I had to clean the rotten icing from the grease trap. Now, I've since worked at several restaurants and cleaned out many a grease trap but to this day, nothing compares to a months worth pure sugar and lard in hot dark water. I don't work there anymore but the bakery still exists, I drive past it sometimes and a shiver runs up my spine every time I do.
I helped clean one of those food trucks before that specialized in breakfast and lunch. They do a light surface cleaning before breakfast, after breakfast and again after lunch, but once a week, they have to break down the rest of the inside of the food truck to clean out the harder to get crevices and areas that don't affect the food from a sanitary perspective. egg drippings, meat drippings, grease, vegetables, and other food debris gets down inside those cracks and rots. When you pop out the stoves, shelves, the space below the steamer trays, and all of that, the putrid smell punches you in the face. This was the mid 90s when people didn't have so many smoking laws, so the guys on the truck would smoke constantly while cleaning the truck because it dampened the smell or they would shove ear plugs up their nose. It still isn't the worst thing I have smelled, but it is pretty high on the list.
Years ago I was living at a house owned by a church and was doing work to earn room and board. I was 18 or 19 years old at the time so there was a lot about work that I didn't understand so I ended up putting myself in some bad situations. Case and point, I was helping the tile guy grout the bathroom. You do that with an epoxy grout because the regular stuff will soak up stuff like pee. It also sets fast so when I was sloppy and got it all over the tiles I had to get it off and the dude said get it done. I ended up on my hands and knees with a paint scraper. I discovered that a combination of paint thinner and acetone made it soft enough to do the job. I didn't have a fan or anything to vent the space, didn't think I needed it and no one mentioned it. It didn't smell bad so much as really intense. I'm not sure how long I was in there but it did take a while. Like I said, I was young. By the time I was done everyone I talked to said my pupils were so big you couldn't see the eye color.
Once I was hungover and wanted to make some mac and cheese, started heating some milk up in a pan however what I hadn't realised was the milk was out of date. Almost immediately the milk started curdling that combined with the added heat and being hungover I was gagging and on the verge of throwing up. Threw the whole pan outside and collected myself before cleaning it.
3 Weeks after an little accident my big toenail fell finally off, due to the bruise under the nail. First of all this was really painful and secondly the smell of this nail once it finally came off... I can still smell it today. I never thought my body could produce such a bad smell! Really horrible!
Dude!!! I hit my toenail myself about a week ago and it's bruised up. I didn't think it would fall off. It just looks bruised but not damaged...dang now I'm wondering if it's going to fall off on me man
I guess I was lucky. I got my toe stuck and fell down with most of my body weight on the big toe. It bend, cracked and bled from under the nail but the nail never fell off. Its fine today, but this was one of the worst pain ever...
I had my big toenail, being sore for about a month after breaking in a pair of boots, just come off completely, and is the worst smell I've ever known.
When I was in college, I was babysitting a 5th grader and she put a metal pot in the microwave. The smell was so unbelievably unnatural and would not leave my sinuses for days. I could even taste it. It was a mixture of electrical fire, metallic electricity smoke and also burned plastic from the handle of the pot. It was unbelievable and inescapable. We left the house and left windows open but the smell only dissipated slightly. Absolutely awful.
@@FarfettilLejl Probably tried blending something that stopped the motor. A stopped motor uses more power and will overheat the wires in the motor. The smell would be from burning insulation covering the wires.
I remember back in the day when i got flu or bronchitis i also used to lose sense of smell and taste. I find it strange that losing sense of smell got such a big hype nowdays. It was a thing no body payed attention to back in the day.
True story. I tried to make cinnamon ornaments with my students one year. The concentration of cinnamon was so strong that it sent some of the students to the nurse with a strange health condition; Their faces and cheeks had turned bright red. The nurse was baffled. We had to remove the project from the building and air out the classroom for an hour. The redness went away quickly after getting fresh air. Too much of a good thing!
Interesting. We have so much work to be done with smells. Notice we don’t talk about it very much. It def has the ability to associate things and change your life if it’s terrible enough
In the early sixties, cinnamon toothpicks were popular. You could buy them pre-flavored, but little vials of clear liquid that I guess was cinnamon oil were also sold so you could flavor your own toothpicks. Fun, huh?? I was a stupid little kid and got hold of my big brother's vial and some toothpicks, then snuck them into the bathroom. Of course, the first thing I did was spill it all over the counter and use the front of my shirt to clean it up. My stomach turned red, all right. It was like being engulfed in invisible fire that was only exacerbated by my attempts to extinguish it. So, even though cinnamon is associated with sugar and spice and nice stuff like apple pie, its essence is hotter than the meanest hot pepper. Everybody's eaten those big jelly beans, Hot Tamales (active ingredient, cinnamon). The redness is probably a first-degree burn.
I feel so validated by this video. I grew up in Oregon. When I moved to Florida at 14 I noticed that the rain smelled different. Everyone laughed at me, saying that rain had no odor. But I could honestly smell the difference.
I used to work for a natural gas company, and one of the sites I had to visit was the pump station where they added mercaptan (aka methanethiol). Even in a sealed system, the entire site reeked, and I had to wear a mask when entering the pump station as a safety measure.
The worst smell I have ever come across happened during nursing school. I had a patient with sever foot fungus. I had to apply a cream to his feet and chunks of rotting flesh were coming off his toes. It took hours to get the smell out of my nose.
There's an amazing smell to being in Japan, and it makes me nostalgic. Walking into Japanese houses built before the 70s economic boom, and more modern homes that use traditional methods all have the same smell. I think it's either how they'd traditionally treat the exposed wood, the tatami mats, or a combination of both.
@@shadow_entity9191 So you assume all of Japan is just one metropolitan city? And not a chain of 4 major islands and many smaller ones, with different climates? Interesting
10:00 “if you took a tanker full of vanilla and spilled it then that vanilla would be smelled across the entire world” *well ferb, I know what we’re gonna do today!*
Probably the raw sewage smell that greeted me when I tried to move into my first apartment in Denmark. The U-bend in the shower drain had been allowed to dry up between occupants. It actually burned my eyes and made me dry-heave, which is weird for me because of all the things that can make me nauseous, bad smell usually aren't among them. It took 3 days to air it out, during which time I had to stay on the couch at the AirBnB my folks rented. Thank goodness they were there to help me move in (and make a vacation of it before I had to start work)
I worked as a radiographer in a department built on the top of the morgue in a hospital. Holes had been drilled through the floor for cables. One day they brought in an old lady who had died in bed several weeks earlier with the electric blanket on. Liquefaction had occurred. All was normal in the department until a very faint pong began to be noticeable. This increased in stinkiness over the next hour until it was so disgusting and weirdly terrifying we could no longer work
Sadly one of my favorite smells that takes me back to my childhood is mildew. Our dryer was old and didn't work well when I was a kid so towels always had a mildewey smell to them ... It's oddly comforting to me, but I rarely get to smell it now because I have an actual functioning dryer.
You sure it wasn't just because someone forgot the clothes in the washing machine for a couple of days. I know that was the cause occasionally in our house. Plus overtime the washing machines can actually get dirty with residue buildup.
A friend of mine is a doctor and worked for many years as a nurse. I once asked him what's the most disgusting thing he ever smelled and he said it was definitely when a homeless alcoholic patient puked old blood over him.
One of my favorite smells is so odd. Its the smell of this random off-brand shampoo called Prell (yes, Prell - not Purell). My family used it when I was growing up and it takes me right back to childhood and makes me so happy. I love it.
I had Covid about 6 months ago and my sense of smell was completely gone for around 3 months. Now it's about 10% of what it was. It has ups and downs. Like poo doesn't smell anywhere near as bad as it did, but smells I love (like citrus fruits, or certain perfumes) now smell a little bit off to me. Luckily, when I take a giant sniff of my kids' heads (parents will know what I mean), it still feels good.
"Luckily, when I take a giant sniff of my kids' heads (parents will know what I mean), it still feels good. " I don't have kids, but that made me tear up! My youngest niece who is still very close to me is 16 now, and I remember catching whiffs of her head when she was a little one and hugged me or sat on my lap. I think I know what you mean. It's just the nicest smell of innocence. I don't say it literally, but it's the actual smell of childhood...of kidness. It ceases too soon.
Actually, Scoville scale is also subjective. It is organoleptic test, which involves diluting the dried pepper untill 3 out of 5 people can`t feel the heat of the pepper.
I remembered that had changed, and looked it up; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale The Modern Scoville scale is no longer organoleptic, but is based on amount of capsaicin per unit of material, multiplied by some factor. (The wiki indicates 15 or 16.)
When I was in college my senior year I took a microbiology class where I had to isolate an anaerobic bacteria that could grow on a substrate of my choice. I chose trimethylamine. I later found out that this is the chemical that gives rotting fish it smell. I would feed my bacteria 1 mL of trimethylamine twice a week. I would have my bacteria inside of an anaerobic cabinet that I accessed with manipulator gloves, kind of like what you see when people are working with the radioactive material. I would be wearing nitrile gloves inside of those. Inside the manipulator cabinet I would use a syringe to extract the trimethylamine from a tube with a rubber stopper and inject the trimethylamine into the top of my culture jar which was covered with another rubber stopper. In spite of all this, trimethylamine always seem to work its way onto my hands through all the layers of protection. Then it absorbs into your skin, and you can taste it and smell it for hours. I had a meeting after this class every week, and I had to sit on the opposite side of the room because the smell was so awful coming from my hands. It made me sad to find out that some people have a condition where they excrete trimethylamine out of their sweat glands. It is awful stuff.
We actually have more than five senses, although they detect internal sensations. For instance, proprioception is your ability to sense where parts of your body are. There's also nociception (pain), vestibular sensation (balance), and really specific receptors like baroreceptors, which detect our blood pressure and signal the brain to stabilise it.
I used to walk past an ice cream factory, and when they made vanilla ice cream, the huge vent fans put out a warm, humid, gale-force wind so heavenly scented, I would stop and bathe in the warm wind, even in summer when more heat was unwelcome. Years later and far away, the worst smell: I won't go into that... Don't want to give anyone "ideas."
I lost my sense of taste and smell when I had covid a few months ago. It was so strange. I remember rubbing icy hot on my back and not being able to smell it, which was bizarre because icy hot is some strong smelling stuff. The taste thing was weird too. I ate a lot of spicy food during that time because spicy was one of the only types of taste that came through at least a little bit.
I lost my sense of smell a few years ago after a bad sinus infection. Taste went with it. I ate the things I knew I liked & avoided textures I knew I didn’t. Made it easier to try knew things, even if I couldn’t quite taste them properly. I worked as an RN in hospital then & believe me, not being able to smell things was a godsend. However, the fumes from the floor wax/cleaner/polisher still made me dizzy even if I couldn’t smell it. Anyhoo, it took a while to recover any smell/taste. It’s still not what it once was. Strong smells & flavors get through easier.
I like the smell of dead skunks! My grandparents lived in the county off a busy highway that always had a dead skunk or two rotting on it. When I was little, I only got to visit my grandparents occasionally so I learned to associate that smell with people I loved, happy times and rare treats! I’m grown now and they are long gone but that smell still makes me feel good. Great! Now I’m crying! Thanks Joe!
I’m a “complete anosmic” which means I was born without a sense of smell. I taste things just fine (I joke and say “oh, I taste great!”). But every doctor that I’ve ever told about this just goes “huh, interesting” and moves on. They don’t understand smell and they can’t “fix me”. Ps. Long time fan. Been watching for like 7 years.
that's actually very interesting. I'm curious, do you understand the concept of smell if you've never been able to smell anything? like does the concept of perfume confuse you?
@@vibaj16 hold your nose and eat something with real vanilla. Then do the same with artificial vanilla. Then you can tell me if there’s a difference. Also, what radiation?
@@mook_butt8037 ok, after researching a bit, I was mostly wrong. What I was talking about was that the main flavor of vanilla, vanillin, is in both real and artificial vanilla. However, real vanilla has a lot of other chemicals that probably cause the difference that you taste. Also, artificial vanilla often includes things not naturally found in vanilla, such as sugar. The radiation thing is a way that counterfeit vanilla (artificial vanilla labelled as real vanilla) can be found. People can try adding all the common chemicals that are normally in real vanilla to make their artificial vanilla truly indistinguishable from real vanilla (it would literally be the exact same thing), and they'd get away with it if it weren't for radiation: real vanilla is slightly radioactive. It contains radioactive carbon-14 due to being in a living plant. Artificial vanillin is the exact same chemical, but it isn't radioactive, because it's usually obtained from petroleum, in which the carbon-14 has had millions of years to decay. It's half-life is only 5730 years, so it's almost certainly fully decayed and therefore not radioactive.
Bromine. There was this guy, let's call him G, one time at my work (I used to work in a laboratory) this guy decided to empty and clean a receptacle that contained Bromine. Now if you're a SDS kinda guy like, you'd read up on this and quickly find that its interaction with water can cause a toxic gas to emerge. It just so happened that he needed to wash the already empty container out, which the compound got out. Now this brown cloud gas can destroy your olfactory system. My nose was overwhelmed by this brown ass smelly armpit automotive gas-like smell which made me nauseous quickly and suddenly for almost 4 hours after that, I couldn't smell a damn thing. I could of eaten a whole onion and not tasted a single thing. Bromine is no joke.
They used to (still?) tent whole houses and treat them with bromine to nuke termites (and everything else) A few darwin awards were handed out to those who figured it was a perfect time to rob a vacant tented house.
Worst smell? My co-worker who smells like Salt & Vinegar chips and musk but really intense, that one time someone left 5000 dead worms in the office over the weekend and I was opening up on Monday (I work at a courier company), or when I was in high school doing dissecting rats and someone popped their rat's stomach and we all had to evacuate. The worms gave me nightmares. I walked in, smelt it, found the box and walked over to it, saw them coming out then realised I was standing in a massive patch of dead worms. This was Monday at 3am and my brain literally asked myself am I awake? Later that night, I dreamt that everywhere I went, dead worms were dropping behind me and I would only see them when I turned around.
I'd love to see you do a video on capsaicin, spiciness, heat, and people's fascination with it. You touched on the scoville scale briefly in this video and I've always found it an interesting topic.
I've never smelt anything in my life. It's pretty interesting figuring out how it works, from an objective viewpoint. And how little people talk about it. There's a lot to talk about.
@@MaxWindshear Ironically I never get bored of food, possibly because there's limited variety in the first place. Texture plays a big part in my culinary experience, as well as the four tongue tastes (although people who can smell seem to experience tongue tastes a little different to me)
As an apprentice diesel mechanic, I once got trapped inside of a box truck operated by a fish distributor. The temperature was in the 90’s, to this day I can detect fish going bad instantly. Not a bad niche to have when making sushi! lol
Worst smell for me happened due to a tragic freak heatwave. My family rescued rabbits. (All those Easter bunnies kids no longer wanted got to live with us.) On this day, out of nowhere, a freak heatwave suddenly sent temps up to 120 degrees. No one in my family expected it, so we had not prepped the rabbits, bringing the cages under shade, bringing the older rabbits or any pregnant rabbits inside, and setting up misters for those who were outside. No one was home when I came back from high school and was greeting by an absolute horror show. All of the rabbits were overheating. Some had been dead for hours, and it really stank, with the heat making it worse. Others were dying, and if you want to know the worst sound in the world, it's a dying rabbit. They were screaming in death throes, and although I raced around doing all I could, there was no way to rescue 80+ rabbits on my own. I just had to race around, moving cages, hosing down rabbits, doing my best to save those already screaming and convulsing (at that point, there was nothing that could be done, but I tried) and when my parents came home from work 3 hours later, I was still running around the yard, sobbing as I worked in the middle of this wretched stench of death. We lost 20 rabbits that day, and I ended up with pretty bad PTSD. The sound of a rabbit screaming throws me back to that moment and makes me break down into tears, regretting that I could not save more. The stench of death and sun-bloated bodies is something I will never forget. So yeah, THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME BACK DOWN THAT VORTEX OF TRAUMA, JOE. (kidding, I'm fine.) On a positive note, lavender and honeysuckle are smells that warm my heart. I would go to lavender fields to pick bundles, dry them, and hang them around the house. I use lavender in air filters and put a drop on my pillow when I can't sleep. Honeysuckles grew along the fence of my childhood home, so that smell is connected to child innocence. (Before the rabbit horror show, that it.) Also, the smell of orange blossoms is one that makes me melt. When my husband and I were dating, the road from his house to mine passed by an orange grove. In the spring, we would slow down along that stretch, roll down the windows, and enjoy the smell of the blossoms. Although it only smelled like that in the spring, it is still a smell uniquely tied in with dating him. (We dated for 7 years, so 7 springs full of orange blossoms.)
Weird scent related memory I have is the particular scent of my kindergarten's playground and it's lunchroom. I have probably only smelled that scent a few more times since back then but it always brintgs back memories of that yard.
the worst thing i ever smelled was when i was walking through an apartment complex. i don't know where it was coming from, but it repulsed me on a deep level. someone i was with said it smelled like death. to this day, i wonder if one of those apartments had an undiscovered dead body inside. that was the worst smell, but not the strongest/most painful. that is usually concentrated pet/human urine in a home that has not been properly cleaned. i've been to a couple of those.
My dad was a paramedic and so i became aware of what a dead person smells like and while its similar to a dead animal, its a bit worse IMO. When you know the smell and you smell it again, you know. It instantly causes me to feel an urge to run, not out of “pew that stinks” but out of fear; i’ve learned how to not do so but the urge to is still there. I wonder where your friend got exposed to the smell to know thats what it is, assuming they were right? As for worst smell, i’d say you’re right, cadaverine and Putricine are the worst smells, easily.
What year was that? There was house in FL that the neighbors had complained about for a couple of years, but police never checked it out until a girl escaped with chains on her. Then they discovered bodies in various stages of decomposer.
My family said I had the nose of a wolf. I lost nearly all my sense of smell from covid and it never fully came back. I miss the smell of fall leaves. Haven’t experienced it in two years.
I lost my sense of smell as a child and don’t really remember what it was like, but just know I can relate to a degree. I’m really sorry you have to go through that.
@@ClayAlchemist I’m really sorry to hear that, super glad you got it back tho! I don’t really have a great appetite myself honestly and it’s probably because I don’t experience smell at all but it’s been like this for so long that I really don’t feel too bothered by it much
@@josephplath8752 Legitimately why I used cannabis daily was to give myself an appetite. I don’t have weight to lose so when I don’t eat, I shed weight. Thankfully don’t need to currently. Made me noticeably more sluggish, lol.
I’m in the same boat ☹️ lost it around 2 years ago and it never properly came back, some things smell normal, some things smell different, and some things I can’t smell at all
I remember two cases: 1) Being at the 8th school year and synthesizeing butyl-mercapthane in the lab of a chemistry hobby club. There were two fume hoods and I switched on the wrong one. 2) In the morning after the university graduation celebration being performed in a day-rented countryhouse. Turns out, the barbecue meat residues were accumulated for at least a month in a large 100 l bucket and for some reason covered with sand layer-by-layer, thus not stinking. We were performing a cleanup (gathering bottles, food leftowers and so on to leave the countryhouse clean) and I decided to empty the barbecue waste bucket into a large plastic bag. The stench of 30 kilos of composted meat waste was mind-blowing. The house next to this was holding a wedding at the moment and we heard people throwing up. Sorry, dear newweds😳.
By the way, our party members (mostly) endured the stench ok. Maybe it was due to the fact that were were biologists, or more or less drunk, or, more likely, drunk biologists :-).
Worst smell I ever experienced was human remains so old they had liquified. I don't appreciate remembering it, Joe, so your bit about screaming into the void was pretty spot on.
Belated congrats on your 1.32 M subscribers! WOW, man! You deserve it. You tread where few dare. NO ONE else could report something like this in such an entertaining way. You are a national treasure. Don't stop! And that means you have to outlive me. All good wishes!
The worst smell I ever experienced came when I accidentally opened a zip lock bag with a rotten onion, inside. Almost hurled. Some friends of mine got the formula for mercaptan, many years ago, and synthesized a small sample in the high school chemistry lab, filled a small balloon with some water, and squirted the mercaptan inside. The next day, one of them brought a battery operated drill to school, unscrewed the grille from the "air return" vent for the school's HVAC system, tossed in the balloon, and quickly re-attached the grille. The ventilation system promptly spread the odor throughout the building; school was promptly evacuated; and they went out for a "ditch day." Best of all, that wasn't even the best senior prank, that year. Those guys were top-notch honors students, and every one of them had been accepted in the universities of their choices, for months. Their pranks were *amazingly* creative. That was a pretty good one, though. 😉
I just wanted to mention that when my smell came back, I could smell every spice and every ingredient in every meal. I retain my super smell to this day.
So when you greet new people do you smell their butts like a dog or have you smelled a dog's butt? It must be amazing to then with their super sense of smell. Lol
Last year I saw what looked like a spiral telephone cable laying on the beach in the Netherlands. After picking it up and throwing it into a nearby trash can I noticed a really strong chemical smell on my hands which I've never smelled before. It stuck to my hands and the bag and sunglasses I had touched. It was extremely unpleasant, nauseating and drove me almost mad on the drive home. I washed and scrubbed my hands multiple times without much success. I had to sleep with my hands in rubber gloves to block the smell because it kept me awake. The smell stayed for some days before slowly fading away. I often wonder what chemical compound that could have been but never want to smell it again EVER!
Whenever I smell crude oil I’m instantly transported back to the hills of Yorba Linda California. When I was young, my dad and I would take long walks through the eucalyptus trees and oil wells. I lost him this year but the memory will remain with me for a lifetime.
I used to work in tech repair, and one thing I'll never forget is the smell of a shorted capacitor. It's smell is something like distilled cancer. A very noxious chemical smell.
I had some of this mercaptan in the 1980s in the UK. It was a small sealed vial and it was used by the gas board to test leakages in pipes. It contained about 2 tablespoonfuls of liquid and I was told that if it was broken, it would contaminate 1 cubic mile of the atmosphere. I never did crack it open and I don't know what ever became of it. True story!
I had the C back in April and it took my sense of smell. It’s mostly back but not all the way and some smells are mixed up for example minty toothpaste smells like fried chicken! I’m not complaining lol it’s just odd. I had a very sensitive nose before and now I feel like my sense of smell isn’t as strong as it was and that’s a blessing for me. I would get sick if someone had ketchup near me but now I barely smell it and my kids love that stuff.
I had it in July 2020, and still struggle to recognize any scent I might pick up throughout a week/month. The one thing I just can't get over is that anything that would produce a sulfur-ish sorta smell is just a weird sour feeling. Smelling cat poop is like I just stuck my nose in lime juice. When someone lights a match, smokes a cigarette or even if I burn up some electronics, there's no recognizable smell. Maybe a weird feeling inside my nose if I'm lucky. The upside is that cat poop doesn't bother me (but I still wish Charlie would learn to cover his turds!), and the downside is that no food is really all that good and I can't tell when there's a fire or if my car has been leaking coolant for a week or so. Heh My sense of smell was my superpower before. I enjoyed trying new foods, new beers, and was a coffee snob. Now I don't enjoy any of it.
Ah, you might have been a _super smeller,_ like Fran Blanche, who recently lost her sense of smell entirely, due to covid. That story here: ua-cam.com/video/FVQ8Zf1i_qs/v-deo.html
Reminds me of a quote of one of my professors: "CO in cooking gas is prohibited. The wastage of housewives would be too large otherwise." Speaking of dumpster smell: What is surprising to me is how universal that smell is. Apparently combining a lot of rotting things comes up with a pretty nomalized stink.
thats soo true. same goes for recycling smell. that sour sickingly sweet smell of people who didnt clean out their cans of tomatoes or fats or sugars rottingin the summer sun. its a universal smell.
At the end of every May and into early June, Russian olive trees bloom all across the Salt Lake Valley. They're an introduced and invasive species that's more a large bush than a proper tree, but they thrive in the arid valleys all around the west. Blooming for about three weeks a year, their tiny yellow flowers (blossoms?) are my absolute favorite smell in the entire world. It reminds me of being an elementary school kid and counting down the days before summer vacation. Their aroma is so entrenched in the pleasure centers of my brain to this day it's ridiculous. That sweet, sweet smell meant warm summer days, sleeping in, no homework, pool parties, kick-the-can, fireworks and barbecues were right around the corner!
Vanilla smells great to me. Also, I don't know if schoolkids get this anymore, but everyone used to like the smell of freshly mimeographed test papers. There's a scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" where the teacher gives the students such papers to pass around and everybody immediately picks up their paper and sniffs it. I really don't know how to describe it, but it was an oddly pleasant aroma.
Some of my favorite smells would have to be burning pine needles, fresh coffee, peppermint and lemon. One of the worst things I've ever smelled is burnt dry ramen.
@@drmether9150kinda like burnt hair and burnt popcorn, not horrible just intense. i got a lil stoney baloney once and cooked ramen without water, ended up stinking up the kitchen for days 😢
"We only have 5 senses" - we actually have 6 if you include proprioception, the awareness of where your body parts are. This sense allows you to touch the tip of your finger to your nose with your eyes closed.
It's far more than that. In addition to the already menationed proprioception, we also have the sense of balance. "Touch" is usually counted as one sense, but it is actually many different senses. For example, detecting temperature is different to detecting a physical contact.
The scent that takes me back to toddler years is the fragrance of cannonball tree flowers. My kindergarten used to have a giant tree that made alot of flowers.
I’ve got two. When I was in middle school something in the a/c system caught on fire. It smelled like someone fire bombed a pile of tires and aluminum foil. The second was when my mom gave me some crab cakes to take home in the middle of winter. I stuck them in the trunk and forgot they were there until June when the smell got unmistakably strong and terrible.
The absolute worst smell I have ever encountered was when a local hospital that is also a forensic lab kept the bodies of some criminals in a refrigerated TEU container for prolonged investigations and I was watching them unloading some of them from 20-30 meters away and I still could smell it
Worst smell for me is a rotten pasta that has sat in warm for a week under lid. To my nose it has very gentle, sweet, bready and mild scent that induces vomiting immediately. It's like being raped by butterflies.
Human decomp is bad. I can still smell the morgue at a hospital in Baghdad. They only had power at this hospital around 8 hours a day so this cooler was actually just a hotbox filled with a pile of bodies in various stages. Holy shit that smell. It’s not the worst tho in my opinion. Car bombs produced the worst for me. Burned human flesh and large volumes of blood everywhere really turn my stomach even just thinking of it. You can smell the iron and stickiness from large amounts of blood. Its bad.
I worked in an Oil patch for one Winter that made me reconsider my choices in life. I opened a pipe and passed out. We still don't know what was in there. But I had a cough for 5-6 years. Probably an exotic Hydrocarbon soup. It was not Hydrogen Sulfide. I know what that smells like.
We have far more than five senses, which I think could make for a pretty great video to cover. Especially considering the debates among experts on which ones should and should not count.
@@mikeg4972 good cuz this must be a joke. Your sense of right and wrong, sense if style, common sense, E.S.P..... LOL I would love to see what this person had in mind because I have a feeling they weren't joking around.
As someone who discombobulated their sense of smell with a traumatic brain injury I'm so curious if I'd react to thiols in the same way, and as a Synethete I wonder what color Thioacetone would be 🤔 my favorite smell used to be Geosmin but I always thought it was called petrichor
Interesting fact I have learned in my many years: The memory of something that smells bad is clear and acute forever, it does not fade with time, unlike memories of other senses. I'm talking about you, Bromine.
I worked in a mining lab, cooking ore samples in various acid mixtures. One of those was HBr or hydrobromic acid. I have elsewhere described the brief whiff I got of HBr (while moving a rack of beakers from one fume cupboard to another) as "pure evil" - unlike anything else I have ever smelled.
Since you brought this up, Joe, I'd love to see a video by you on the importance of smell. So many in your comments talk about losing smell from Covid, which is not like losing sight or hearing, but is still an important sense.
Ackchyually we have 9 senses: Smell Hearing Taste Touch Sight Proprioception (sense of where your body is in relation to itself. If you can close your eyes and touch your two index finger tips together, then you have good proprioception) Nociception (sense of pain) Thermoception (being able to tell temperature e.g. you can hover your hand over a hot stove and know not to touch it. This does not require touch.) Balance
In one of my early jobs I had to create an instrument method for determining the garlic oil content of garlic oil capsules. The standard that we used was pure garlic oil, which is about fifty percent diallyl disulfide (sulphur compounds again!). The smell was awful, and after working with it I stank of garlic for days.
I was already losing my sense of smell before, but when I got covid back in march it made it a lot worse. Now I can only smell the strongest scents and I have to get someone else to smell the milk for me or just make sure I drink all of it within like 3 or 4 days.
Sorry to hear that. Just in case it is useful in your circumstances, you can freeze milk. For best results, it should be frozen in the portions you use in a day or a take, because when it thaws, first the protein/fat part does, and then the water does, so if you are putting a larger amount of thawing milk in a jar, first you'll get a thicker milk and will end up drinking water. This works with the kind of pasteurized milk sold in Argentina; it isn't that raw as to spoil in three days, but not so ultrapasteurized as to last for months. You could make the experiment and see if it works for you. Good luck. ✌
I have a friend who contracted Covid-19 over a year ago. He briefly lost his sense of smell but as he recovered he said almost all food and drink began to strongly smell like rotten onions. A year later it hasn’t gotten any better. The only things he can tolerate are water, the cheap instant Mac-n-cheese, turkey and white bread sandwiches, and saltines. He’s 24, in college and is so depressed, isolated and malnourished. No one has any idea what to do for him or the resources to help. They’re all trying to keep people from dying in Houston. He only has one semester to go but he may not be able to finish school. I feel so bad for him.
God, that is terrible. And the similar stories I'm seeing in these comments. Hopefully it's like some kinds of nerve damage -- it takes ages to heal but eventually does.
Best smell ever - I worked at a Kraft factory as security and they had a water purification room for crystal light drinks, that room smelled incredible, like a clean rainy day but in a purely indescribable way. It smelled so good 😊
This sounds magical
I am very very intrigued
Interesting
Lucky you, that sounds wonderful.
It’s the smell of ionization, I think.
Worst smell I ever experienced was an elderly lady in surgery whose infarcted bowel was so foul every single person dry heaved. We were all professionals so nobody actually vomited. That was 30 years ago and I still think about that smell and the withered geriatric partially alive human this smell came from and it made me sad, nauseated and terrified at the same time .
My brother had a twisted bowel so bad that he lost 90% of his small intestine. He was in a coma for 2 weeks (maybe? It was years ago) and almost died. When he finally woke up, he had a colostomy bag for a week or 2. The first time he changed that thing was the worst smell, but thinking about it brings me to tears because it reminds me of how happy I was that he was going to be ok. I'm literally crying right now just writing this comment.
@@trybunt Thank God he's ok...Had a very good friend who- because of colon cancer- had to get fixed up with a colostomy bag setup.
Unfortunately, we lost Matt a year later.
(lol...I remember him telling me how bad it smelled when he had to change it out)
C. Diff?
That's literally how my grandmother went, and the timing is about right. She died a couple of days after the surgery, iirc. "Partially alive" really describes her last while on Earth.
@@trybunt my BFF’s son was born prematurely, and had an underdeveloped blood flow to his intestines. He has had to have them resected a few times (he’s only 5!) and had an ileostomy bag for a long time.
I used to work with mercaptan at a hazardous waste lab.
The smell gave me literal nightmares.
A smell. That gives you wake up shouting nightmares. I wore my optional respirator after that.
okay im sorry for laughing at your pain but lmaooooo thats a hell of a thought
Hahaha wake up shouting nightmares
if its any consolation i would very much pay to swap my wake up shouting nightmares with ones where i didnt wake up with visions in my head of violence.
@@mycosys ummm 🤔.....what?!
@@justdave9610 Ex-Soldier or Cop likely.
My worst smell (yet) was when cleaning a marginal hoarder house in Charleroi: the city ordered them to leave after their smallest child got the gangrene after being bitten by rats. In their cellar, there was a freezer full of meat that had liquefied after being there without electricity for at least half a year. That combined to the 20 cm of poo on the floor because the pipe of their toilet was broken and had leaked there filling the cellar slowly but surely. Opening that freezer in that cellar...
That is a nasty smell. Been there. Similiar situation.
AND that's about the point where any sensible organization just has the whole building condemned and set on fire.
@@natesmodelsdoodles5403 I was working for a private. The situation was that the hoarders house was the very last in the street with a garden next to it and an organization of supermarket planned to build there a parking and then demolish the house to build a shop. The guy living next to the garden bought the hole property instead because he didn't want to have a parking next to his home. We cleaned the house just to make it safe, hygienic and dry but it's just an abandoned building right now and the neighbour still has his tranquillity ;)
Charleroi? As in Belgium?
@@JanoyCresvaZero Yes, Gilly to be precise ;-)
The worst smell I probably ever experienced was when I had to get my tonsils removed.... and they used a laser. So for a solid 1-2 days I was both smelling and tasting burnt and decayed flesh constantly, which wasn't fun.
This comment gave me the same face watching this video did. I'm now very worried about my tonsils
I read that as nostrils and not tonsils, for some reason, and was seriously concerned for you for a moment.
I had my tongue clipped that way and I totally agree that shit is nasty. Who would have thought human flesh would smell and taste so horrid when charred.
@@RejoiceYardley it only smelt like that because of a cauterizing machine, at least that's how I understand this person's comment. If you have that without having any procedures done I would definitely talk to a dentist and see what's going on because that's not natural. Best wishes and take care in life.
Damn I had my tonsils removed like 25 years ago and this just made me recall the taste. Atleast I got alot of vanilla icecream.
My primary school was in the middle of hundreds of sugar cane fields.
When they would prepare the lands they'd use blood and bone manure.
It is one of the worst smells I've ever experienced. Literally the smell of corpse's and poop, all day for weeks in class. You could never escape it.
If you take that smell and multiply it by 10, you have the trace smell that foxes leave behind to mark their territory. They're cute, but they stink like hell
Slaughter houses stink for miles from my experience. Took a bus everyday that would stop at a train crossing near one and it was the longest wait. *gag
it was going so well for the first sentence
yes!! i used to live near a sugar beet factory🤢🤢🤢
@@Arterexius I know!! It blows my mind that so many people keep them as "pets"!
Before the pandemic, I was a frequent volunteer in my local nature museum's specimen prep lab, where I worked on turning mostly small songbirds into study skins to be added to the museum's research collections. It was incredibly cool work, but it was in the prep lab that I encountered the worst smell I've experienced to date - a bird that neither I, nor my supervisor, nor the other volunteers in the lab that day knew was actually in an advanced stage of decomposition until we thawed it and opened the ziploc it was in. Pure, intense, eye-watering rot wafted out into the lab that day. It was so bad that I could taste it, and all of us were racing to get data from the specimen - measurements, weight, information about where and when it died - as fast as we could so that it could go into the trash, and then out to the dumpster behind the museum. The only thing we could do in the face of such a horrible, unexpected stink was laugh. Just thinking about the smell made me gag for weeks afterward.
Ptsd for your nose
But you finished the job, respect to you man!
As a kid, I brought home a dead bird's head I found on the train tracks. It didn't seem too bad when I wrapped it in a plastic bag.
I didn't know how to get to the pure skull and beak I was after, so I scraped off what I could from the already stinking thing, and put the head in a jar filled with water and a bit of soap, closed it and left it in a cupboard for a day or two.
Man, what a series of unfortunate decisions 😅
@AMOYY CERIIA No no no.
@AMOYY CERIIA 💀 why the hell would you put that on a comment about how a rotting bird smelled
There is a smell i like to think of as "sun" smell. It's when the sun comes out and heats up your living room, there is a smell that does not come from heat (like radiator) - but from the sun rays warming the room directly. Another smell i like is campfire. Fresh wood, burning wood ... smells nice.
hmm, I wonder if the UVA coming through the window is reacting some things?
I’ve never smelt that before
Mark Rober should use this in the Glitter Bomb Trap 5.0
Agreed 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Lmaooo
That is SO funny because I JUST saw his recent video a few hours ago 😂
I was literally thinking the exact same thing🤣🤣🤣
Yes
My mom passed away in 2015. Somehow, every time she took a shower, the whole house would smell of soap and shampoo but it never did when anyone else would shower and use the same products. And it didn't matter what products my mother used, it always smelled the same to me. I can still remember exactly what it smelled like. Thanks for the Memories, Joe! 💞
I’m very sorry u lost your Mom. I got truly very blessed with my Mom and honestly I don’t want to outlive her. She smells like home:)
RIP
Sounds like your mom used waaayyy too much soap when she was showering. :P Possibly combined with showering with very hot water, making the water vapour carry the soap smell all over the house.
Decompositional slurry is pretty bad, when a human has decomposed over a 2-3 week period. That is how a lot of bodies are discovered. The smell is really horrible and very strong.
Then there was a chemical made from sulphur called "Apple Blossom". It was applied to the radiator heaters in the high school I attended ( 1969 or so ) and the school was evacuated due to the sickening smell.
I’m asking random people in the comments, have you ever smelled Magic shaving powder? It’s at any drugstore pretty much. Take a sniff next time you’re in a dollar general I promise you’ll be smelling it for weeks, it’s one of those very strong chemically smells mixed with a sulfur, shitty smell, so don’t sniff too hard lol, but I wonder if that’s what your school may have smelled like
@@emsa5034 I will have to check that out next time I see that product...."Nair" hair remover is pretty nasty also, but the "Apple Blossom" stink bomb was REALLY nasty !
I was about to comment the same. Our morgue's fridge broke over a weekend. The smell lasted for weeks
I have a buddy who works for police rescue, and he frequently has to recover bodies from inconvenient locations. First time he had to bring up a body from the bottom of a cliff, hauling it up on abseiling ropes, the body bag burst halfway up, and he was showered with decayed fat and flesh.
@@emsa5034 smelled it in prison, I'll never forget that stink!
The smell of old wooden houses is one of the best smells ever imo. The combination of the flooring, paneling, trim, etc, aged to perfection. Also some cedar helps. When i step into an old house or building with that smell, i don't want to leave.
Worst smell.... raw sewage and rotten eggs or food. Basically like Joe said, natural defense reaction.
One thing I've noticed with smells is their seemingly instantaneous ability to recall memories of mine from decades ago. People talk about how music can take them back to a time and place but with smells I find that effect to be a lot stronger. I'll open a new brand of washing detergent and immediately recognise it as the smell of my friend's house which I haven't visited in 15+ years or something like that
That's because the part of the brain that controls your sense of smell is literally right next to the part that is responsible for memories. So when one part is stimulated some of that neural excitement extends out to the surrounding areas intrinsically linking them. Sort of like if there's a party next door your gonna hear the music/ruckus wether you want to or not.
I get that too from specific laundry detergents. One memorable thing I smell strongly that I can't explain is the smell of outside air. Not the smell of air while outside, but the smell of outside air blowing indoors. Sometimes people say it's the smell of dust being picked up maybe around the window, but the thing is, the smell happens non stop. I can crack the front door and smell the air coming at head height where there shouldn't be any dust, close the door and it goes away. As soon as I step outside though, It becomes a bit more intense for about a second then dies down over the next minute. The more outside air I get all at once, the more quickly it goes away, hence why cracking a door or window helps it last longer.
Scent is the most powerful sense tied to memory. Things like you’re mothers cooking or a lover’s perfume can trigger flashbacks. One time I was grocery shopping with my mom and I opened a bottle of aftershave near her and she started sobbing uncontrollably because it was the same brand her dad used.
@@GrizzlyTank I think it's probably because smells are not really pattern based like sight, sound, or even touch. There are spectrums and patterns of the kind of stimuli you can experience with vision (color/contrast/form), hearing (pitch/volume/direction), touch (temperature/stress/location), and in taste there are categorical stimuli that have respective gradients of intensity in each category (flavor groups). Smell is the one sense that is hardest to assign a predictable pattern to. You can't say, imagine the smell of eggs but with 15% pumpkin smell added. It's unquantifiable. There's no way to foresee a smell that you've never received yet, but as long as you don't have Aphantasia, you can imagine at least sights, maybe sounds, and feelings that you haven't had yet. You may even be able to recall tastes, but only those you've experienced before. I think this means your brain has to manually record every vivid detail in accordance to every single smell you've ever had. You brain can't reference one smell as a template in order to save space and compress information. Every smell is therefore a separate experience. The more serotonin you have at the time of smelling or re-smelling something, the more acuity your brain can have to record the smell. In his video about Aphantasia, he also mentioned that with vision, there's a negative correlation between brain activity with processing what your eyes see, and imagining previously recorded visual information. This means your ability to imagine images and daydream (if you have the ability to) can hurt your focus on what your eyes are actually seeing in the moment. With smells, imagining them isn't much of an option as they're much harder to recall with no reference, so your acuity to smell is much more focused on actually taking in the real life information to remember it, but you can't access that vivid information again by just imagination since there's no pattern, only when you find that smell again in real life can you experience the smell and the other feelings that were packaged with it come along.
@@Dragonfly9307 I wonder if you can relate to my observation that this smell of fresh air is very similar to how the air smells on certain summer days, often times, after there was a storm. The best explanation I have for this wonderful freshness is ozone (O3). I feel the same smell when I leave my laundry outside for couple of hours and then smell it (it's faint if I add too much detergents or a softener). The reason that it goes away pretty quickly is almost for sure because your nose gets used to it fast.
when i was about 12 or 13 my family moved to a new place. the underground storage room wasn't very clean. lots of stuff were left there by the previous owner. amongst the rubbish was a 2 litre milk carton just standing there by itself with a hole on top. i went to have a look. imagine "i can smell it with my eyes" isn't a joke. imagine having flashbacks every time you see a milk carton. imagine an interrogation tool 10 times more effective than waterboarding. so let me describe the content i saw before my body involuntarily recoiled all the way upstairs. there's gooey brown liquid that probably was once milk, 1/4 full. there's a mouse floating on top half decomposed. there are maggots in the liquid and on top of the mouse, all dead and decompsing too. what i think happened is the mouse bit into the carton, fell in and drowned. then maggots started eating the corpse but probably died of lack of oxygen sometime later (the only opening is at the very top of the carton. gas from decomposing are all heavier than air, like CO2, H2S etc). anyhow. the family therapist at the time suggested sharing is the best way to deal with trauma. so here i am. hope you lot enjoyed my story of smell.
The image of that alone is disgusting.
I'm glad the therapist didn't suggested "shaking" as solution. Great story. Thank you for sharing.
@@pinkimietz3243 NOOOOO
While I hate the mental image your story has burned into my imagination, I love the way you write and can paint such a vivid image. Putrid, but vivid nonetheless
i am so sorry stan. thats disgusting
I had Covid this week and 100% lost my sense of smell. So weird sticking your nose in a box of incense and not smelling a thing. Luckily unlike most people I know (who couldn't smell anything for months) it was only a few days. I've never been so happy to experience the smell of urine (I noticed it start to come back while I was in the loo haha).
I thought I lost mine in January when I tested positive. Never had any symptoms, but while I had myself quarantined I was washing my hands and couldn't smell the soap. I always get strongly scented soaps for my bathroom. Went to my room, a little freaked out, when my dog farted and the smell made me dry heave. Turns out my son had refilled the soap bottle with unscented soap. 🤦
I, fortunately, also had a relatively short run in with the virus and lost my smell for about a week. The first smell I noticed was the pollution from cars, that was a very ambivalent feeling. For some reason pollution and smoke smelled really sour for a while.
everything tasted extremely salty but to be exact, everything smelt absolutely of bicarbonate soda (Natron in german). Not exactly sure if it was Covid but i never experienced something like this since everyone sais you loose taste i'm sure it was.
I tried to eat a salami sandwich i couldn't eat it was so disgusting thats probably when it was worst
For me it made a big bag of weed smell like absolutely nothing
Sunflower leaves are anti-viral (if I remember correctly); try making tea with it. It is pretty bitter though
Due to chronic sinus infections which started when I was an infant, I have permanently lost my sense of smell. I have no memory of what smell even is. So I have been very interested in speaking with covid sufferers who suddenly have no smell and how they react to food. I salt almost everything I eat because it's one of the few things I can taste.
That’s rough. I lost my smell and taste from Covid. It made it kinda boring to eat. Salt did help a lot. But it was weird it didn’t matter what I made as long as I was getting sustenance like my brain was like eh you can’t taste it just eat it. I craved enchiladas but when they taste of nothing it was soo frustrating. Helped me clean my fridge and pantry out though. I did scrub my tongue with my toothbrush and honestly it kinda helped to bring my taste back.
@@mogaliz2185 did you get your sense of taste back
I also suffer from chronic sinus infections, there's only certain things I'm still able to smell and taste. Most of what I eat is based on texture, lol. When covid first started, I was constantly having to explain that because people would get all scared when I said I couldn't smell something they did.
Honestly, smell is very similar to taste, just in the nose.
There is a perfume - don't know the name, never learned it - that whenever I smell it, I immediately think of a good childhood friend's mother who passed away when we were still kids. Audrey was almost like a second mom to me at the time. I smell this perfume on strangers from time to time and I'm transported back to her house. A great way for me to remember a tremedous woman.
If she was in her prime they the late 70s 80s it's probably elezibeth Taylor perfume
Maybe it could be a classic perfume like a Chanel No.5 or something of the like.
Hope you can find it! (If that’s what you want) :)
It wouldn’t hurt to ask the next person you smell wearing it.. Offer a brief explanation to keep it from being weird or creepy. 😆
I don’t remember Elizabeth Taylor having a perfume out until late 80s. Jovan Musk was popular in the 70s, & it’s still the most nauseating perfume ever.
I was a winemaker for 15 years: mercaptans can form in wine that isn't properly managed, and the stench is utterly foul, similar to rotting garlic. I hate to think how bad it would be at higher concentrations.
I've had wine that was spoiled and tasted of garlic. Apparently the liquor merchant's cask I decanted port from to take home was contaminated. To call it vile in smell, taste and aftertaste is beyond mere understatement. Even the glass flagons I transported it in had to be throw away. The glass could be cleaned but the seals of the caps were contaminated.
I think the worst thing I have ever smelled was when I was a kid me and my friends made these stink bombs where we put milk, egg, vegetables, fruits, and just a bunch of stuff that would spoil into Gatorade bottles then we left them out in the back of our yard for 2 years in the sun and everything, we both puked when we opened them up… the things we do as kids 😂
Ohhhh whyyyyyy lol
This is so 1980s!
We did the same!!
Yep... A friend and I did the same thing using very similar ingredients. Milk, eggs and the like. To it, we added canned clams with the juice, some random fish.....and shrimp.
We opened it, we vomited...both of us. We were going to use it in retaliation during a neighborhood kid prank war. We did not. Not because our consciences told us not to, rather neither of us would open the second bottle. That first one was enough.
miata 😄 i have a 90 in black
I always loved the smell of my grandmas house. She always had a nice candle burning, but she also had an immaculate large garden that she worked in every day, so there was a lovely earthy smell all of the time. Fresh tomatoes mixed with spices is something that comes to mind the most.
I used to work in a lab and one time someone tipped over a 25 mL (less than an ounce) bottle a 2-mercaptoethanol. The entire building was evacuated until the spill was cleaned up because the HVAC system spread the stench to nearly every room. I wonder if that HVAC system was routed properly, because it probably wasn't a good thing that lab air was being mixed with office air.
My dad collected all kinds of stuff, kinda in a hoarder type of way. And in his collection was two 12kg bottles of mercaptan. Later he moved out and he left the mercaptan at my place and I absoultely have no idea what to do with it. Even if I move the cilinders they leak some of the mercaptan and it is the most foul smelling thing I have ever encountered. It is so bad that sometimes I can randomly smell it even if im nowhere near it.
@@sarlol00 Would you be game to ship em my way if I sent you some vac-seal bags and air tight containers??
@@lucid_sound_design I mean, I don't want to commit chemical warfare against the postal service, but if you want to pick it up it is all yours for free. :D
In 2013 there was a feck up at a gas processing plant in Normandy where they add the mercaptan stink to fuel gas.
It was smelled in Britain.
During my undergrad days, I had some procedures that used 2-mercaptoethanol. Up close the stuff was indeed vile, but if you kept it in the hood properly, that tiny bit that leaked out into the room reminded me of bok choy cooking and actually made me hungry for the Asian noodles they served in the cafeteria. Funny little memory there.
When I was a kid I was snorkeling at a breachway in RI, and there was a giant 42 gallon barrel of chum that was just rotting in the sun. A group of other kids decided it would be a good idea to tip it over. I'm 37 now and just thinking about it forces that smell back into my nose somehow.
Yikes, I still remember back when my pal of mine left a turkey (the dead packaged kind) in the trunk of his car for over a week because he forgot about it and called me to help him get it out. I will never ever forget that smell it makes me gag just thinking about it.
Old chum is not your friend.
@@martineldritch unless you’re going fishing.
@@dragonace119 I forgot a bag of potatoes in my trunk, it was a similar experience.
I worked in a call center. One coworker had left a cup of coffee with creamer behind their computer. They were fired and we were unaware of the cup. We don't know when the cup was left we only knew that it was found weeks after she was fired. She probably just forgot about it as she was being fired. The warm fans from the computer had been blowing on it for weeks. It was only discovered when somebody tripped and bumped into the desk and caused the coffee to spill all over the desk. We had to evacuate the call center for the rest of the day it smelled so bad. The next day the room smelled of really strong cleaning supplies, but it was at least bearable.
When I was in paramedic school, we went to a cadaver lab to explore anatomy and practice intubation. Intubation, if you're not familiar, is when a tube is placed down your throat and into your airway. There at the lab they had one cadaver specifically being used to practice this skill because he was still "fresh". While the others had been treated with formaldehyde. You'd think that the worst smell was maybe the smell of a rotting body or the chemicals to preserve them. However for me, it was the cotton ball soaked in mouthwash stuffed in the intubation cadaver's mouth. You had to get right at face level and look directly down his throat to place the tube correctly. Something about the feable attempt of the mouthwash and polarity of such a generally normal smell in such an abnormal situation caused me for months to have to switch to cinnamon toothpaste i could only find online. I still can't smell moothwash without thinking of corpse's 🙃
That’s kind of like my aversion to the smell of blakhaus liquor because it induced my first ever hangover. I can’t even smell raspberry seltzer without my face contorting into an expression of utter disgust. And that was more than 20 years ago!
@Jeremy O'Hair I truly appreciate the agony you endured in pursuit of such a noble career. TY!!
I don't get grossed out easily, yet reading this made me woozy!
Not sure I have a favorite smell, but I totally have a most nostalgic one-the ambient smell of my house's garage. Wood and sawdust from my father's wood shop, mixed with grass and gasoline from an old riding lawnmower. I have fond childhood memories attached to both.
My most reminiscent and favourite smell is that sweet/earthy/fruity aroma that you get when entering a greenhouse growing tomatoes in summer.
It always reminds me of my Granpa who died when i was about 8, he grew nice tomatoes.
I think that's probably ethylene.
Literally same here in every regard except no greenhouse and I was 28 not 8.
Rip grandpa
@@cybersentient4758 and those fresh tomatoes sandwiches. Two pieces of toast, mayo salt and pepper and some fresh sliced juicy tomatoes. One of my favorite comfort foods. I basically live off that while tomorrow are in season. Occasionally I'll add lettuce and bacon for the classic B.L.T. but when the tomatoes are perfect I don't want anything to cover the taste.
@@seanriopel3132 bruh i want Tomato sandwich now 😭
The worst smell I've ever smelled was during a physics class in high school, we'd mush a piece of banana, mix it with some lukewarm water and let it sit for a week in a sealed jar, except we forgot the experiment for 2 months. Multiple pupils vomited when the jars were opened.
I can imagine. My kid left one in his lunchbox for a week once. Oof
Nice.
my mom left a banana in the microwave for about a month. the smell never left
@@bearoqueiro8905 El psy congaro
Good answer, but what's a 'physics call'? Did you mean 'physics class'? And I'm curious what the experiment was about, because it sounds more like something we would've done in biology or chemistry. (Some physicians think those disciplines are just applied physics, but a lot of people think they're wankers.)
For me it's probably Lavender. My Mom used to wear it as perfume and in lotions, as she always found the smell calming. Whenever even just a small amount hits me, it has this simultaneous effect of being calming, but, at the same time I start to have to fight back tears as all of these memories of her come back, and the sting of her being gone is felt again. It was actually a very long time before I could stand being around, what was then, and is again now, one of my favorite smells.
I’m sorry honey. So sad and sweet. If I could share my Mom with u…I would
One of my favorite smells is burning butter in a pan. My dad used to make crepes every Christmas morning, and the browning butter smell used to fill the whole house. Another of my favorite smells is vaporized vinegar. I work as a cook and use vinegar to clean the flat-top grill every night... I love it.
One of the worst smells I've encountered was rotten chicken that was left in a thermos for a few months. Uncorking that thing left a smell that lingered for days in my apartment... it was awful. Sorry neighbours!
Heh, though I was the only one who instantly love vinegar aroma on air. i wanted to dye clothes and boil plentiful of vinegar. Somehow it reminds me of grape juice... strange i love it ever since. but when i told my brother to smell it, he doesn’t liked it 🤷♀️
As an urban explorer I regularly come into some really foul smelling places, mostly from molds, rotting tissue or homeless people's shitrooms. However the worst smell I remember was the inside of a smoke purifier of an abandoned powerplant. I have no idea what chemicals they were using in there, but it was just this really artificial, slightly metallic, volatile substance smell combined with a bit of sulphuric odor. I actually got a bit disoriented by it and my head started to hurt, fortunately I kept myself on the narrow catwalk which lead me to this purifier's hatch.
The second worst smell I remember was in an abandoned yeast factory where they dumped hundreds of liters of unfinished product into some outdoor trench. The smell itself was not so terrible, it was really just an amplified yeast smell, but it catched onto everything, including my own skin and cavities. So even weeks after the visit the smell ocassionaly just went back into my nose from somewhere deep inside my body...
That's what I loved about motorcycling the first time I started doing that. The smell of the neighbourhood. Knowing who was having a bbq. Or a firepit. Or who was doing their laundry. The smell of fresh cut grass. Or a spring rain on pavement.
You don't get that from driving a car. I loved biking the minute I took my first leisurely ride through the city. It was awesome.
When I was in high school (1965), I had my own home chemistry lab, an 8 ft x 10ft building in the far corner of our large (ish) suburban lot. I had read about methyl mercaptan (methyl thiol), the stuff used to give an odor to natural gas. With dubious wisdom, I decided to try to make some and it was surprisingly easy to do using chemicals I already had (don't ask how, I won't tell you).
Anyway, not long after that, a supposed friend at school had taken it upon himself to intentionally smear ice cream on my back really messing up my jacket. I wanted revenge and had the means to get it. The next day, I took a tiny vial (about 0.5 ml) and half-filled it with my noxious liquid. I then encapsulated the vial in multiple layers of wax (like how dipped candles are made). I put the encapsulated vial in a glass jar and again sealed the top with more wax. I made the mistake of carrying it through the house which didn't endear me to my mother.
At school (strangely, it didn't smell up the bus), I took the vial out of the bottle, removed the was at the top, and casually walked by his locker which had several air vents in the door. I quickly poped the top off the vial, dumped the contents into his locker, and continued walking away. After my first class, I happened to walk by the tainted locker only to see the principal and several of the janitorial staff close to the aforementioned locker with blueprints of the building and heard them say something like, "but there ARE no natural gas lines in this part of the building." I just looked straight ahead and walked by. I didn't say anything about it for years. Good times.
I had about the same idea, but it was a little later, and it was ethyl mercaptan I thought of making. Yes, the process was quite easy. It would lead to instant divorce, so I won't try.
That's some passive-aggressive sh*t right there
@@feraudyh That's probably wise.
@@walterbrunswick Keep in mind that I was 14 or 15 at the time. Passive-aggressive? Perhaps, but I have gotten a lot of amusing mileage out of the story.
Another bad smell story, but not of my making. In the early 70s, I had a part-time job at an American Cyanamid chemical factory in Azusa, California. It sat adjacent to a mostly dry riverbed. During WWII, the company was making chemical warfare agents (mustard gas, I believe) and they buried the chemical waste in the riverbed in metal drums. During my employment, the company had to remove the waste and it caused a horrible stench you could smell for miles around. They tried to cover it up with some nauseatingly sweet smell. At least it lasted only a couple of months.
My favorite smell is a smell that comes off of a steam locomotive while it's hot and running. I think it's a combination of hot iron, coal fire and the lubricants they use, but it always reminds me of going to tourist railroads when I was little.
When I woke up this morning I thought "Gosh I miss Joe's Thursday videos" and here you are! So great to see a Thursday new video! Happy holidays to you, the wife and fur babies!!
U wake up thinking about UA-cam videos? 😂
@@Nick-jg1te I have a pretty shite existence. UA-cam helps
same!!! literally exactly same. right after morning coffee
@@Darkflowerchyld718 no need to make it depressing
@@Nick-jg1te Oh Darlin I'm not making it depressing. Have you looked around lately? It is depressing.
Joe: "If you tipped over an entire oil tanker filled with vanilla, it would be enough to make the entire planet smell like vanilla."
Me: "...... Let's put that to the test then. Get the boys back in town; we're pulling one last heist!"
Imagine, the whole world smells vanilla and everyone just goes straight up ....Koom Bai Ya. :D
The least harmful terrorist act in the world
where is this sudden smell of vanilla coming from? 🤔
Sounds all fun and games until you experience the stuff firsthand. I used ONE little pinch of vanillin for about a kg and a half of sweets for last new year's eve's party, and by the end of the evening I was feeling almost sick. The smell of vanilla stuck to my hands no matter how much I washed them.
I almost didn't eat that evening.
sounds like a job for mr. beast.
My first job was at a little mom and pop bakery, they specialized in sweets; cupcakes, turnovers, pies, lots of wedding cakes. They were proud to make everything from scratch and used zero preservatives. I was the dish washer and every month I had to clean the rotten icing from the grease trap. Now, I've since worked at several restaurants and cleaned out many a grease trap but to this day, nothing compares to a months worth pure sugar and lard in hot dark water.
I don't work there anymore but the bakery still exists, I drive past it sometimes and a shiver runs up my spine every time I do.
I thought that was going to be about the best smell, given baked goods and such, and then it took a dark turn! lol
I helped clean one of those food trucks before that specialized in breakfast and lunch. They do a light surface cleaning before breakfast, after breakfast and again after lunch, but once a week, they have to break down the rest of the inside of the food truck to clean out the harder to get crevices and areas that don't affect the food from a sanitary perspective. egg drippings, meat drippings, grease, vegetables, and other food debris gets down inside those cracks and rots.
When you pop out the stoves, shelves, the space below the steamer trays, and all of that, the putrid smell punches you in the face. This was the mid 90s when people didn't have so many smoking laws, so the guys on the truck would smoke constantly while cleaning the truck because it dampened the smell or they would shove ear plugs up their nose. It still isn't the worst thing I have smelled, but it is pretty high on the list.
Years ago I was living at a house owned by a church and was doing work to earn room and board. I was 18 or 19 years old at the time so there was a lot about work that I didn't understand so I ended up putting myself in some bad situations. Case and point, I was helping the tile guy grout the bathroom. You do that with an epoxy grout because the regular stuff will soak up stuff like pee. It also sets fast so when I was sloppy and got it all over the tiles I had to get it off and the dude said get it done. I ended up on my hands and knees with a paint scraper. I discovered that a combination of paint thinner and acetone made it soft enough to do the job. I didn't have a fan or anything to vent the space, didn't think I needed it and no one mentioned it. It didn't smell bad so much as really intense. I'm not sure how long I was in there but it did take a while. Like I said, I was young. By the time I was done everyone I talked to said my pupils were so big you couldn't see the eye color.
Once I was hungover and wanted to make some mac and cheese, started heating some milk up in a pan however what I hadn't realised was the milk was out of date. Almost immediately the milk started curdling that combined with the added heat and being hungover I was gagging and on the verge of throwing up. Threw the whole pan outside and collected myself before cleaning it.
3 Weeks after an little accident my big toenail fell finally off, due to the bruise under the nail.
First of all this was really painful and secondly the smell of this nail once it finally came off...
I can still smell it today. I never thought my body could produce such a bad smell!
Really horrible!
Dude!!! I hit my toenail myself about a week ago and it's bruised up. I didn't think it would fall off. It just looks bruised but not damaged...dang now I'm wondering if it's going to fall off on me man
@@oscarraygoza4350 If it's somewhere between dark blue and black, it certainly will.
Don't sniff it once it does!
I guess I was lucky. I got my toe stuck and fell down with most of my body weight on the big toe. It bend, cracked and bled from under the nail but the nail never fell off. Its fine today, but this was one of the worst pain ever...
I had my big toenail, being sore for about a month after breaking in a pair of boots, just come off completely, and is the worst smell I've ever known.
I had the exact same thing happen to me. And yes, the smell was fascinatingly awful.
When I was in college, I was babysitting a 5th grader and she put a metal pot in the microwave. The smell was so unbelievably unnatural and would not leave my sinuses for days. I could even taste it. It was a mixture of electrical fire, metallic electricity smoke and also burned plastic from the handle of the pot. It was unbelievable and inescapable. We left the house and left windows open but the smell only dissipated slightly. Absolutely awful.
I know that smell, it permeated my house after my grandmother nearly broke the blender.
@@gustavodutra3633 how did she break it again that created a foul smell?
Electric fire is truly terrible.
@@FarfettilLejl Probably tried blending something that stopped the motor. A stopped motor uses more power and will overheat the wires in the motor. The smell would be from burning insulation covering the wires.
That was ozone. Ozone bad
I remember back in the day when i got flu or bronchitis i also used to lose sense of smell and taste. I find it strange that losing sense of smell got such a big hype nowdays. It was a thing no body payed attention to back in the day.
True story. I tried to make cinnamon ornaments with my students one year. The concentration of cinnamon was so strong that it sent some of the students to the nurse with a strange health condition; Their faces and cheeks had turned bright red. The nurse was baffled. We had to remove the project from the building and air out the classroom for an hour. The redness went away quickly after getting fresh air. Too much of a good thing!
Cinnamaldehyde? (cousin of formaldehyde)
Interesting. We have so much work to be done with smells. Notice we don’t talk about it very much. It def has the ability to associate things and change your life if it’s terrible enough
I can't handle cinnamon in scents either
Makes my face turn red and burn and affects my breathing yet I can eat it no problem
Allergic reaction maybe?
In the early sixties, cinnamon toothpicks were popular. You could buy them pre-flavored, but little vials of clear liquid that I guess was cinnamon oil were also sold so you could flavor your own toothpicks. Fun, huh??
I was a stupid little kid and got hold of my big brother's vial and some toothpicks, then snuck them into the bathroom. Of course, the first thing I did was spill it all over the counter and use the front of my shirt to clean it up. My stomach turned red, all right. It was like being engulfed in invisible fire that was only exacerbated by my attempts to extinguish it.
So, even though cinnamon is associated with sugar and spice and nice stuff like apple pie, its essence is hotter than the meanest hot pepper. Everybody's eaten those big jelly beans, Hot Tamales (active ingredient, cinnamon). The redness is probably a first-degree burn.
I feel so validated by this video. I grew up in Oregon. When I moved to Florida at 14 I noticed that the rain smelled different. Everyone laughed at me, saying that rain had no odor. But I could honestly smell the difference.
its called petrichor! water also tastes different but you have to train yourself to notice the differences!
The worst smell I've experienced hit me when a friend peeled off the toenail of an infected toe. Sometimes I can still smell it in my memory.
Christ
Oh hell nah
This might be the worst image that's appeared in my head this week.
Wow, double whammy. Geez dude.
@@nya8482 this comment made it so much funnier.
I used to work for a natural gas company, and one of the sites I had to visit was the pump station where they added mercaptan (aka methanethiol). Even in a sealed system, the entire site reeked, and I had to wear a mask when entering the pump station as a safety measure.
The worst smell I have ever come across happened during nursing school. I had a patient with sever foot fungus. I had to apply a cream to his feet and chunks of rotting flesh were coming off his toes. It took hours to get the smell out of my nose.
On behalf of humanity, I thank you for putting that image in our heads.
Oof… dumpster juice is about the worst I can imagine!
Fun fact.
The smell itself.....means that particulate matter is actually in contact with your nasal cavity and tongue.🐱
Are you sure you weren’t just deboning a turkey?
@@smeggerknee2448 yep I know. I kept flushing my nostrils with 10mL of NS. It didn't help.
There's an amazing smell to being in Japan, and it makes me nostalgic. Walking into Japanese houses built before the 70s economic boom, and more modern homes that use traditional methods all have the same smell. I think it's either how they'd traditionally treat the exposed wood, the tatami mats, or a combination of both.
That's just the smog slowly filling your lungs
@@shadow_entity9191 So you assume all of Japan is just one metropolitan city? And not a chain of 4 major islands and many smaller ones, with different climates? Interesting
@@dee5tank No. But after your reply I'm assuming you didn't get the joke...
@@shadow_entity9191 oh then ya.
@@shadow_entity9191 aren't jokes supposed to be witty or funny or insightful?
10:00 “if you took a tanker full of vanilla and spilled it then that vanilla would be smelled across the entire world”
*well ferb, I know what we’re gonna do today!*
Probably the raw sewage smell that greeted me when I tried to move into my first apartment in Denmark. The U-bend in the shower drain had been allowed to dry up between occupants. It actually burned my eyes and made me dry-heave, which is weird for me because of all the things that can make me nauseous, bad smell usually aren't among them. It took 3 days to air it out, during which time I had to stay on the couch at the AirBnB my folks rented. Thank goodness they were there to help me move in (and make a vacation of it before I had to start work)
I worked as a radiographer in a department built on the top of the morgue in a hospital. Holes had been drilled through the floor for cables. One day they brought in an old lady who had died in bed several weeks earlier with the electric blanket on. Liquefaction had occurred. All was normal in the department until a very faint pong began to be noticeable. This increased in stinkiness over the next hour until it was so disgusting and weirdly terrifying we could no longer work
Sadly one of my favorite smells that takes me back to my childhood is mildew. Our dryer was old and didn't work well when I was a kid so towels always had a mildewey smell to them ... It's oddly comforting to me, but I rarely get to smell it now because I have an actual functioning dryer.
You sure it wasn't just because someone forgot the clothes in the washing machine for a couple of days. I know that was the cause occasionally in our house. Plus overtime the washing machines can actually get dirty with residue buildup.
A friend of mine is a doctor and worked for many years as a nurse. I once asked him what's the most disgusting thing he ever smelled and he said it was definitely when a homeless alcoholic patient puked old blood over him.
Esophageal varices 😉
@Robert Moore digested blood
@Robert Moore like it was out from the circulatory system and had enough time to go bad before he puked
Fear the Old Blood.
@@jo_naash Homeless people vomiting the Old Blood usually directly precedes them turning into werewolves, in my experience..
One of my favorite smells is so odd. Its the smell of this random off-brand shampoo called Prell (yes, Prell - not Purell). My family used it when I was growing up and it takes me right back to childhood and makes me so happy. I love it.
I had Covid about 6 months ago and my sense of smell was completely gone for around 3 months. Now it's about 10% of what it was. It has ups and downs. Like poo doesn't smell anywhere near as bad as it did, but smells I love (like citrus fruits, or certain perfumes) now smell a little bit off to me.
Luckily, when I take a giant sniff of my kids' heads (parents will know what I mean), it still feels good.
"Luckily, when I take a giant sniff of my kids' heads (parents will know what I mean), it still feels good.
"
I don't have kids, but that made me tear up! My youngest niece who is still very close to me is 16 now, and I remember catching whiffs of her head when she was a little one and hugged me or sat on my lap. I think I know what you mean. It's just the nicest smell of innocence. I don't say it literally, but it's the actual smell of childhood...of kidness. It ceases too soon.
I don’t have kids but I know what you mean. I like smelling puppies too, lol.
Actually, Scoville scale is also subjective. It is organoleptic test, which involves diluting the dried pepper untill 3 out of 5 people can`t feel the heat of the pepper.
I remembered that had changed, and looked it up; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale The Modern Scoville scale is no longer organoleptic, but is based on amount of capsaicin per unit of material, multiplied by some factor. (The wiki indicates 15 or 16.)
When I was in college my senior year I took a microbiology class where I had to isolate an anaerobic bacteria that could grow on a substrate of my choice. I chose trimethylamine. I later found out that this is the chemical that gives rotting fish it smell. I would feed my bacteria 1 mL of trimethylamine twice a week. I would have my bacteria inside of an anaerobic cabinet that I accessed with manipulator gloves, kind of like what you see when people are working with the radioactive material. I would be wearing nitrile gloves inside of those. Inside the manipulator cabinet I would use a syringe to extract the trimethylamine from a tube with a rubber stopper and inject the trimethylamine into the top of my culture jar which was covered with another rubber stopper. In spite of all this, trimethylamine always seem to work its way onto my hands through all the layers of protection. Then it absorbs into your skin, and you can taste it and smell it for hours. I had a meeting after this class every week, and I had to sit on the opposite side of the room because the smell was so awful coming from my hands. It made me sad to find out that some people have a condition where they excrete trimethylamine out of their sweat glands. It is awful stuff.
We actually have more than five senses, although they detect internal sensations. For instance, proprioception is your ability to sense where parts of your body are. There's also nociception (pain), vestibular sensation (balance), and really specific receptors like baroreceptors, which detect our blood pressure and signal the brain to stabilise it.
I used to walk past an ice cream factory, and when they made vanilla ice cream, the huge vent fans put out a warm, humid, gale-force wind so heavenly scented, I would stop and bathe in the warm wind, even in summer when more heat was unwelcome. Years later and far away, the worst smell: I won't go into that... Don't want to give anyone "ideas."
I lost my sense of taste and smell when I had covid a few months ago. It was so strange. I remember rubbing icy hot on my back and not being able to smell it, which was bizarre because icy hot is some strong smelling stuff. The taste thing was weird too. I ate a lot of spicy food during that time because spicy was one of the only types of taste that came through at least a little bit.
everything tasted extremely salty, exactly like sodium bicarbonate (Natron in german) no matter if sweet or salty
I've read that when you lose your sense of smell, a good part of your sense of taste goes with it. They're very intertwined.
I lost my sense of smell a few years ago after a bad sinus infection. Taste went with it. I ate the things I knew I liked & avoided textures I knew I didn’t. Made it easier to try knew things, even if I couldn’t quite taste them properly.
I worked as an RN in hospital then & believe me, not being able to smell things was a godsend. However, the fumes from the floor wax/cleaner/polisher still made me dizzy even if I couldn’t smell it.
Anyhoo, it took a while to recover any smell/taste. It’s still not what it once was. Strong smells & flavors get through easier.
I like the smell of dead skunks! My grandparents lived in the county off a busy highway that always had a dead skunk or two rotting on it. When I was little, I only got to visit my grandparents occasionally so I learned to associate that smell with people I loved, happy times and rare treats! I’m grown now and they are long gone but that smell still makes me feel good. Great! Now I’m crying! Thanks Joe!
I’m a “complete anosmic” which means I was born without a sense of smell. I taste things just fine (I joke and say “oh, I taste great!”). But every doctor that I’ve ever told about this just goes “huh, interesting” and moves on. They don’t understand smell and they can’t “fix me”.
Ps. Long time fan. Been watching for like 7 years.
that's actually very interesting. I'm curious, do you understand the concept of smell if you've never been able to smell anything? like does the concept of perfume confuse you?
So you can easily tell the difference between real and fake vanilla, can’t you?
@@mook_butt8037 There is no difference, other than the amount of radiation
@@vibaj16 hold your nose and eat something with real vanilla. Then do the same with artificial vanilla. Then you can tell me if there’s a difference. Also, what radiation?
@@mook_butt8037 ok, after researching a bit, I was mostly wrong. What I was talking about was that the main flavor of vanilla, vanillin, is in both real and artificial vanilla. However, real vanilla has a lot of other chemicals that probably cause the difference that you taste. Also, artificial vanilla often includes things not naturally found in vanilla, such as sugar.
The radiation thing is a way that counterfeit vanilla (artificial vanilla labelled as real vanilla) can be found. People can try adding all the common chemicals that are normally in real vanilla to make their artificial vanilla truly indistinguishable from real vanilla (it would literally be the exact same thing), and they'd get away with it if it weren't for radiation: real vanilla is slightly radioactive. It contains radioactive carbon-14 due to being in a living plant. Artificial vanillin is the exact same chemical, but it isn't radioactive, because it's usually obtained from petroleum, in which the carbon-14 has had millions of years to decay. It's half-life is only 5730 years, so it's almost certainly fully decayed and therefore not radioactive.
Bromine. There was this guy, let's call him G, one time at my work (I used to work in a laboratory) this guy decided to empty and clean a receptacle that contained Bromine. Now if you're a SDS kinda guy like, you'd read up on this and quickly find that its interaction with water can cause a toxic gas to emerge. It just so happened that he needed to wash the already empty container out, which the compound got out. Now this brown cloud gas can destroy your olfactory system. My nose was overwhelmed by this brown ass smelly armpit automotive gas-like smell which made me nauseous quickly and suddenly for almost 4 hours after that, I couldn't smell a damn thing. I could of eaten a whole onion and not tasted a single thing. Bromine is no joke.
it can destroy ovaries too. and it goes through gloves. it's either bromine or bromide. real nasty stuff.
NileRed has some nice Videos about Bromine
They used to (still?) tent whole houses and treat them with bromine to nuke termites (and everything else) A few darwin awards were handed out to those who figured it was a perfect time to rob a vacant tented house.
Worst smell?
My co-worker who smells like Salt & Vinegar chips and musk but really intense, that one time someone left 5000 dead worms in the office over the weekend and I was opening up on Monday (I work at a courier company), or when I was in high school doing dissecting rats and someone popped their rat's stomach and we all had to evacuate.
The worms gave me nightmares. I walked in, smelt it, found the box and walked over to it, saw them coming out then realised I was standing in a massive patch of dead worms. This was Monday at 3am and my brain literally asked myself am I awake? Later that night, I dreamt that everywhere I went, dead worms were dropping behind me and I would only see them when I turned around.
I'd love to see you do a video on capsaicin, spiciness, heat, and people's fascination with it. You touched on the scoville scale briefly in this video and I've always found it an interesting topic.
I've never smelt anything in my life. It's pretty interesting figuring out how it works, from an objective viewpoint. And how little people talk about it. There's a lot to talk about.
Do you just taste salt, bitter, sweet, and sour in your foods? If so, sorry to hear that because without the aroma, food is boring.
@@MaxWindshear Ironically I never get bored of food, possibly because there's limited variety in the first place. Texture plays a big part in my culinary experience, as well as the four tongue tastes (although people who can smell seem to experience tongue tastes a little different to me)
@@_fubar i'm sure you could get a furnace on the cheap these day
You doing okay boo? Having no sense of smell does terrible things to people’s mental health apparently.
anosmia I think its called. my mom has the opposite, hyperosmia. and she has trauma associated with body odor.
As an apprentice diesel mechanic, I once got trapped inside of a box truck operated by a fish distributor. The temperature was in the 90’s, to this day I can detect fish going bad instantly. Not a bad niche to have when making sushi! lol
Worst smell for me happened due to a tragic freak heatwave. My family rescued rabbits. (All those Easter bunnies kids no longer wanted got to live with us.) On this day, out of nowhere, a freak heatwave suddenly sent temps up to 120 degrees. No one in my family expected it, so we had not prepped the rabbits, bringing the cages under shade, bringing the older rabbits or any pregnant rabbits inside, and setting up misters for those who were outside.
No one was home when I came back from high school and was greeting by an absolute horror show. All of the rabbits were overheating. Some had been dead for hours, and it really stank, with the heat making it worse. Others were dying, and if you want to know the worst sound in the world, it's a dying rabbit. They were screaming in death throes, and although I raced around doing all I could, there was no way to rescue 80+ rabbits on my own. I just had to race around, moving cages, hosing down rabbits, doing my best to save those already screaming and convulsing (at that point, there was nothing that could be done, but I tried) and when my parents came home from work 3 hours later, I was still running around the yard, sobbing as I worked in the middle of this wretched stench of death.
We lost 20 rabbits that day, and I ended up with pretty bad PTSD. The sound of a rabbit screaming throws me back to that moment and makes me break down into tears, regretting that I could not save more. The stench of death and sun-bloated bodies is something I will never forget.
So yeah, THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME BACK DOWN THAT VORTEX OF TRAUMA, JOE.
(kidding, I'm fine.)
On a positive note, lavender and honeysuckle are smells that warm my heart. I would go to lavender fields to pick bundles, dry them, and hang them around the house. I use lavender in air filters and put a drop on my pillow when I can't sleep. Honeysuckles grew along the fence of my childhood home, so that smell is connected to child innocence. (Before the rabbit horror show, that it.) Also, the smell of orange blossoms is one that makes me melt. When my husband and I were dating, the road from his house to mine passed by an orange grove. In the spring, we would slow down along that stretch, roll down the windows, and enjoy the smell of the blossoms. Although it only smelled like that in the spring, it is still a smell uniquely tied in with dating him. (We dated for 7 years, so 7 springs full of orange blossoms.)
Weird scent related memory I have is the particular scent of my kindergarten's playground and it's lunchroom. I have probably only smelled that scent a few more times since back then but it always brintgs back memories of that yard.
the worst thing i ever smelled was when i was walking through an apartment complex. i don't know where it was coming from, but it repulsed me on a deep level. someone i was with said it smelled like death. to this day, i wonder if one of those apartments had an undiscovered dead body inside.
that was the worst smell, but not the strongest/most painful. that is usually concentrated pet/human urine in a home that has not been properly cleaned. i've been to a couple of those.
My dad was a paramedic and so i became aware of what a dead person smells like and while its similar to a dead animal, its a bit worse IMO. When you know the smell and you smell it again, you know. It instantly causes me to feel an urge to run, not out of “pew that stinks” but out of fear; i’ve learned how to not do so but the urge to is still there. I wonder where your friend got exposed to the smell to know thats what it is, assuming they were right? As for worst smell, i’d say you’re right, cadaverine and Putricine are the worst smells, easily.
What year was that? There was house in FL that the neighbors had complained about for a couple of years, but police never checked it out until a girl escaped with chains on her. Then they discovered bodies in various stages of decomposer.
My family said I had the nose of a wolf. I lost nearly all my sense of smell from covid and it never fully came back. I miss the smell of fall leaves. Haven’t experienced it in two years.
I lost my sense of smell as a child and don’t really remember what it was like, but just know I can relate to a degree. I’m really sorry you have to go through that.
@@josephplath8752 Finally has come back in the past couple weeks. It was incredibly depressing and ruined my appetite for a solid 1 1/2 years.
@@ClayAlchemist I’m really sorry to hear that, super glad you got it back tho! I don’t really have a great appetite myself honestly and it’s probably because I don’t experience smell at all but it’s been like this for so long that I really don’t feel too bothered by it much
@@josephplath8752 Legitimately why I used cannabis daily was to give myself an appetite. I don’t have weight to lose so when I don’t eat, I shed weight. Thankfully don’t need to currently. Made me noticeably more sluggish, lol.
I’m in the same boat ☹️ lost it around 2 years ago and it never properly came back, some things smell normal, some things smell different, and some things I can’t smell at all
I remember two cases:
1) Being at the 8th school year and synthesizeing butyl-mercapthane in the lab of a chemistry hobby club. There were two fume hoods and I switched on the wrong one.
2) In the morning after the university graduation celebration being performed in a day-rented countryhouse. Turns out, the barbecue meat residues were accumulated for at least a month in a large 100 l bucket and for some reason covered with sand layer-by-layer, thus not stinking. We were performing a cleanup (gathering bottles, food leftowers and so on to leave the countryhouse clean) and I decided to empty the barbecue waste bucket into a large plastic bag. The stench of 30 kilos of composted meat waste was mind-blowing. The house next to this was holding a wedding at the moment and we heard people throwing up. Sorry, dear newweds😳.
Oh dear lord. 😂
By the way, our party members (mostly) endured the stench ok. Maybe it was due to the fact that were were biologists, or more or less drunk, or, more likely, drunk biologists :-).
OMG!
Worst smell I ever experienced was human remains so old they had liquified. I don't appreciate remembering it, Joe, so your bit about screaming into the void was pretty spot on.
Belated congrats on your 1.32 M subscribers! WOW, man! You deserve it. You tread where few dare. NO ONE else could report something like this in such an entertaining way. You are a national treasure. Don't stop! And that means you have to outlive me. All good wishes!
The worst smell I ever experienced came when I accidentally opened a zip lock bag with a rotten onion, inside. Almost hurled.
Some friends of mine got the formula for mercaptan, many years ago, and synthesized a small sample in the high school chemistry lab, filled a small balloon with some water, and squirted the mercaptan inside.
The next day, one of them brought a battery operated drill to school, unscrewed the grille from the "air return" vent for the school's HVAC system, tossed in the balloon, and quickly re-attached the grille.
The ventilation system promptly spread the odor throughout the building; school was promptly evacuated; and they went out for a "ditch day."
Best of all, that wasn't even the best senior prank, that year. Those guys were top-notch honors students, and every one of them had been accepted in the universities of their choices, for months. Their pranks were *amazingly* creative.
That was a pretty good one, though. 😉
I just wanted to mention that when my smell came back, I could smell every spice and every ingredient in every meal.
I retain my super smell to this day.
So when you greet new people do you smell their butts like a dog or have you smelled a dog's butt? It must be amazing to then with their super sense of smell. Lol
@@seanriopel3132 what
Last year I saw what looked like a spiral telephone cable laying on the beach in the Netherlands. After picking it up and throwing it into a nearby trash can I noticed a really strong chemical smell on my hands which I've never smelled before. It stuck to my hands and the bag and sunglasses I had touched. It was extremely unpleasant, nauseating and drove me almost mad on the drive home. I washed and scrubbed my hands multiple times without much success. I had to sleep with my hands in rubber gloves to block the smell because it kept me awake. The smell stayed for some days before slowly fading away. I often wonder what chemical compound that could have been but never want to smell it again EVER!
Whenever I smell crude oil I’m instantly transported back to the hills of Yorba Linda California. When I was young, my dad and I would take long walks through the eucalyptus trees and oil wells. I lost him this year but the memory will remain with me for a lifetime.
I just got smacked in the face with a scent memory, wow.
I used to work in tech repair, and one thing I'll never forget is the smell of a shorted capacitor. It's smell is something like distilled cancer. A very noxious chemical smell.
Yep, gotta agree it’s unique and horrible smell. Not enough to make me want to throw up but bad none the less
I had some of this mercaptan in the 1980s in the UK. It was a small sealed vial and it was used by the gas board to test leakages in pipes. It contained about 2 tablespoonfuls of liquid and I was told that if it was broken, it would contaminate 1 cubic mile of the atmosphere. I never did crack it open and I don't know what ever became of it. True story!
NileRed: "It's not *that* bad."
I had the C back in April and it took my sense of smell. It’s mostly back but not all the way and some smells are mixed up for example minty toothpaste smells like fried chicken! I’m not complaining lol it’s just odd. I had a very sensitive nose before and now I feel like my sense of smell isn’t as strong as it was and that’s a blessing for me. I would get sick if someone had ketchup near me but now I barely smell it and my kids love that stuff.
I had it in July 2020, and still struggle to recognize any scent I might pick up throughout a week/month. The one thing I just can't get over is that anything that would produce a sulfur-ish sorta smell is just a weird sour feeling. Smelling cat poop is like I just stuck my nose in lime juice. When someone lights a match, smokes a cigarette or even if I burn up some electronics, there's no recognizable smell. Maybe a weird feeling inside my nose if I'm lucky.
The upside is that cat poop doesn't bother me (but I still wish Charlie would learn to cover his turds!), and the downside is that no food is really all that good and I can't tell when there's a fire or if my car has been leaking coolant for a week or so. Heh
My sense of smell was my superpower before. I enjoyed trying new foods, new beers, and was a coffee snob. Now I don't enjoy any of it.
Ah, you might have been a _super smeller,_ like Fran Blanche, who recently lost her sense of smell entirely, due to covid. That story here: ua-cam.com/video/FVQ8Zf1i_qs/v-deo.html
Reminds me of a quote of one of my professors: "CO in cooking gas is prohibited. The wastage of housewives would be too large otherwise."
Speaking of dumpster smell: What is surprising to me is how universal that smell is. Apparently combining a lot of rotting things comes up with a pretty nomalized stink.
thats soo true. same goes for recycling smell. that sour sickingly sweet smell of people who didnt clean out their cans of tomatoes or fats or sugars rottingin the summer sun. its a universal smell.
The Great Reekqualizer
@@scrocrates6380 this guy gets it
At the end of every May and into early June, Russian olive trees bloom all across the Salt Lake Valley. They're an introduced and invasive species that's more a large bush than a proper tree, but they thrive in the arid valleys all around the west. Blooming for about three weeks a year, their tiny yellow flowers (blossoms?) are my absolute favorite smell in the entire world. It reminds me of being an elementary school kid and counting down the days before summer vacation. Their aroma is so entrenched in the pleasure centers of my brain to this day it's ridiculous. That sweet, sweet smell meant warm summer days, sleeping in, no homework, pool parties, kick-the-can, fireworks and barbecues were right around the corner!
Vanilla smells great to me. Also, I don't know if schoolkids get this anymore, but everyone used to like the smell of freshly mimeographed test papers. There's a scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" where the teacher gives the students such papers to pass around and everybody immediately picks up their paper and sniffs it. I really don't know how to describe it, but it was an oddly pleasant aroma.
Me too!! The papers smelt so good!
This makes me wonder if there are any chemicals we use that smell fine to us, but are repulsive to some other species.
Yes. And vice-versa. And a possible reason for ET making themselves scarce around here.
Some of my favorite smells would have to be burning pine needles, fresh coffee, peppermint and lemon.
One of the worst things I've ever smelled is burnt dry ramen.
That doesn’t sound like it smells that bad… but what does it smell like?
@@drmether9150 Its hard to describe other than noxious.
@@drmether9150kinda like burnt hair and burnt popcorn, not horrible just intense. i got a lil stoney baloney once and cooked ramen without water, ended up stinking up the kitchen for days 😢
"We only have 5 senses" - we actually have 6 if you include proprioception, the awareness of where your body parts are. This sense allows you to touch the tip of your finger to your nose with your eyes closed.
7, if you include fashion sense
8, if you include common sense
try about 14 or so
It's far more than that. In addition to the already menationed proprioception, we also have the sense of balance. "Touch" is usually counted as one sense, but it is actually many different senses. For example, detecting temperature is different to detecting a physical contact.
26 - last I heard. We have 26 isolated senses and the number keeps growing.
The scent that takes me back to toddler years is the fragrance of cannonball tree flowers. My kindergarten used to have a giant tree that made alot of flowers.
I’ve got two. When I was in middle school something in the a/c system caught on fire. It smelled like someone fire bombed a pile of tires and aluminum foil. The second was when my mom gave me some crab cakes to take home in the middle of winter. I stuck them in the trunk and forgot they were there until June when the smell got unmistakably strong and terrible.
The absolute worst smell I have ever encountered was when a local hospital that is also a forensic lab kept the bodies of some criminals in a refrigerated TEU container for prolonged investigations and I was watching them unloading some of them from 20-30 meters away and I still could smell it
Worst smell for me is a rotten pasta that has sat in warm for a week under lid. To my nose it has very gentle, sweet, bready and mild scent that induces vomiting immediately. It's like being raped by butterflies.
Human decomp is bad. I can still smell the morgue at a hospital in Baghdad. They only had power at this hospital around 8 hours a day so this cooler was actually just a hotbox filled with a pile of bodies in various stages. Holy shit that smell. It’s not the worst tho in my opinion. Car bombs produced the worst for me. Burned human flesh and large volumes of blood everywhere really turn my stomach even just thinking of it. You can smell the iron and stickiness from large amounts of blood. Its bad.
One of my favorites of all time is the fixer used in film photo chemistry.
I worked in an Oil patch for one Winter that made me reconsider my choices in life. I opened a pipe and passed out. We still don't know what was in there. But I had a cough for 5-6 years. Probably an exotic Hydrocarbon soup. It was not Hydrogen Sulfide. I know what that smells like.
that's terrifying, oh my god
We have far more than five senses, which I think could make for a pretty great video to cover. Especially considering the debates among experts on which ones should and should not count.
Hear, hear!
Don't forget, the sense of humor. :-)
@@mikeg4972 good cuz this must be a joke. Your sense of right and wrong, sense if style, common sense, E.S.P..... LOL I would love to see what this person had in mind because I have a feeling they weren't joking around.
@@seanriopel3132 Here's two: 1) Your sense of the position and extent of your body in space, and 2) balance.
@@mikeg4972 or the sense of accomplishment or entitlement... this could go on for a long while :-)
As someone who discombobulated their sense of smell with a traumatic brain injury I'm so curious if I'd react to thiols in the same way, and as a Synethete I wonder what color Thioacetone would be 🤔 my favorite smell used to be Geosmin but I always thought it was called petrichor
How did it affect your sense of smell?
Ahh I love geosmin, it’s always soothed me.
Interesting fact I have learned in my many years: The memory of something that smells bad is clear and acute forever, it does not fade with time, unlike memories of other senses. I'm talking about you, Bromine.
I worked in a mining lab, cooking ore samples in various acid mixtures. One of those was HBr or hydrobromic acid. I have elsewhere described the brief whiff I got of HBr (while moving a rack of beakers from one fume cupboard to another) as "pure evil" - unlike anything else I have ever smelled.
@@sophdog1678 I imagine it is what Pure Evil smelled like in Time Bandits
Since you brought this up, Joe, I'd love to see a video by you on the importance of smell. So many in your comments talk about losing smell from Covid, which is not like losing sight or hearing, but is still an important sense.
Ackchyually we have 9 senses:
Smell
Hearing
Taste
Touch
Sight
Proprioception (sense of where your body is in relation to itself. If you can close your eyes and touch your two index finger tips together, then you have good proprioception)
Nociception (sense of pain)
Thermoception (being able to tell temperature e.g. you can hover your hand over a hot stove and know not to touch it. This does not require touch.)
Balance
Well done fitz! That’s a nod to agents of shield
In one of my early jobs I had to create an instrument method for determining the garlic oil content of garlic oil capsules. The standard that we used was pure garlic oil, which is about fifty percent diallyl disulfide (sulphur compounds again!). The smell was awful, and after working with it I stank of garlic for days.
I never understood why people say garlic stinks. I _adore_ the smell of freshly chopped garlic sizzling in olive oil.
I was already losing my sense of smell before, but when I got covid back in march it made it a lot worse. Now I can only smell the strongest scents and I have to get someone else to smell the milk for me or just make sure I drink all of it within like 3 or 4 days.
Sorry to hear that. Just in case it is useful in your circumstances, you can freeze milk. For best results, it should be frozen in the portions you use in a day or a take, because when it thaws, first the protein/fat part does, and then the water does, so if you are putting a larger amount of thawing milk in a jar, first you'll get a thicker milk and will end up drinking water.
This works with the kind of pasteurized milk sold in Argentina; it isn't that raw as to spoil in three days, but not so ultrapasteurized as to last for months. You could make the experiment and see if it works for you. Good luck. ✌
I have a friend who contracted Covid-19 over a year ago. He briefly lost his sense of smell but as he recovered he said almost all food and drink began to strongly smell like rotten onions. A year later it hasn’t gotten any better. The only things he can tolerate are water, the cheap instant Mac-n-cheese, turkey and white bread sandwiches, and saltines. He’s 24, in college and is so depressed, isolated and malnourished. No one has any idea what to do for him or the resources to help. They’re all trying to keep people from dying in Houston. He only has one semester to go but he may not be able to finish school. I feel so bad for him.
God, that is terrible. And the similar stories I'm seeing in these comments. Hopefully it's like some kinds of nerve damage -- it takes ages to heal but eventually does.