The Worst Smell Ever

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KBABZ has got me onto to smells! Awful smells, well yesterday the onion stuffing cooking at 9.15am put me off present opening and my breakfast. Worst smell ever has to be when a mouse died in my room over the Christmas holiday when I opened the door I was engulfed by the sweet, putrid whiff of death. Anyone else got any hated smells? My sense of smell is very strong, some people hum!

Not sure smell is the right word but:

Chlorine is the worst thing I come into contact with often.

Oh sulfur smells do not bother me that much . I love garlic. My dog got sprayed by a
skunk but I found the smell kinda of sweet like and not all that offensive. One of my
chemistry professor worked with organic sulfur compounds and he explained that if you work with them alot you lose you perception of their smell and can work with them while other people think you smell like a skunk.

Worst smells ever = any kind of perfume/hairspray/body spray/etc.

scientists have discovered the worst odor:

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060925_odors.htm


Chemistry defeats the “Godzilla of odors”

Sept. 25, 2006
Courtesy American Chemical Society
and World Science staff

In the realm of stinkers, a group of che­m­i­cals called isoni­triles may have no ri­val. Odor the­o­rist Lu­ca Tu­rin once termed iso­ni­triles “the Godzilla of smells” and the world’s worst odor.

“The smell is in­de­scrib­a­ble. Not that it is so un­god­ly be­yond all ex­pec­t­ed lev­els of stink, which it ap­proach­es, but more it is like noth­ing you have ev­er ex­pe­ri­enced and your brain while cer­tain­ly re­pulsed to the ex­tream [sic], strug­gles to de­fine it. A dou­ble as­sault at your sen­ses. It has a per­sist­ent lin­ger on ev­ery­thing that comes near it in­clud­ing your [brain cells]. Much like a hor­ri­ble pic­ture... that can’t be purged from your mind. Even af­ter the scene changes you are left with a ghost dif­fi­cult to erad­i­cate...”

“I have no good de­scrip­tion for it. Be­sides me, the two oth­er peo­ple near­by, who were brave enough to try it... had the same thing to say, 'I can't de­s­cribe it but it sure is hor­ri­ble'. There does not seem to be a way to smell it on­ly slight­ly... I mean if you get en­ough of it to reg­is­ter, it’s en­ough to sat­u­rate your sens­es... In­i­tial ex­po­sure goes like this…You know it’s go­ing to smell so you try very hard to not get a big whiff by wav­ing the stop­per... get­ting brav­er every at­tempt un­til.. Bin­go! It’s ac­tu­al­ly fun­ny to watch some­one’s re­ac­tion when it fi­nal­ly sets in. It’s a very strange face. ... It took an hour and a half gal­lon of IPA99%​/​HCL32% to clean that smell out of my hood. If you do it, plan to spend some time de-stink­ing... Ti­ny whiffs of rem­nant traces on the hood tended [to] re­mind my nose of the full scale event and I dreaded it.

— Descriptions of an isonitrile written by readers of science-madness.com, online forum for amateur chemists



“You can’t be­lieve how aw­ful they smell,” Tu­rin said. “They make you vom­it your guts out in­stant­ly.” They’ve even been patented for use as non­le­thal weapons.

The merciless stench is a key rea­son why che­m­ists have large­ly shunned the iso­ni­triles as in­gre­di­ents in im­por­t­ant chem­i­cal re­ac­tions.

But re­jec­tion of iso­ni­triles comes at a price, be­cause they have dis­tinct ad­van­tages over oth­er in­gre­di­ents for many pur­poses.

Now, two chemists say they have come up with some­thing to salvage the dis­mal si­tua­tion: nose-friend­ly iso­ni­triles.

Mi­chael C. Pir­rung and Su­bir Gho­rai, of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Riv­er­side, are re­port­ing de­vel­op­ment of the new com­p­ounds. These so-called “isoni­trile es­ters” have pleas­ant fra­gran­ces and work just as well in re­ac­tions as ex­ist­ing com­pounds, they claim.

The palette of aro­mas in­clude those of soy, malt, nat­u­ral rub­ber, mild cher­ry and even taf­fy, ac­cord­ing to a study in the Sept. 20 is­sue of the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal So­ci­e­ty.

Another prob­lem with usual iso­ni­triles is that ex­ist­ing recipes for mak­ing them re­quire use of haz­ard­ous com­pounds. Pir­rung and Gho­rai say theirs can be made safe­ly.

Al­so known as or­gan­ic iso­cyanides, isoni­triles are de­fined as com­pounds with a ni­tro­gen and a car­bon at­om con­nec­ted by a link known as a tri­ple co­va­lent bond.

Witnesses to the stench claim words cannot describe it. But af­ter read­ing ma­ny first-hand ac­counts of their or­deals, one be­gins to piece to­ge­ther a dim pic­ture of the od­or as a sort of beast that takes the whole sen­s­ory ap­pa­ra­tus hos­tage, leav­ing vic­tims feel­ing ab­used and vio­la­ted. Like a bru­tal ty­rant, it seems, the smell makes itself felt even after one leaves its im­me­di­ate pre­sence (see sidebar).

Dead animal is way up there.

I think BO is one of the most horrible smells.

Also rotting vegetation, there used to be this huge compost heap at school when they cleard like half a forest, and my god it was revolting.

vomit. I have smelt far too much of that recently (puke smiley)

Human waste in a toddler's diaper or training pants.

I'm a big lad. Do you want me smelling because I can't use my aftershave even though I bath daily?

Yeah Hovis want stand you with it and Hall_Bopp want stand you without it. You should
just eat a big clove of garlic and piss everybody off(thats what I do).

I answered this in the Worst Job Thread, but it's a good tale.

Once worked for the County Landfill Department, and would get the call to fill in at the dump, operating the bulldozer that pushed the garbage into the pit. One day a local resident dumped several bags off his pick-up truck and left. I put it in gear, moved forward to push the plastic bags, and almost LOST MY LUNCH. The bags contained the rotting carcasses of some small farm animals (sheep? goats?) and intestines went all over the ground. The stench was unbelievable ! ! Another time a guy dumped a refrigerator. Thinking nothing of it I started pushing it into the pit when it came apart, AND AGAIN I STARTED GAGGING. The 'fridge was full of rotting food. If you've ever seen a cat trying to pitch a hair ball that's stuck, you have a pretty good idea of how I looked. Awful, awful stench. Hell couldn't smell like that.

it has to be the combination of Poo And Air Freshener. you know the story, someone's eaten something they shouldn't, and made a Dreadful Smell in the bathroom. but instead of opening the window, they think that emptying a can of air freshener will somehow drown out the smell?!?!?! well it doesn't. so the next poor unfortunate victim - usually me - is hit by a double whammy of diarrhoea and diphenylcarboheadacheosmellerene and it's always when you're Desperate For A Pee isn't it!! !! ! any other time you'd be able to run out the room and retch but you can't, you're just about to pee yourself, so you try and hold your breath and force the pee out as hard as you can, terrified that you might have to take a gasp of Gaseous Death....

BO And Deodorant is just as bad. BO really isn't that bad, it's the BO that's been festering for a week that's bad. and people who think that, rather than have a shower, they'll just mask the smell with deodorant... urrrrghh *puke* they should all be locked up in a sealed room full of Poo And Air Freshener

My sense of smell decreased after I had the flu in 2003, but it is still very sensitive... one of the worst smells for me are beans that have been left our at room temperture for 12 hours or more, or the leaves of leeks that have been left at room temperature overnight.

The smell of cotton candy makes me want to retch.

decaying flesh.....I think we have a natural aversion because it warns us off something that could be toxic to touch/eat.

I can smell the chlorine in our local water....yuck.It gives my body rashes if I swim in it,I hate to think of what it does to my insides.

Perfumes and such.....it's not the oder.per say,but the "chemical smell" that pierces my brain like a spike.

BO....some of it I really like but it is a very sexual and intimate smell,so I think it is a boundary issue when you smell "strangers"...it's to intimate.

All things considering, skunk smells pretty good - lets face it, it could smell like hot vomit but it doesnt - the smell reminds me of spring time