Yes, it is genetic. My husband was in a “class.” It was actually a recruiting session for a company with DoD contracts.
During a break, the instructor brought in a cloth with a tiny amount of cynide, too small to hurt anyone, but enough to alert people with the genetic ability to smell it.
My husband’s head snapped around like he’d been slapped. They offered him a job on the spot.
He can’t describe the smell to me. except it smells “dangerous.”
And to me, the difference between regular almonds and “oh hell this bakery smells like cyanide” is enormous, but apparently the mileage of that particular baker varied.
Oh, I’m sorry. I have no idea how I missed Tamerlane’s post entirely, but I did. (Does this mean it’s not all about me? sniff 
)
Sleep with their best friend and dump them by text.
I’m very sensitive to the smell of bitter almonds - I hate marzipan, maraschino cherries, anything with artifical almond flavour. I like eating almonds, though, and things made with those (almond based curries are yummy). Came in handy when I was doing a chemistry degree.
I also find cucumber bitter. The luck of the genetic draw.
I thought people who liked cucumber happened to like the bitter taste - they don’t find it bitter?
I insist my wife cuts the cucumber last when she makes salads - that way, I don’t get any cucumber taste on the rest of my salad from the knife or chopping board.
My wife says she can’t taste it in the same way.
Red flag.
I may not know the difference in smell from stale holiday almonds cracked from their shell and cyanide, but I do know that cyanide is very commonly used in chemical manufacturing processes like plating. Companies like that hire people with chemistry degrees to manage their stockpiles. Even the waste results from the cyanide process, which just need to be disposed of not regulated, are lethal when ingested.
“No cookies for me, thank you. I just ate…”
Indeed. I was working with some benzyl nitriles (can’t remember what I was actually making, now), and if things went wrong during the reaction, the possibility was that cyanide would be evolved. I had to know my way to the cyanide treatment kit (at the other end of the lab, right next to the acid spill treatment kit), and be responsive to any evolving gas in the fume hood. Never happened, though.
Mining (gold and silver) uses lots of cyanide and produces severely contaminated tailings that need to be safely neutralised.
Speaking of cyanide and chemists…
One summer during college I worked in the labs for the work-study program. My biggest job was cleaning out one of the chemical stockrooms and organizing all the stuff in it so a proper inventory could be made.
I found a case of 12, count 'em 12, 500g jars of sodium cyanide on a shelf. After the initial :eek: I went to find the chemistry department head, thinking someone ought to know there were several pounds of poison just sitting around in an unlocked stockroom any idiot could wander into.
He gave me the biggest shit-eating grin ever and said, “We’ll have to think of some way to use that up.”
I’m pretty sure he was joking, but I sure resolved never to eat or drink anything he gave me after that 
I like the smell of almonds, but they don’t smell nutty to me…they sort of smell flowery, like a rose, but that’s not right either. I do know I am REALLY sensitive to smells though, not sure if it smells like that to anyone else (and tastes, I “ruined” two beers for people commenting how one tastes like cinnamon and the other, cloves. Now that’s all they can taste. Whoops).
Poison smells like root beer to me, and not in a good way. It may have a bitter almond component but it isn’t the same thing.
While we’re repeating things we’ve heard about cyanide… I read somewhere that the smell comes not from cyanide itself but from poisoned flesh. So you don’t smell it until somebody’s already dead. Chemically that doesn’t make much sense, bitter almond scent being so popular and all.
When I was a teenager (~1957) I was heavy into chemistry. I initially wanted a chem lab capable of analyzing just mineral specimens. I had financial help from my dad for basic chemicals and equipment. With the full acquiescence of my high school chem teacher Mr Rahn, I and my best friend Steve were given permission to “help” him clean out and reorganize the chem stockroom after school. We had implicit permission to take samples of any chemicals we wished! There were even chemicals that had been purchased in the 1920’s. We never abused the privilege but did acquire several hundred different chemicals for my basement lab. One day just before he left for home, he casually told us that he was discarding an unneeded dangerous chemical and mentioned just where it had been left for disposal. Naturally, we investigated. That is how I acquired one lb. of reagent grade sodium cyanide! We opened the old bottle in my lab and very carefully wafted some air to smell it. NOTHING!! Neither of us could smell anything. A considerable library effort (no internet yet) informed me that about 10% of males could not sense the smell of HCN. It was a mere fluke (1% probability) that neither of us could smell it.
By 1960 I was taking a course in inorganic chem at IIT. When I went to qualitative analysis lab I carried a (pre-cleared with the professor) home-made kit of spot test reagents including a small bottle of cyanide solution. At the final exam we were given two hours to analyze an unknown solution. Although I had requested an especially difficult unknown, I only got one with three elements and was done in fifteen minutes (I knew this stuff cold). I had a new friend, Ken; a junior in chemistry and asked if he could smell cyanide. He responded positively and sniffed my old NaCN. I asked him if it smelled like anything else. He said it was just like benzaldehyde which I can smell perfectly.
A course in organic chem, where I did most of my syntheses at home, followed. As I entered my junior year I was far too busy in my major of physics to continue my hobby of chemistry. I went on to an Ms Physics '66.
The question about the smell of cyanide brought back many old memories.
A small sidenote:
If I had a teenage grandson interested in chemistry and outfitted him with the same chemicals and equipment that I had, I would probably be greeted by a SWAT team in full regalia. Youth of today, have no concept of the freedoms lost and the lies fed to them.
[Fell for a poisonous zombie. Whoops.]
There is little, if any, HCN in commercial bitter almond extract. It’s an extremely volatile compound.
You can smell BzH and HCN side by side. They don’t smell like each other.
I know – I love when people write “explaining” one unknown thing in terms of some other unknown thing.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote a wonderful essay about how people writing about evolution always said that the “dawn horse” Eohippus was “the size of a fox terrier” – as if most people know what a fox terrier is, or how big it is. It says something about the time the text was written, who it was written by and who it was intended for.
For what it’s worth “oil of bitter almonds” used to be a – if not common, at least not rare – flavoring. I recall my mother having a bottle of it. I haven’t seen one in years.
As for ridiculous comparisons or references, my favorite was by Fawn Brodie in her biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows my History*, where she says, at one point “This was simply an ordinary Egyptian hypocephalus.” There’s no further explanation, as if she feels that everyone ought to know what a “hypocephalus” is. In those pre-internet days, this was a word unlikely to show up in your Pocket Webster’s Dictionary.
(I shouldn’t do it – you’re already ON the internet. But here: Hypocephalus - Wikipedia )
*I love that she titled the book this way. Fawn Brodie was, of course, no man.
Interesting that this was bumped, because just the other day, on some quiz show, I learned that a foolproof method of figuring out if a material is genuine silk is to light some on fire. If it’s real, it will smell “like burning feathers”. Ooooookay. That helps.
I can smell it, and I can also detect an overheating AC system by the sensation of phosgene [hold a handful of pocket change in a hot sweaty hand. You know that metallic smell and taste - and definitely a taste - that is the sensation of about 0.1 part per million. Hey, I can also gauge the amount of chlorine by the color of the air … working hazmat in a chemical factory gives you mad survival skills if you want to explore Saturn.]
*I used to joke that work was actually the training program for surviving a Saturn exploration mission. I now know how fast I can get an airpack out of the wall case, check it, put it on and clear it while in a warehouse full of fumes. sigh
“Sorry I had to burn your scarf, but now we know that it was real silk!”
You pull out a thread. (The smell thing is true but really what you’re looking for is that it burns instead of melting, since you’re probably trying to figure out if it’s synthetic.)
This thread makes me realize that “almond” is one of those words that looks increasingly weird the more you see it.
I’ve never burn tested actual clothing but it’s helpful if you’re in one of those fabric warehouses that have great prices and terrible organization.
Sure; I’m not doubting that the test works. It’s just that I have no idea what burning feathers smells like. I guess I could go get some feathers and find out.