I remember the smell from Rexall and Revco drugstores when I was a kid in the 1960s, and I also recall it was similar to the smell of One-A-Day multivitamins, which had a distinct smell.
I think you’re onto something here.
I interned in a compounding pharmacy about the same time as the OP was posted. It was a trade-only shop filling for local drug stores and the county jail (lots of stool softeners for the guys in confinement). The place smelled faintly of carbolic acid disinfectant.
Lifebuoy is a mild carbolic soap. The pine and coal tar soaps now in vogue are too, as pine and coal contains phenol, the source of carbolic acid. A nasty trivia point: Dr. Mengle used phenol to euthanize children after subjecting them to experimentation.
This thread reminded me of my days working in the chemical stockroom at a Big Pharma when I was many years younger.
We had a certain number of stock reagents (things like distilled water, silica gel, and HCl solutions), and then we had about 10,000 bottles of every organic chemical the chemists had ever ordered on the shelves.
It worked like this: if Joe ordered 100ml of 1,2,3,4 hexamethylwhatever, he would use whatever he needed, and one day he would seal it with waxy Parafilm and give it to us. We would assign a stock number, type up a catalogue card, and put it on the shelf among thousands of other similar bottles.
The smell was indescribable.
To add a nice base for the mélange of weird chemicals, we stocked diethyl ether in a refrigerator, and even though that was in sealed tins, the aroma somehow escaped.
My liver still tickles when I think about those daysl