Is it just me, or does anybody else sometimes notice that the faint smell of one substance sometimes smells like some other completely different substance, that doesn’t even have a similar smell?
Example: I made coffee this morning, and when the first faint whiff came into my den where I was, at first it smelled to me like the sulfurous lighting of a match. When I walked toward the kitchen to get the coffee, the smell got a bit stronger, and reminded me of tuna fish. When it got strong enough, it asserted itself as coffee smell.
They were painting the women’s room at work the other day, and as I walked by to go to the one on the other floor, the paint smelled like hot lettuce – the way lettuce smells on a Big Mac or something. That was a little weird. Both that it would smell that way and that I would identify it as “hot lettuce.”
I was messing around with the cardboard tube from a roll of foil today, and it smelled like feet. But that was close up, so I don’t think it would count as much.
I could see from the preview that you were using coffee as an example, and I just knew you were going to mention tuna fish. I always smell the same thing.
It’s odd, isn’t it. I suspect there’s some kind of smell component that the two share, that is normally overpowered by other smell components when the full smell is present.
A little bit of Hydrogen Sulfide (from 2 ppb to 150 ppm) smells like rotten eggs. More Hydrogen Sulfide doesn’t smell like anything because it will overwhelm the olfactory nerve. Even more Hydrogen Sulfide and you won’t ever smell anything again, because you’ll be dead. In fact concentrations higher than 800 ppm will cause sudden death. The HS works similiarly to Hydrogen Cyanide. It forms a complex bond to iron in mitochondrial cytochromes, thereby arresting aerobic metabolism in an effect similar to cyanide toxicity.
Seriously though: form personal experience working in a Chem lab, I can tell you that low concentrations of Hydrogen Arsenide smell like garlic. Once you start smelling that, you better get your butt out of there, because it is very poisonous, and will kill you by causing hemolysis, leading to kidney failure, jaundice and ultimately death.
I concur with the Doritos/smelly socks or feet, and also with the Mexican seasoning a bit like BO. I think it’s the cumin in the latter, but who knows?
Which is why I don’t altogether mind the smell of my own BO.[/spoiler]
And here’s a bit more TMI.
When I eat sunflower seeds, I put the shells in a bag. The saliva and shells together smell like — TMI ahead:
Period blood.
Parmesan cheese smells like vomit. I remember once sitting in my school cafeteria near the pizza place, thinking I smelled vomit and thinking about how bad it smelled. But then I realised it was parmesan cheese, and my whole mindset shifted and then I was thinking about how good it smelled. Funny how that happens.
Water based paint smells like dough on the first few smells to me.
Last night I made a bag of microwave popcorn and it smelled just like rotten potatoes while it was cooking. When I opened the bag it went back to the normal smell.
