Can you really not smell vodka?

[FrostedPony]

@FrostedPony

No stereotyping intended, BUT… On the day after certain holidays, i.e. days when people might be imbibing in their chosen type of alcohol, I can actually smell the fumes from vodka. Don’t know whether the many, many Russians in my neighborhood have drunk enough of the stuff that it’s spraying from their pores or what. All I know is this – Vodka does, indeed, have a distinct, unmistakable odor; it is a chemical, after all.

:smack:

Of course, the more logical explanation is that there are some resourceful folks utilizing their homeland’s countryside custom of distilling moonshine vodka or samogon.

[Bob_Blaylock]

@Superhal

Because the alcohol smell is so strong, how can any other smell be distinguished?

@Swords_to_Plowshares

Pure alcohol does not have an odor. Rather, it has an anesthetizing effect on the nose, but that is a chemesthetic effect (in the same family as hot, cold, astringent, etc), not an olfactory one.

@glowacks

I find it hard to believe that alcohol has no odor. When I open a concentrated source of alcohol there is always something in the air that causes me to not enjoy the sensation coming from my nose. It may have an effect on the nose that makes it not technically an odor, but anything that causes your nose to relay information about the content of the air you breathed in sure sounds like an odor.

I do not have any vodka or other “drinking” alcohol in my home, but I do have a can of denatured ethanol. I just now opened it and took a sniff. It definitely produces a sensation in my nose, that I would call a smell or an odor. I suppose there’s room to argue that there is some technical difference between how it reacts with my nose, and how something that conforms to the strictest possible definition of a “smell” reacts with my nose, but any such difference is not at all apparent to me, and I would be very much inclined to dismiss any such claimed difference as irrelevant. As far as I am concerned, it is a smell.

I have to admit to a small possibility that what I am smelling is not the ethanol, but the denaturant, but on carefully examining the label, I see that the denaturant is methanol, another form of alcohol; so this is pure (or reasonably close to it) alcohol, just not pure ethanol.

I also have a bottle of pure isopropanol (“rubbing alcohol”, minus the water) and taking a sniff of it, I find that it also has a distinctive smell, different than the denatured ethanol.

[skdo23]

While I was growing up, my parents and most of my friends’ parents could easily pick up on it. Also, the ability to not only detect the scent of vodka, but also hone in on its exact source amongst a crowd of students seemed to be a prerequisite for serving as a dance chaperone at the middle school I attended.

ETA: It was technically possible to mask the smell with cigarettes. True, this was not without its own problems, but back then (early 1980s) it would have been considered the lesser of two evils.