# Creating the nastiest possible smell. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 6, 2005, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316 "2005-01-06T00:48:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![KidCharlemagne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ed8c4c/32.png) [@KidCharlemagne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KidCharlemagne)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/1 "2005-01-06T00:48:39Z")
Ok, so this it’s morbid and odd but I want to create the nastiest smell possible. I’ve always been curious as to how bad the smells are that can make people reflex vomit. I would imagine the worst smells are a result of anaerobic putrefaction. I have smelled meat that was nearly liquified from putrefaction and while it was nasty, it wasn’t completely intolerable. Anyone know how i can create such a smell in a glass jar or something? Also, is rotting human flesh any worse than, say, rotting bovine flesh? ---
**Author:** ![Cat\_Fight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/90ced4/32.png) [@Cat\_Fight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cat_Fight)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/2 "2005-01-06T01:20:48Z")
Ask and ye shall [receive](http://www.viceland.com/issues/v11n11/htdocs/gross_jar.php) . With pics. It seems the boys and girls over at Vice think a lot like you do. This year, their “Gross Jar” contains > [@](#): > > 1 small whole raw chicken, ripped into pieces > 1 pint skim milk > 5 facial scabs from the editor’s mysterious cheek lacerations from when he blacked out last week > 1 good mouthful of flu spit from the office manager > 1 cup chicken blood > 1 really long piss from aforementioned editor > 3 eggs, two cracked and one left whole in the bottom Mmmm, flu spit. ---
**Author:** ![Trailer\_Park\_Casanova](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8baadc/32.png) [@Trailer\_Park\_Casanova](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trailer_Park_Casanova)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/3 "2005-01-06T01:46:29Z")
Guiness Book of World records used to list a recipe for what you mention. Damfino if they still do, but I remember it was tuff to even read the recipe. ---
**Author:** ![spingears](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@spingears](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spingears)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/4 "2005-01-06T01:49:46Z")
KidCharlemagne: Find a case of gangrene to take a sniff of! Fill a jar with all of the rot you mentioned then get some gangrene bacteria to inoculate the jar with and put it in a warm place. Reminds me of the little brown shack out back. ---
**Author:** ![spingears](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@spingears](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spingears)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/5 "2005-01-06T01:51:00Z")
KidCharlemagne: Find a case of gangrene to take a sniff of! Fill a jar with all of the rot you mentioned then get some gangrene bacteria to inoculate the jar with and put it in a warm place. * * * Reminds me of the little brown shack out back. ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/6 "2005-01-06T01:56:04Z")
The Atkins Diet Dinner of fat, meat, beans, and broccoli, topped off with a sugar-alcohol-laced bowl of low-carb ice cream is a highly effective way to generate noxious odors. Don’t try this on a work night. The effects can be quite long-lasting, and your cow-irkers will plot against you if they find out who was responsible. ---
**Author:** ![racer72](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/racer72/32/3075_2.png) [@racer72](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/racer72)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/7 "2005-01-06T02:10:57Z")
Most sporting good stores that have hunting supplies will have deer rut lure. A quick sniff of an open bottle gave me the dry heaves. Kimchi smells pretty bad too. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/8 "2005-01-06T03:24:51Z")
What about skunk spray? ---
**Author:** ![Civil\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d78d45/32.png) [@Civil\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Civil_Guy)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/9 "2005-01-06T03:31:46Z")
I don’t know what there was about it, but I gotta say that the time I came closest to puking was having to clean out some opposum poop from my sister’s garage. Well, okay, those others are probably better answers - though I’m glad I can’t say from personal experience. ---
**Author:** ![Roland\_Deschain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/73ab20/32.png) [@Roland\_Deschain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roland_Deschain)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/10 "2005-01-06T03:40:25Z")
Well, I can’t tell you an exact recipe, but you can bet that what ever it is will probably contain Sulfur, or Sulfur like molecules. Sulfer and it’s many associations with the carbon atom give some of the most disgusting smells around. It raises the question of why we are evolved to be so “averse” to these smells. I suspect that it has something to do with avoiding disease (by avoiding areas full of dead bodies one is perhaps less likely to get dysentary, cholera, and other maladies which would likely remove one from the gene pool). ---
**Author:** ![Roches](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bc8723/32.png) [@Roches](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roches)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/11 "2005-01-06T04:19:28Z")
It seems that the nastiest possible smells are actually mixtures of multiple nasty-smelling compounds. The Guinness entry, IIRC, was for ‘bathroom malodor’, which is apparently a mixture of chemicals resembling various disgusting odors such as feces and rotting meat. There are a few chemicals which have an extremely powerful bad smell even in tiny concentrations. When trithioacetone (a six-membered ring with sulfur atoms in the 1, 3, and 5-positions and two methyl groups at the 2, 4, and 6-positions) is heated, it produces an astonishingly bad smell, rather than the desired product, thioacetone (CH[sub]3[/sub]-C=S-CH[sub]3[/sub]), which would also likely smell bad. Two anecdotes about attempts to produce thioacetone from trithioacetone (from Clayden et al., _Organic Chemistry_, p. 4): in 1899, the city of Freiburg was evacuated when most of the town was affected by a stench that caused fainting and vomiting. In 1967, a group of chemists at an Esso facility near Oxford tried to repeat the experiment. They performed the experiment in a closed, ventilated system, and so were unaware that an offensive odor was spreading outside the lab. They apparently couldn’t detect the odor on themselves, but a waitress at a restaurant sprayed them with deodorant later that day. To prove that the smell was indeed unbearable, their colleagues tried placing a single drop of the suspected offensive chemical on a piece of glass in a fume hood in the lab where the incident occurred, and the chemists who had been originally responsible were able to smell the stench up to a quarter mile away. The chemical produced by cracking trithioacetone is probably the strongest and most potent bad smell resulting from a single chemical. It’s not actually thioacetone; it is thought to be either propane dithiol (CH[sub]3[/sub]-C(SH)[sub]2[/sub]-CH[sub]3[/sub]) or 4-methyl-4-sulfanylpentan-2-one (CH[sub]3[/sub]-C(CH[sub]3[/sub])(SH)-CH[sub]2[/sub]-C=O-CH[sub]3[/sub]). One more thing: the chemicals actually responsible for the smell of rotting flesh aren’t sulfur compounds, but amines (nitrogen compounds). You can read about them on [this page](http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm) – go down to putrescine. These compounds, obviously, smell bad because they are a warning sign of rotten food that may cause illness. The odors of skunk and rotting eggs are both sulfur compounds, though, and the artificial sulfur-containing nasty smells described above probably activate the receptors for these natural offensive odors. ---
**Author:** ![Jurph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/50afbb/32.png) [@Jurph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jurph)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/12 "2005-01-06T04:44:36Z")
I found a smell that actually made me dizzy as well as nauseous; I was trying to grow “rare” molds in one of the old LiveSavers brand “Holes” canisters (a small clear plastic tube, mostly airtight). I skipped brushing my teeth for two days, then very roughly chewed up a handful of peanuts. A small sample of these – the wet peanut crunches – went into the case with a few drops of tap water, which went under the bathroom sink for several weeks. The idea was that pretty much everything living in my mouth would have a chance to duke it out on the peanuts, and whatever was toughest would survive and grow. When I got impatient and finally checked on it (probably not more than a week later, actually!) the container was full of dark grey-green mold. I popped the top, took a whiff, and almost yorked all over the place. So, even if you’re going to use other foul foods, go ahead and throw in some ground-up peanuts, and get everyone in the office to forego brushing one morning and come in to spit in the jar. It’s also possible to collect farts by laying in a bathtub of hot water and collecting the bubbles. For some reason, bubbling them through water makes them smell _much much_ more potent. ---
**Author:** ![Silver\_Serpentine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3be4f8/32.png) [@Silver\_Serpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silver_Serpentine)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/13 "2005-01-06T05:17:17Z")
I was watching the Mythbusters about skunk spray, and they said the spray is mostly made up of thiols. IIRC, thiols are the chemicals that make things like poop and rotting stink so bad, and the human nose is really sensitive to them - we can smell something like 10 parts per billion. I can find cites for skunk spray containing thiols, but nothing on what else thiols are in, just a bunch of scientific stuff about them. Anyone have anything about the stench factor? [Two of the thiols are responsible for the strongly repellent odor of the secretion, (E )-2-butene-1-thiol and 3-methyl-1-butanethiol.](http://www.humboldt.edu/~wfw2/chemofskunkspray.html) Anyway, I figure that would do the job. Liquid stench. ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/14 "2005-01-06T05:36:23Z")
Kitten poop. Kitten poop is notoriously stinky. I could send you some of Maggie’s uh, “samples.” That little bugger could clear out an entire stadium with some of her farts. ---
**Author:** ![Duckster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duckster/32/1244_2.png) [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/15 "2005-01-06T06:13:36Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > Kitten poop. Kitten poop is notoriously stinky. I could send you some of Maggie’s uh, “samples.” That little bugger could clear out an entire stadium with some of her farts. I second and third this. Our two little cherubs can individually render our place unfit for all life in a matter of seconds. On the Gag A Maggot scale, each rates a perfect 10. ---
**Author:** ![Trigonal\_Planar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/0ea827/32.png) [@Trigonal\_Planar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trigonal_Planar)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 6:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/16 "2005-01-06T06:41:02Z")
Penguin guano is also horribly offensive. Not sure if anyone can back me up on that one! ---
**Author:** ![akifani](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7ba0ec/32.png) [@akifani](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/akifani)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 6:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/17 "2005-01-06T06:51:19Z")
I do believe Putrescine (previously mentionned by Roche) is , in it’s pure state, the nastiest smelling substance for humans. But you need a lab and some chemistry knowledge to make it. I don’t recommend trying. ---
**Author:** ![curly\_chick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7ba0ec/32.png) [@curly\_chick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curly_chick)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 11:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/18 "2005-01-06T11:12:23Z")
Fresh durian is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had the misfortune to smell outside of the lab. Inside the lab, I have to say that the during research into the odours produced by cooking the meat from uncastrated pig was indescribably diabolical to me. But on the plus side, not everyone has the genetic misfortune to be able to smell it. ---
**Author:** ![Caiata](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e56c9b/32.png) [@Caiata](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Caiata)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/19 "2005-01-06T12:58:50Z")
> [@Silver Serpentine](#): > > IIRC, thiols are the chemicals that make things like poop and rotting stink so bad In organic chemistry class last year, on the first day of aromatics study, our teacher passed around 4 unlabelled bottles of powdered aromatic compounds for us to try. Being the overachiever I was sitting in the front of the class, so I got them first. The first one was vanillin, the second was cinnamic acid, the third was whatever is responsible for wintergreen (eugenol?). By the time I got to the fourth I was excited to take a big whiff of whatever wonderful smell resided therein. The bottle contained [skatole](http://www.flavornet.org/info/83-34-1.html), which smelled all the world like 10 tonnes of crap condensed into 5 grams of powder. I nearly vomited. My teacher found this indescribably funny. What’s worse, I was chewing gum at the time, and there was no convenient way to get rid of it, so I was left with the lingering aftertaste of poo in my mouth. _shudder_ Forget thiols, I don’t like amines! ---
**Author:** ![mks57](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@mks57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mks57)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2005, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316/20 "2005-01-06T13:06:37Z")
Many years ago, I read a book that recommended Butyl Mercaptan as an ingredient for stink bombs. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creating-the-nastiest-possible-smell/283316.md?page=2)