That’s the very stuff I was talking about, Caiata! I feel a sense of shared camaraderie with you. You poor, poor thing!
A disgrunted fired gas company employee left an opened canister of “that stuff they add to natural cooking gas to give it the smell” on the stairway of a mall. The stench was unbelievable.
Scientists - God bless 'em - are working hard on this very problem. They are coming up with all sorts of non-lethal crowd control methods including stinking them out.
One of the worst odors I ever smelled was some kind of dried/salted/lyed shark that a friend of mine brought back from Iceland (or was it Greenland).
He entered my house, and cracked the lid of a tupperware container. I swear the smell travelled faster than the light. And my reaction was instinctual and basic. Before I realized what I was doing, I had jumped up off the couch and yelled, “get that out of my house.”
Normally at this point, this guy would have then removed the lid and started waving it in my face, but I think my reaction was so immediate and genuine that he actually backed out of the house and closed the lid.
Here’s an article about smelles where a guy also talks about the DOD working on crowd-control smells.
http://www.elfmanworld.com/grossnugget.html
I also recall reading an article once (no cite) that indicated that “vomit” was the most universally appalling smell. They had people from different nationalities and cultural backgrounds reacting to smells. And vomit was apparently more unappealing than rotting flesh, and even poop.
I think the upshot was that repulsion is some kind of “learned behavior”.
The “stuff” is methyl mercaptan, which is one of the smelliest substances known. It is added to propane and natural gas, both of which are ororless in their “native” state, to give an ororous warning if the gas should leak. It is detectable in tiny concentrations (IIRC something in the order of 0.5 parts per billion, but could not find a reliable cite).
The nastiest smell I’ve come into contact with was a wafting from a vial of high-concentration butyric acid. My response was an involuntary urge to heave, so powerful I almost did exactly that; quite interesting in retrospect, but highly unpleasant in the moment. I think any coctail of olfactory evil should include some proportion of that foul substance.
That backs up what Trunk said, as butyric acid is found in… wait for it… vomit. And parmesan, which explains a lot. (I like parmesan, but it does smell a little like pavement pizza.)
To me it wasn’t all that bad. But, I would say that the oder that comes off of Islas Ballestas is pretty horrid.
I’m lactose intolerant. Give me a pint of whole milk and I’ll give you the worst smell you’ve ever experienced - bar none.
The whole association thing is really interesting. Butter and parmesan contain some of the same stuff as, well, puke, and this is what makes them “distinctive”. Limburger cheese smells like someone’s unwashed sweatsocks. The durian has all the olfactory charm of a juicy fart (tastes like heaven, smells like shit, so they say).
And yet these are delicacies. Go effin’ figure.
red fox urine.
i worked at kmart in high school. one of my coworkers stole a vial and spilled it near a heating vent at school. cleared the joint in minutes.
apparently it’s to hide your scent while hunting. sure, it’ll hide the human scent from whatever animal you’re trying to kill, but you’ll smell like piss times a million to everyone else.
plain old milk is great, too. in architecture school some of my friends had a vendetta against some younger student. so the day before summer vacation they took an empty glue bottle and filled it with milk, then put it in his locker. it smelled pretty horrible the once school started up again. the same guy opened one of those little oints of milk or whatever and stuck it under the recliner of his neighbor in the dorm. the guy was so lazy i don’t think he actually investigated the smell for weeks. not pretty.
i kept a gallom of milk outside all summer but never got up the nerve to use it for anything. it was all separated and green in the bottle. nasty.
Last time we did this, butyric acid was thrown around a lot. As for creating it, does buying a bottle of it count? 
Well, by me, actually, though from that thread it sounded as if cadaverine may be the single-mega-boss-stankiest malodorant around. I only cite butyric acid again because I’ve had the misfortune of getting a good whiff of the pure stuff.
Having said that, my gawd is that stuff awful. I still can’t get over how freakin’ bad some of the baddest compounds must be if they out-stink butyric acid. Can you imagine what would happen if somebody dropped a high-yield-and-potency malodorant stink bomb on, say, New York? Many of these compounds are very simple, chemically, and probably not a big deal to synthesize. It’s a little scary to think about. All the underground chemists are busy cooking up meth, but just a few mischievious dudes with PhD’s could probably foul up many square miles of city with unbearable funk if they put their minds to it.
I’m going to second **Colophon ** and LoopyDude: parmesan. Some jackasses in college decided it would be funny to place a nice big bowl of parmesan into the microwave in the cafeteria, crank it up to 10 minutes, and leave.
Aweful, aweful, aweful! And you can have your smell in 10 minutes, rather than the various time-intensive methods listed above.
My dad has to pick up all my dog’s poo! The results: a large bag up to the brim with dooky! Man, when I got a whiff of that… I wont tell you
Well, I figure zombies’d smell pretty rank.
The amusing subsection of a chemist’s blog, “Things I Won’t Work With,” divides roughly into two categories: Things that will kill you because they are highly reactive (see, e.g., chlorine trifluoride) and things that will drive you from not just the lab, not just the building, but the entire fucking campus because they are so malodorous. In that category, we have selenophenol (“Imagine 6 skunks wrapped in rubber innertubes and the whole thing is set ablaze. That might approach the metaphysical stench of this material.”), various isocyanides (“the Godzilla of scent”), thioacetone (“an offensive smell which spread rapidly over a great area of the town causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation”) and carbon diselenide (“the vapors had unfortunately escaped the laboratory and forced the evacuation of a nearby village”).
Bon appetit!
I should add that one of my formerly favorite talk radio hosts (and in some part, the reason I went to law school), Lionel, did a show on “The Worst Thing You’ve Ever Smelled” before he… well, kinda lost what made me dig him in the first place. The most memorable example from that bit of radio was a mare with some sort of vaginal cancer–could knock you down from across the pasture, apparently.
Dog shit to smells like … dog shit. Sometimes I get it on my hand while picking it up with a bag. Human shit smells like …, you get the idea. Perhaps enormous swaths would be different.
The worst I-have-to-run-or-I’ll-puke experience I’ve had was in a building with many pig pens.
I think they have pig-shit lakes in some states that are attracting legal attacks because of their smell that travels for miles.
Clean this mess up or we’ll all end up in jail!
I can’t be the only one who kinda likes skunk smell. Now, mind you, I don’t want to be sprayed, but a whiff of skunk in the air is oddly pleasant to me.