I enjoy plants whose foliage and flowers have scents that most people find loathsome.
Example: the succulent genus Stapelia has large, often decorative flowers that typically smell of rotting meat or fish, the better to attract pollinating flies.
I am not alone in this, as people have been known to congregate in celebration when such plants bloom.
I used to grow a garden perennial in the genus Gynura, whose flowers smelled of used sweatsocks. Alas, it is not hardy for me in my current location, so I have to make do with an only mildly malodorous Amorphophallus.
I also like plants whose blooms have powerful sweet/spicy scents, which the fainting-on-my-divan types think are “too strong”.
Mmmmm…90wt. Every now and then I like to rearrange the garage and accidentally knock over a transmission (leftover from some project or other). In righting it, I move in slow motion to give the gear oil a little time to spill out. I’m a sick, sick guy. And another vote for diesel exhaust for the memories links to.
Curiously, the interior of 70-80s Toyotas. Not the decades of stale french fries and butt sweat, which you can get in any car, but it’s more like the smell of decomposing plastics and interior linings they used at that time.
Bromine; is that what that smell is? I adore that smell, specifically because of theme park rides. There was a stretch of road near my house growing up where you could smell it - pipe works or something, I’d assumed - and I wished it lasted longer.
Nail polish has always smelled good to me, though I’ve been around people who can’t stand it.
Dairy Farm Scent. Cow manure mixed with spoiled milk, as someone mentioned above, with a bit of sweet alfalfa. Reminds me of vacations to my cousins’ dairy farm when I was younger - some of the best memories of my childhood.
Also vinegar, especially warm vinegar - the scent reminds me of dyeing Easter eggs as a child.
Thought I was the only one - but I kind of like a light scent of skunk. Not freshly sprayed on my dog though. Then it’s so strong it doesn’t even smell like skunk!
Horse barn
Gas
Like others - I hate cigarette smoke except for the first 2 seconds after one is lit.
Dog feet
Dog ears
I spen t my life as a mechanic and all too many times I had spilled gear oil on my clothes, the smell would stay with me sometimes for two days. I got to where I hated the smell. I love the smell of a freshly overhauled engine being started for the first time as it burns off the oil residue from the over haul.
Count me in on cigarette smoke and skunk-from-afar. I also love the smell of nail-polish remover.
Ones that I don’t think have been said: The exhaust of a Go-Kart or small engine vehicle of that nature (the cars at Tomorrowland Speedway do the same). Freshly laid blacktop, like that of a parking lot. I love driving by newly paved parking lots that have been baking in the Florida sun for hours!
Fresh hot asphalt as it’s being laid down on a road.
I usually hear from former smokers that they are repulsed by the smell of cigerette smoke. It’s been over 15 years since I quit but I still don’t mind it. Stale smoke on clothes is awful.
This, from my Brown Bess. Lots of kids ask me at events how I can handle that smell. I smile and tell them it reminds me of being on the field blasting away! To me it’s a wonderful smell.
Also manure on fields in the spring. Smells like things about to grow.
Not only do I like the smell of John Mace’s farts, I like my own. Those of others, not so much.
Yes! I love the smell of the beach at low tide. Especially mudflats. In fact, the first raw oysters I ever ate tasted to me exactly like the mudflats smell. I was in heaven. Other oysters I’ve tasted since haven’t been the same. Wish I knew where in Puget Sound those first ones had been harvested.
I thought of another one.
The scent of my 2nd Ex-husband’s underarm perspiration. It was like perfume to me, weird. 1st Ex-husband’s natural smell was not at all pleasant.
My granddaughter likes the smell of skunk, and not necessarily at a distance.
When I was in college and dating the young lady who eventually took mercy on me and agreed to marry me, we would often visit her cousins, who lived about a quarter-mile from a Budweiser brewery in Van Nuys, California. Before my first visit, she and her cousins went on and on about how their neighborhood stunk so badly. The first time I visited, I absolutely snarfed up the aroma of the brewery. It reminded me of something I smelled a lot when I was growing up in Taiwan. One day, I mentioned it to my brother, and he told me that there had been a brewery in the same area where I was born and lived for 2 years. Later, he drove by the brewery in LA and called me to tell me it was just about the same smell as the one in Taiwan. I loved that smell.