Best: Vanilla pipe tobacco that my grandfather used to smoke
Worst: spoiled milk (still in the container) that has been sitting at room temperature for a couple of weeks
Memory inducing: the smell of a freshly mown lawn always takes me back to my childhood–it especially makes me think of playing youth soccer and Little League baseball.
Best: Turkey cooking
Worst: Litter box after Wilson has been in there
Memory: Smell an outboard motor on a small boat puts out (diesel? gas? I dunno what it is). I’m about 10 and we are going out onto Lake Sebago for a ride. I’m so happy.
Best: Jet exhaust - I love to travel, and the moment when you first step out on the tarmac and smell the planes is wonderful. Stupid jetbridges spoil all the fun.
Worst: Hmm, dunno, there are many smells I don’t care for, but it’s hard to single out any particularly bad one.
Memories: Warm towels fresh from the dryer - that smell takes me back to days spent at my grandma’s house as a child. Whenever I took a bath, she’d put a fresh towel on the radiator, and it was incredibly snuggly and smelt awesome.
Best: Kentucky fried chicken just when you take the lid off the bucket. OK, so I’m a lowbrow. So sue me.
Worst: Salmon after it’s been in a freezer that you discovered had failed about a month ago. That’s gotta be the all time worst.
Memory: A restaurant in Houston TX when they brought out some rolls just out of the oven. If I ever smell anything like that it takes me instantly back there. The thing is, this was in 1936, and I still remember it vividly, even to what the waiter looked like. Good Lord, that was 76 years ago.
Best: Young woman’s vagina in college.
Worst: burning something, plastics perhaps
Memory: that young woman
Best: Baking cookies or bread
Worst: Dead body after a week in an apartment
Memory: Chapstick. Takes me back to being 9 years old, sledding & playing in the snow in Indiana - instantly!
Best smell: my favorite perfume (Joy)
Worst smell: my first dead body back during my reporter days. the body wasn’t found for five days during 90-plus-degree-heat.
Best: Baking bread, good leather, vanilla, chocolate, clean cat, barbecuing meat, coffee (though I hate drinking it)
Worst: Pig farm (friend in college was an ag major), paper factory (childhood field trip), cat poop, dead possum that crawled under my mom’s car and died while she was away for 2 weeks
Memory inducing: Barbecuing steak (my dad used to barbecue steak nearly every weekend when I was a kid–still the best I’ve ever had), Christmas tree/pine, roasting turkey (reminds me of hanging around my house on Thanksgiving as a kid while my mom cooked), diesel (reminds me of Disneyland), violets (reminds me of my mom)
Best: Vicks Vaporub
Worst: Boiled goats head (or what ever the bloody hell my neighbours across the hall cook)
Memory: Raspberry cider that my great-grandma used to make. It smells like happy.
Best - petrichor (the smell outside after a good rain, like earth and worms and rain)
Worst - I can’t break this tie. 1a) The corny-scented air outside the ethanol plant at my old college. 1b) Musty Drakkar Noir. Every time my manager walks behind my chair, it surrounds him like Pigpen’s cloud. I won’t be surprised when that odor attains sentience. I only hope it strangles him before it gets to me.
Most memorable - Lilacs. We had bushes in my backyard growing up, and I miss them.
Best - the smell of sagebrush after that first warm spring rain.
Worst - a dumped rainbarrel that had several dead baby possums rotting inside…blargh!
Memory - childhood house in Southern California, surrounded by orange blossoms in the spring.
I hate to do this to my husband and children, but I must add another “best” smell. I just spent a good 10 minutes with my face buried in a packet of Penzey’s Vietnamese Cinnamon. Oh, my God, that is the best cinnamon I’ve ever smelled in my entire life.
I gave it one whiff and chucked my other cinnamon. Oh, it’s wonderful.
Best: Garlic, anything with yeast cooking and my old lady.
Worst: Peaches, nasty, stinky disgusting evil fruit.
Memorable: rotten fishy salty stinky seashore and 2 stroke outboard exhaust, 2 stroke exhaust smells extra good with the back ground of rotten fish and filtered through water.
Best: my husband’s cheap aftershave, which smells incredibly delicious, sort of like lilacs and salt. Also the smell of cake made with almond meal and brandy while it bakes.
Worst: dissection room
Memories: the buttered-popcorn-jelly-bean smell of Pampers diapers from my daughter’s newborn days; the Irish-Spring-and-cornflakes smell of my grandmother’s house; the cafe mocha and paper smell of my favorite book store.