I don’t know about other smells, but stainless steel (either some "silver"ware or even the sides of a stainless steel sink) under running water does remove garlic - but NOT onion. So it isn’t every smell. (and I think the abrasion idea is bogus - try a scouring pad, with or without soap, on garlicy hands and it won’t work nearly as well as the smooth side of the stainless sink.)
Fishhead
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
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Can stainless steel and running water remove the smell of garlic? (18-Jun-1999)
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I was on the way back to post the link and you beat me to it. You’re pretty fast on the draw!
Fishhead
Another thing I’ve noticed about stainless steel:
I have gone through a series of stainless steel thermoses, because I keep coffee with cream in them. Unless I carefully rinse the thermos out every day, the stainless steel lining acquires the horrible smell of sour milk. Do this a couple times, and the smell becomes so bad that it contaminates new coffee!
I have tried everything to get the damn smell out, from industrial cleaners to baking powder solutions to lemon juice, and stored thermoses open to the air for months, but once the stench is in there, the thermos has to be retired.
This seems to be a property peculiar to stainless steel, and I can’t help wondering if it’s related to stainless steel’s beneficial scent-absorbing uses.
Don’t mind me if I clank when I walk. My new odor-eaters are stainless!
I cook with a lot of garlic, so my hands have smelled of it more often than not for the past 15 years. I’ve also had a stainless steel sink all that time, but I never considered rubbing my hands on it to clean them. I’ll be trying this technique tonight or tomorrow.
As any self respecting Italian American should know-after using garlic, onions, or other “Smelly” substances, do the tomatoes. The acid in the tomatoes will remove the smell. This is verified by years of experience at home and in restaurants, as well as an old episode of the Partridge Family.
So, the extra money I spent on the ionizer in my air filtration system was wasted?
I don’t know offhand what the chemical potentials of the (likely) sulfur-containing species are, but this sounds a lot like it might be a spontaneous reduction/oxidation reaction. Iron and nickel sulfates are both very stable (heat of formation < -210 kcal/mol at 25 deg C), and water is a great reagent for chemical reactions. Iron (-23 kcal/mol) and nickel (-20 kcal/mol) sulfides are somewhat less stable.
We’d need to know what the heats and entropies of formation are for both reactants and products to know for sure, but my guess is that the volatile sulfur compounds are reacting with the iron/nickel in the steel and fixing the sulfur, making them inoffensive. If the stainless steel is discolored (by garlic, maybe?), this would be a clue…
I crush garlic all the time with the side of a stainless steel cleaver (it’s quicker and easier and less cleanup than a garlic press). There has been no visible staining of the stainless. (I guess that’s why they call it stainless.) I think the redox answer is closely related to and as good as Cecil’s ionization answer - both bateando as they say in spanish. But I don’t have any answer that’s any better.
Also - anybody got a good way to get rid of fish smell on the hands? and don’t say lemons or tomato juice. I’ve been there, and while they may help some, you still don’t want to go out on a date after handling fish all day. (I’m not sure if the stainless treatment helps for fish smell or not - I’ve tried it, and I’m not sure if there was a positive effect or not. It certainly didn’t remove nearly all the smell, like it does for garlic.)
Fishhead
As regards “fish smell,” I don’t know. Lemon covers it up well, though.
Complicating the above answers, I forgot to mention, is that there are several different compositions of “stainless steel,” all of which have different contents of different alloys.
Missed the tail end of that, ‘and don’t say…’
UFMike: lemons? The obvious solution to Fishhead’s fishy predicament is a liberal use of tomato juice.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading the column yesterday and I’m annoyed Cecil didn’t investigate further because it’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time. Williams-Sonoma began, years ago, selling little soap-bar sized chunks of stainless steel for removing garlic odor. I’ve always just rubbed my hands on the faucet and gotten good results.
My guess has always been that somehow the stainless steel was able to remove or neutralize the oil the garlic leaves behind on your hands. This led me to wonder if it would remove the hot pepper residue from hands as well – a problem well-documented on these boards. 
I’m also wondering what it is in peppers that causes them to leave behind their firey hotness, and why is it that soap is unable to scrub it off. And say, just how does soap work anyway? On smells, I mean, not dirt.
The things this board gets me to ponderin.’
Talk to Adria about that. You may end up with a garlic sink.
I’ve crushed plenty of garlic with my cleaver and it has no residual garlic smell after normal washing. BTW - this has a wooden handle, so I don’t put it in the dishwasher. Otherwise, the bleach in dishwasher detergent might explain the lack of UFMike’s stain. But if I was Adria I would try bleach anyway.
I’ve tried the garlic stainless steel experiment and was amazed at the results. However, I did seem to notice that the odor of garlic returned to my hands several minutes later! I concluded that the smell neutralizing capability of the stainless was only a temporary phenomenon. I dunno if anyone else has experienced this.
Re the fish issue… Having cleaned many a fish, I always washed my hands with ordinary soap and a dash of salt and that always did the trick. I suppose some Lava soap with pumice would’ve done as well, but this is the poor man’s solution.
With regards to fish and hot peppers: when the smelly and/or burning substances are oils, you need more oil to dissolve them, and THEN use soap. This is something well known to women that use a lot of makeup- you need to use a seperate cleanser to dissolve the oil or titanium dioxide stickyness in the makeup, and then soap can clean off that cleanser. This is also why milk and sour cream (and avocados) will cut the heat from peppers (the fat does it), but other drinks don’t as well. Whole milk works better than skim.
So, you can try hand lotion, olive oil, cold cream… these things may end up working pretty well on quite a range of substances.
This of course has nothing to do with stainless. I think the sulphur argument is a good one- it’s just so surprising when you keep in mind that one of the reasons it’s “stainless” steel is that it isn’t supposed to be reactive. I also argue against the abrasiveness argument.
I think the tomatoes/tomato juice gets smells off because it’s so unbelievably caustic and probably strips off a couple of layers of skin. I used to work in a kitchen for a while, and after working with the tomatoes for about a week, I developed really awful dry/cracked/peeling/tough hands. Disgusting. Remember to rinse after the tomatoes! Noone told me that at the time.
My *Favorite* comment in that column is that ionization explanations are usually bunk- made me laugh out loud :). SO true. As a side note, ionizers in "air purifiers" make ozone- a pretty strong lung irritant, even more so if you have asthma. This is why they are illegal and Canada and it's a crime they aren't illegal here too. If you have an ionizer in your air cleaner, turn it off! Not only are they bunk, but harmful bunk! Worse than just bunk bunk! (Okay, it's late.. ;) ) -jWhile the chemists and metallurgists pull their hair over exactly why stainless steel often helps to destink your hands, I pondered whether it might be aided by a residue of something else ON the stainless. When you clean your sink (or your Nonion bar,) you leave a thin residue of cleaner on the steel. Perhaps this gets caught up in the reaction between the steel and the stink. The same, I suppose, goes for dish detergent.
I can’t delve any deeper into it, myself. Al Kaline is in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and that’s about all I know about chemistry.
–Nott