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24 October 2005
What are your three favorite smells?→[More:]
warm fir needles
dark red Portland roses
freshly crushed garlic
It's hard to pick three; I could go on all day...
Damn, I forgot about fresh bread. That's a great one. I've heard of people that say when you're trying to sell your house it's a good idea to bake bread so your house feels more like an old fashioned house.
Self-noise--I was going to say that vaguely metallic smell in the air right before the snow falls.
cucumber
Deep Woods Off (reminds me of summer camp)
christmas trees
the smell of a cooking meatloaf (reminds me of my grandmother's house.)
Old Spice and Charlie (what my parents wore)
Old Bay seasoning
Drakar Noir (my first love wore it)
Pretty much everything that everyone else has said.
I especially love the smell of autumn evenings. I don't know what it is I'm smelling (wait, it's NYC - probably trash) but the fall has a very distinctive smell to me.
Newly-mown alfalfa
Basil
Garlic
Salt air
Frying bacon
Coffee roasting (and I don't even like coffee)
Good red wine
Used book stores
Roses
Science Girl's hair
Fresh bread (I spent two years baking and i still love that smell)
...I could go on for days. Life doesn't only enter through the eyes.
- donut shop: that lovely blend of fresh donuts and coffee
- Italian kitchen: garlic and tomato sauce and warmth
- burning leaves: practically defines fall for me, scentwise
Not the DeKalb L. We have Mexicans and Dominicans, and I never see anyone spit except on the tracks. It's garbage and urine and a special something else.
Gaspode, that's a good point about books. I love how new books smell, and old ones too. Have you ever noticed how you can smell the acid in paper? I like to guess how many years something has before it crumbles apart.
Slowly rotting books (the smell of research libraries)
Guy I like
Joss sticks
1 - the base of the neck of the woman I love (the Ta Chui point, in chakra-speak)
2 - clean laundry
3 - new books
also-rans (also-smelled?): carta d'armenia from the Farmacia di Santa Maria Novella, a special essence (I'm not telling which one) from Verde in Hampstead
Baking bread.
Clean dogs.
A mountain stream in the woods in summer.
Fall.
A mixture of diesel fuel and roasting chestnuts.
Christmas trees.
Pineapple sage.
Maybe it's because I'm a misanthropic weirdo, but this makes me think. Clearly it was an evolutionary advantage for baby's to smell good, so we'd like them, but what about the babies that didn't have this genetic advandage and didn't pass their genes on? What happened to them? WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM?!
although everything everyone else said sounds good too. jasmine comes in a close 4th i think.
also, lately i've been smelling this weird kind of fungal, dank smell when i walk through a certain part of campus. for some reason i really like it. it's kind of foresty.
Nitromethane
Burning rubber
High-octane gasoline
I second all these and add the smell of Methanol exhaust mixed with water from within a full-face helmet. Nothing like that to get my pulse racing and it just doesn't smell the same any other way.
Umm, babies smell OK too, I suppose. Especially when being fried with onions and mushrooms.
I can't smell. Well, I may emit odors, but I can't smell them. But I'll go out on a limb and say that quonsar, comic sans fonts, and baby mammals would probably smell lovely.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
