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05 August 2009
Common smells that annoy you. This is quite random, but besides things like "farts" and "acetone" what odors are like olfactory nails on a chalkboard for you?→[More:]
Ha, mrmoonpie. I loathe the smell (and texture, but not the taste) of real bananas but LOVE the artificial stuff. What a weirdo.
But I hate the smell of artificial cherry flavouring. Also, almond flavouring. They smell the same to me, and they both smell gross. Even though I love cherries and almonds.
I can't STAND the scent of freshly cut grass. I don't know if I'm like allergic to chlorophyll or what, but it's like the blades of grass are screaming in agony. Up my nose.
yes, ANYthing with that scent, which bizarrely includes a lot of feminine hygeine products like pads and tampons that someone imagines needing to be scented. Ugh!
Old Spice. My dad used to wear it. One whiff of the stuff and I'm right back in the terror.
Also coconut. I'm allergic to it and, thankfully, I'm usually able to detect it at once, both in cosmetics and food. Just standing near someone wearing coconut oil is enough to make me heave. I have to breathe through my mouth until I'm away from them.
The smell of spit. Even my own. There's a certain act (ahem) that requires covering something in saliva and then repeatedly putting it in your mouth and while I love doing it, I always have the "I HAD NO IDEA SPIT SMELLED LIKE THAT" moment.
Almost all perfumes and colognes. The smell itself usually isn't a bother, but it seems like the Venn diagram of people who wear them and people who wear an appropriate amount of them has very little overlap.
Yes, SpiffyRob, I know what you mean about colognes/perfumes and their wearers. I'm often surprised, working in a scent-free environment, how many people just...well IGNORE this policy. Including our CEO, who had to sign off on the policy.
Totally weird timing: I just wrote my manager an email about how when people apply nail polish and perfume and mist everything with air fresheners, I get a big honking headache and feel like puking my guts out, and is there any way we could send out some sort of common sense email like "Apply your nail polish and perfume at home like normal people do and don't use an entire can of air freshener because you just ate curry at your desk."
Pretty much everything you guys have said: coconut, fake cherry, almond, and banana.
The worst to me is cat pee and cat poop. If I even get a vague whiff in someone's apt or house I will make a quick excuse to leave. It makes me so nauseated!
Cigar smoke is also bad. The residual smell on someone who has just smoked cigarettes is gross but I can handle the smell of the smoke while it is happening. Pipe smoke, however, smells good to me.
The smell of most alcohols, especially dark rum, puts me off. I think that one's genetic because my dad dislikes it even more than I do.
Not raw tuna, not properly cooked tuna, but the canned stuff right out of the can?
Bleeeeeech. I can smell it a mile away and it makes my stomach turn. Someone once taunted me for this and held a can right under my nose. I threw up. They didn't do that again. Uck, just thinking about it makes me ill.
Also, to a much lesser degree, milk (it all smells rotten to me) and eggs if they haven't been heavily disguised.
Oddly enough, while I know body odor and garlic have distinct smells, they don't really bother me.
Or as my mom would explain our general familial revulsion of fish: "We're forest people. not coast people."
Ivory soap; department stores like Macy's, generally near the perfume/skin cream sections. Don't care for really strong fish smells.
Some people have a funny smell; it's not BO or being unwashed, some people just smell a certain way all the time, and some can be unpleasant. Evolution at work, perhaps?
Most of what's already been posted: cigarette & cigar smoke (pipe smoke is usually ok), almond scented stuff, diesel fumes, sweat, most cleaning products, fake freesia scent, fake magnolia scent.
Eucalyptus. Out here there are a lot of eucalyptus groves, and my brain always interprets the smell as "sweaty men." Not the yay pheromones kind of sweat, but something more unwashed and acrid. It's pretty gross.
Tuna. Any shape, form, or whatever. Ugh. My roommate in college LOVED it and eventually just started eating it outside because I would smell it in the hallway trash cans and it just made me feel so ill.
Most scents I don't have any problem with. I love the smell of most solvents, strangely enough. Especially the -tones.
Aqua Velva. There's an old guy in my workplace who apparently got a gift pack for Christmas. I was so thankful in May when the bottle apparently ran dry.
Oil based paint or stain give me migraines. Fresh asphalt. Dog shit on my shoes. Curry. All cologne & perfume unless very lightly applied. Jet fuel fumes.
I like acetone. For me, it means "yay! clean glassware!"
Bad smells-
The smell that results when the people who rent out the upstairs part of my grandmother's house don't use enough water to wash down their um..waste, and the fumes start to waft from the downstairs grate.
Also, yeah, most of the artificial flavors and scents that just smell like chemicals. I hate Febreeze. I do like the smell of some of the LUSH and Bath & Body Works stuff.
Ooh, canned tuna for me too.
Other people's BO/farts/bathroom smells. I don't really like mine, but I don't mind them as much.
Mosquito coils, partly because I can almost feel my DNA mutating as I inhale the smoke.
Well, there are some notably awful smells that aren't necessarily *common* but which I frequently encounter in my town. E.g., low-tide stink (decaying seaweed + dead fish + mucky mudflat eeuuwww); and the local mushroom farm (ostensibly redolent of well-rotted manure, but manure smells like celestial rosepetals in comparison); and paper mills (the source, I believe, of the notorious Tacoma Aroma).
Not in the bottle, to my knowledge, but definitely if it's smeared on a plate that's been left sitting unwashed in a sink for several days. (Old communal living memories die hard.)
Oh, of course, I forgot shopping malls. There are dozens of horrible smells there. Hair salons in malls seem to smell worse than ones on the street, I think maybe all the burning hair (okay, perming hair) has less airspace to dissipate into in a mall. That pretzel place, Auntie Anne's? I hate that buttery smell. Ditto candy stores and cotton candy. Most stores that sell stuff to kids have a sweet cloying smell to them. Oh and those Chocolate Chip Cookie Company places smell like homeless feet.
Then you get the well-documented Abercrombie & Fitch stench; there are a bunch of high chic, low quality clothing stores that seem to atomize cheap perfume out into the mall, it's especially annoying when one of those fuckers that works there gets all cocky in the halls and bumps you out of the way as if you couldn't rearrange his entire life by rearranging his face.
I'd say food courts in general, they smell like garbage and people and cooking food, a combination likely to put you off food forever. It's enough to make me duck into a shoe store for a sniff at some fine leather to soothe the nerves.
Oh, also non-glossy art books, like the "how to draw" ones sometimes have this thick paper that just smells nasty, at least when it's new.
Oh, also non-glossy art books, like the "how to draw" ones sometimes have this thick paper that just smells nasty, at least when it's new.
Are you talking about the sharp, vinegar-y scent that some cheap paper has? Whew, that nauseates me.
And yes, Mall Smell is a bad smell.
Related: walking home today, I had to wait for a light to change on the corner outside the Subway shop, and I noticed I was unconsciously holding my breath so I wouldn't get a faceful of that fake-yeast smell that permeates the place.
Banana skins. gaaaak.
Perm stuff and nail stuff in salons. It must be horribly toxic to employees; I've left poorly ventilated nail salons because it's so vile.
Juliet Banana's answer is highly amusing to me.
If anyone in my office used nail polish and/or remover, I'd consider filing an OSHA complaint, in the US, anyway.
The rug in front of the couch smells like feet, which I attribute to my son and his friends.
Elsa, yeah, the paper smell, I wouldn't quite call it "vinegary" but it is sharp, it kinda smells to me like the primate house at the zoo, or maybe a hippopotamus.
Then again, maybe the smell reminds me of the drawings of gorillas and hippos that were printed on the pages.
Damn, now I really want to know. Time to take a stinky art book up to the Bronx.
Oh I love the smell of books. All books. In fact, when I think no one is looking, I go into the warehouse at work and smell all the books there.
In terms of smells I hate... I can only think of one, and it's not common, so I guess it doesn't fit the bill. And there's no way I could begin to know how to describe it.
Though there are a couple of aftershaves that set my teeth on edge. Ex boyfriends, you know.
That fake-vanilla perfume, often worn by goth or kooky! free-spirited! people.
Egg salad. If someone's eating it I can't be around. Who wants to eat a fart sandwich?
There was a woman yesterday whose perfume was objectionable: She was walking in the crosswalk, I was cycling through the intersection. The distance was fifteen feet if it was an inch. Outdoors. On a blustery day.
I think she had applied it with a paint roller, or perhaps a dip-tank.
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