Baking bread. The smell right after a summer shower. Books. Diesel exhaust on a cold day. Don't ask on that last one, it's weird I know, but I love it.
I like the smell of jergins shampoo from like 30 years ago. My mom, who died when I was 23, used it when I was growing up, and I haven’t smelled it in literally decades, but I’d know it if I smelled it again, because it’s impossible to mistake for anything else, but you try really hard to figure out what the smell is. Pretty sure it died in the early 2000s (apparently it’s still available but I have no hope it smells the same, because I haven’t had a whiff in so long.. last time was on a bus around 2002)
It had a very unique… tangy? smell that wasn’t floral or fruity or musky or anything. It was just its own very specific smell. Probably all man made chemicals. But it contains volumes of memories.
Interestingly, I still don’t like her perfume (dune from like 1990-2004). I have 2 bottles of it, and I find it very unappealing. It smells like her, sure, but I don’t like it. I sniff the bottle every now and then, for memories. But they are adult memories. The jergins is childhood memories.
If anyone has a really old bottle of jergins floating around, I’d pay money for it..
No. I appreciate the thought but I feel like most of the people working those places have never smelled the specific and very particular scent I’m looking for, and throwing shit at the wall to see what’s close isn’t a solution because my brain will trick me but it won’t work the way I hope.
It’s one of those lost memories, I think, like when you want the same game experience but aren’t the same person so super Mario 1 is just really hard instead of being fun..?
The way libraries used to smell before they became homeless shelters. Not hating on anyone who needs a warm place to be. Just sucks it falls to the libraries to be that place.
My chicken after she's been dust bathing, or when it rains.
The dust bathing brings in an earthy note to her natural birdy scent. She just smells like a little nature spirit might, if such things were real.
When it rains, she's usually under cover (though sometimes she gets out into it), but she's picks to the petrichor aroma of rain and soil. She'll carry that scent all evening usually, so when she comes inside and is nestled up next to me, there's the normal bird smell, but also that rich aroma that a gentle rain brings, that usually fades quickly.
Mind you, I also love her normal smell, that almost dusty book, nose tickling smell of bird, colored with the mild earthiness and slight tang that's all chicken.
Luckily, she doesn't mind being sniffed occasionally :)
I woke up early yesterday and the one and only reason I got out of bed instead of going back to sleep is because someone was cooking bacon and the smell made its way up to my room.
Weird one, but I have pet birds. They smell AMAZING. Just stick your nose right up to their feathers and huff. They kinda smell a bit like corn chips, or laundry dried outside in the sun, dusty and earthy and warm.
A combination of the smells from my grandfather's shed: sawdust, machine oil and petrol from the lawn mower, freshly cut grass, leather, his pipe tabacco, and just a hint of whisky from the bottle he used to keep in there. He had a couple of old, leather, wing-back chairs in there and sometimes at the weekend after mowing the lawn we'd just sit and talk in his shed for a bit while he smoked his pipe and had a wee dram.
Sadly long gone (he died in the late 80s) but I get hints of it occasionally. Sometimes I'll smell maybe the lawnmower smells in my own shed and my brain will fill in the rest and I'll feel small and safe and warm and comfortable just for a moment or two.
Chemically it's the smell of beet red. Most people describe it vastly differently because the retro nasal smell makes it feel like something else. Pretty interesting if you ask me.
It's hard to describe I suppose. First the smell of rain hitting dry stone and dirt, and how that smell slowly swells and then fades as they become waterlogged... Then the heat rises as the thunderstorm comes, and the air itself smells warm and wet.
Unburned rolling tobacco in the pack, fresh cut evergreen, a just-opened pack of post-it notes, petrol, the oily/greasy smell of a machine shop, charcoal barbecue.
The many smells of forests, seaweed when it washes up on the beach, new steam deck vent and video rental stores, I guess I'll never smell the last one again though. I know there are candles that are made to mimic them but they are too expensive.
Have you ever toasted sugar? I have recently powdered toasted vanilla sugar I made and it smells incredible (toast first, then vanilla, then powder in food processor)
My husband collects action figures. There are ones that don't have much of a smell. And then there are ones that 'bout knock us over with an offputting chemically smell, probably from the type of plastic or paint or both.
Imminent snow, petrichor, the damp forest on a warm afternoon, sawdust/cut wood, ozone during/after thunderstorm, after a fireworks show (burned black powder).