The kinda bitterishness of a line of oxycodone. And the flowery sweet smell of elderflower&rose cordial. Grabbed a fair few bottles of both that and the concentrate for elderflower cordial alone. Love that stuff.
What I'm finding I'm actually missing though is the menagerie of the weirder, and on occasion even some of the offensive smells that can find themselves spawning in the lab, things like the tang of sulfur dioxide in the air, or the stinging of things like fuming hydrochloric acid and glacial acetic acid, the rich sweet heavy scent of chloroform paired with the lighter, thinner but heady odor of diethyl ether, and best of all I think, the thick, rolling dense mouthwateringly tasty smelling bouquet of benzaldehyde, which smells...well they use tiny amounts to make synthetic cheap almond essence by diluting a little bit of benzaldehyde in an edible oil. Just picture a cruise missile hitting a factory making cherry bakewell and marzipan tarts, right after they'd opened the industrial ovens to let a batch out to cool. Benzaldehyde smells like that, smells SOOOOO good you can't help but feel hungry if you can smell the pure stuff in a lab, and its something you don't need to wear a gas mask to do, so you just get exposed to that delicious sweet smell, guarantee it, when your done and have cleaned up, your first stop after packing up is most likely to be the kitchen for something sweet to nibble on.
Or the fainter, somewhat benzaldehyde-like odors of nitromethane, or fainter still but there, nitroethane, or the..hm...best described as 'ethereal' odor of methyl cyanide. And the seaside-fresh smell of big chunks of metallic-looking purplish silver-black and oh so pretty elemental iodine I just want to be back in there working, but my foot is stopping me. Driving me up the fucking walls.
Right now I could even miss the nasty toxic combination of burning matchhead-farts and sour, acidic HCl brick cleaner with its hints of eggy rottenness that is SOCl2. Or the garlicky smell of white phosphorus; Its weird, how used to all the weird and funky smells I've gotten, only to start to miss them when they aren't here.
n-Butyric anhydride though, there I'll draw the line at the carboxylic anhydride of the organic acid responsible for giving vomit its unmistakeably innards-become-outards characteristic smell. That, hypochlorites, those two really are on my shit-list. And whilst I like the smell of iodine, chlorine gas doesn't get the same forgiveness of its less admirable traits, because the smell of Cl2 is something I've always found absolutely sickening.
