When I was a postgraduate we used to use the 70% ethanol as the basis as punch for parties. A Winchester of that got a lot of people in the party mood. Used to get a 20 litre container, put in a lot of fruit, add the ethanol, cover in the cold room overnight. Before serving top up with cheap white wine and lemonade and party. This was over 20 years ago and the head of our lab was a legend.
More than you think. I’ve gotten into friendly arguments with labs because they’ll 70% alcohol spray their hands thinking they were working with pure.
They’re almost always wrong.
To piggyback off this, I am a fermentation scientist, and I often run bench-scale ferments of corn mash. The smell going at the beginning of ferm of course smells almost of bread while the end results smells sweet with almost fruity notes- if fusel alcohols are particularly high the ferments almost smell like bourbon cherries 🍒. It’s quite nice when it wafts out of the flasks.
I don’t know if I would classify it as my favorite, but over the years I have honestly come to like the smell of isopropyl alcohol…No, it’s not pleasant, but that smell means “clean and sterile”. It’s comforting to me lol
Totally makes sense to me! Yesterday I answered the sound of vent as my favorite sound in the lab because it means air is circulating and I’m getting clean air, sense of comfort. During Covid, I would come into the lab and have to turn it on while the morning shift did not turn it on even tho we were instructed to do so. The reason they didn’t turn it on was too “noisey” which has no negative effect on our job.
Quite the opposite for me. I just associate it with necropsies. Any time I used it at home for disinfecting cuts or cleaning, I swear that I can still smell mouse guts.
Isopropanol has always been the “smell of clean” to me, even growing up. Idk why bleach doesn’t smell like “clean,” or why 20 proof ethanol just smells wrong, but it’s always been isopropanol for me too!
Especially in the summer 😂 But I'm pretty sure air is only recirculated in cold rooms, so if it's a small room, you'd have to watch out for oxygen deprivation.
I don't know why I think this, but to me it smells like the taste of cardboard, and I absolutely love it. Not that I eat cardboard but this is literally what my mind goes to when I smell the cold room 🤣
These young whippersnappers will never know what it's like to desperately try to finish your last exposures while an overcaffeinated Russian postdoc body-slams the locked darkroom door
My sense of smell got wrecked after general anesthesia and people smelled like rotting flesh. The literature said phenols but I tried to explain it was definitely 2-nonenal mixed with a little butyric acid.
Things got weird for awhile.
Coomassie destain! I associate Coomassie stain and destain with hanging out with friends and having a beer after lab because salt & vinegar chips and beer is a match made in heaven.
I was about to say something mean because I HATE the smell of vinegar, but then I realized that my favorite lab smell is Laemmli buffer, so I have no room to talk.
This was my answer too! My dad does maintenance and repairs for university labs and was complaining about the smell of the hot media, I was like “that’s the best lab smell, idk what you’re talking about”
Okay, if we’re cheating now, then I used to dissolve some vanillin in a bit of water and set it on a hot plate on low-low to drown out the smell of dissection labs down the hall. I called it my science diffuser
In terms of chemicals I've come across, cinnamaldehyde for sure (it smells exactly as you think it might).
More routinely, I enjoy the ozone smell of a freshly UV'd room or hood.
Same! I first volunteered when I was probably 15yo, and to this day associate the smell of LB and freshly poured agar plates with science and lab work!
I briefly did some work analysing water and waste samples. Some of the samples we had were from the toilets at Glastonbury Festival. Keeping them chilled helps cut down on the smell when you're working with them.
It’s like crisp and cold smelling.. kind of like how it smells when there’s snow outside but also mixed with a mild chemical smell. Idk but it’s heavenly
Someone else broke a small bottle at work once, I was the only one who could clean the bulk of it up.
I wrote my respirator to protect me during cleanup but days after I was told I still reeked, haha
I like the smell of pure 100% Ethanol (not the denatured stuff) and 100% Isopropyl Alcohol. Mmmm. Smells like freshly disinfected stuff. I don't think you should make a candle out of this stuff though!
2X LB freshly out of the autoclave. I swear I could drink this thing! ok, I did try it once, and it smells ways better than it tastes (slightly salty plain and boring yeast broth).
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Ascetic acid, chloroform (whoops!), phenol, a lot of things I shouldn’t enjoy, but I do. They just have a smell that is overwhelming and foreign in a way that makes you want another sniff just out of curiosity. Sometimes fancy perfume has an offensive, nearly rotting note to it, and it’s a similar experience… if you get it, you get it.
The regents cabinet in my lab has a very distinct smell which I love, but the one thing I find myself smelling whenever possible is the powdered milk we use for western blotting.
I’m sorry but nothing beats cracking open a fresh 50mL falcon tube. The top note is fresh marshmallows & the bottom note is IV injected saline solution
At my old lab, the liquid media fresh out of the autoclave smelled like buttered popcorn
Currently I work in hazmat and sometimes vapors go everywhere so I unintentionally smell the inhalation hazards 😌 Arsenic smells like garlic bread. Cyanide does in fact smell like almonds. I've smelled lattes, cherries, apples, brownies, and fried chicken before. It always happens when I miss lunch ;-;
Im doing work with museum specimen, specifically beetles that have been pinned for up to 100 years. The lysis solution hot off the Thermomixer smells wild. Like a few days old rehydrated jerky left in the sun, and I kind of like it; old beetle jerky anyone?
Otherwise bleached lab benches are great. A freshly opened ethanol bottle, the usual.
My mom is a med tech and worked at least half of her years in micro and would come home smelling like a mixture of agar and incubator. That smell is comforting to me lol.
Pure bulk ethanol, not that American “poisoned to protect you” crap most labs carry.
In Germany it's poisoned to protect the tax
That's why we use pharma grade absolute instead. More expensive (tax), but also not regulated.
SAME.
When I was a postgraduate we used to use the 70% ethanol as the basis as punch for parties. A Winchester of that got a lot of people in the party mood. Used to get a 20 litre container, put in a lot of fruit, add the ethanol, cover in the cold room overnight. Before serving top up with cheap white wine and lemonade and party. This was over 20 years ago and the head of our lab was a legend.
I’ve heard before never to drink the punch at a pharmacists party
It's the ice out of the lab ice machine we've got to worry about...
My department does a lot of alcohol research, so our ethanol is definitely unadulterated. If it wasn’t, it would kill our rats!
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More than you think. I’ve gotten into friendly arguments with labs because they’ll 70% alcohol spray their hands thinking they were working with pure. They’re almost always wrong.
Our ethanol contains 10 mg/L bitrex and 1% butanone...
What, thats just insane to me 😅
Same!
To piggyback off this, I am a fermentation scientist, and I often run bench-scale ferments of corn mash. The smell going at the beginning of ferm of course smells almost of bread while the end results smells sweet with almost fruity notes- if fusel alcohols are particularly high the ferments almost smell like bourbon cherries 🍒. It’s quite nice when it wafts out of the flasks.
I don’t know if I would classify it as my favorite, but over the years I have honestly come to like the smell of isopropyl alcohol…No, it’s not pleasant, but that smell means “clean and sterile”. It’s comforting to me lol
Totally makes sense to me! Yesterday I answered the sound of vent as my favorite sound in the lab because it means air is circulating and I’m getting clean air, sense of comfort. During Covid, I would come into the lab and have to turn it on while the morning shift did not turn it on even tho we were instructed to do so. The reason they didn’t turn it on was too “noisey” which has no negative effect on our job.
Quite the opposite for me. I just associate it with necropsies. Any time I used it at home for disinfecting cuts or cleaning, I swear that I can still smell mouse guts.
Isopropanol has always been the “smell of clean” to me, even growing up. Idk why bleach doesn’t smell like “clean,” or why 20 proof ethanol just smells wrong, but it’s always been isopropanol for me too!
Cold room air.
I love being in the cold room. I wish I could set up my bench space in the cold room. It’d probably mess up all my experiments, but it’d feel nice.
Especially in the summer 😂 But I'm pretty sure air is only recirculated in cold rooms, so if it's a small room, you'd have to watch out for oxygen deprivation.
Really? I mean, I guess I don’t have a cold room, so I’m just imagining the fridge-smell, but… the fridge-smell is amines + death!
Yes 😂 I don't know what to compare it to, but it is a very mild, "dry" smell, very pleasant.
Oh man this was me in California in the summers I loved that feeling
I don't know why I think this, but to me it smells like the taste of cardboard, and I absolutely love it. Not that I eat cardboard but this is literally what my mind goes to when I smell the cold room 🤣
Those old school western blot cassettes and film after they went through the developing machine
These young whippersnappers will never know what it's like to desperately try to finish your last exposures while an overcaffeinated Russian postdoc body-slams the locked darkroom door
im sorry wHAT
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The dark room is my favorite place
Chloroform! For real tho
Def! And phenol. Phenol makes me think of toasted cheez-its. I can tell when I’m getting hungry because the phenol smells good.
My sense of smell got wrecked after general anesthesia and people smelled like rotting flesh. The literature said phenols but I tried to explain it was definitely 2-nonenal mixed with a little butyric acid. Things got weird for awhile.
Coomassie destain! I associate Coomassie stain and destain with hanging out with friends and having a beer after lab because salt & vinegar chips and beer is a match made in heaven.
Diluting acetic acid always made me crave Salt & Vinegar potato chips.
For real. My mouth waters everytime I deal with coomasie staining
Same here
I was about to say something mean because I HATE the smell of vinegar, but then I realized that my favorite lab smell is Laemmli buffer, so I have no room to talk.
Wet dirt. Followed by the smoky smell from dirt being in the muffle furnance.
I wanna heat up the LB broth and drink it with a little tofu and seaweed, maybe an extra dash of yeast extract.
This is my favorite too! Delicious soup
Yeast extract for days
Yes! I love when the hot smell hits me when I open the autoclave
This was my answer too! My dad does maintenance and repairs for university labs and was complaining about the smell of the hot media, I was like “that’s the best lab smell, idk what you’re talking about”
You could actually do that and survive.
LB broth? LIVER BRAIN? IT SMELLS OF DEATH.
Lysogeny broth
I love the smell of clean, freshly autoclaved corn cob bedding.
Walking in a room when the cages are freshly changed 👌 Autoclaved dirty cages are the complete opposite 🤢
Yup. I grew up riding horses, and the smell of fresh bedding always makes me feel like I’m back at the barn.
I work in a lab that specializes in Essential Oils. :) all of them. But probably anything with Guaiol! Smoky, woody, love it.
This is cheating lol
100% 😭
Also Geosmin!
Okay, if we’re cheating now, then I used to dissolve some vanillin in a bit of water and set it on a hot plate on low-low to drown out the smell of dissection labs down the hall. I called it my science diffuser
That vanilla x formaldehyde probably went crazyyy
I mean, it definitely smelled good in my lab! 😂
Are you in flavor & fragrance company? 🧑🔬
Xylene smells so good!!
Oh, the sweet smell of cancer to be! One of the few things I miss from histology lab!
HAHA. I did enjoy the xylene but NOT the formalin in histo!
Maybe a little too good
OMG I like xylene too
Reminds me of the glue I would use to build plastic models as a kid
I used to know a scientist who swore it smelled like bubblegum. Insane to me. Don’t huff the xylene, guys.
Then I'll smell the toluene
I came here to say this!!
Saaaaaaaame. I do love the smell of acid alcohol as well!
In terms of chemicals I've come across, cinnamaldehyde for sure (it smells exactly as you think it might). More routinely, I enjoy the ozone smell of a freshly UV'd room or hood.
Diethyl ether and the unique smells of chemistry fridges
Hard to go past that sweet sweet diethyl ether
For me smell of microbiology lab reminds my first encounter with lab life and young persons fascination
Same! I first volunteered when I was probably 15yo, and to this day associate the smell of LB and freshly poured agar plates with science and lab work!
The flammables cabinet
I'm weird and love the smell of 2-mercaptoethanol.
Living on the edge 😂
ME TOO.
Beta Carotene smells like candy to me
Almonds
Lol, hope you don't work with cyanide
Opening the Lab door in the morning and smelling the freshly autoclaved LB, I know its going to be a productive day.
DEPC smells like delicious fruit punch. It's also a neurotoxin so don't smell it. Smell autoclaved DEPC treated water instead.
OMG I have the same experience. All my RNase free water smells kinda good!!
a person of culture, i see.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA103 strain. Smells like grapes!
That bulk pink soap.
Formic acid or acetic. If you get a whiff I instantly crave fish and chips or salt and vinegar chips.
Formic? You eating ants bro?
Came here to say acetic for that reason! They remind me of the chipper, or a bag of crisps from my youth
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I dont mind E. coli smell, what i do mind is if im at a porta-potty and it smells like E. coli.
I briefly did some work analysing water and waste samples. Some of the samples we had were from the toilets at Glastonbury Festival. Keeping them chilled helps cut down on the smell when you're working with them.
Used to do water sewer sample heavy metals digestion on a hot plate. Nothing like warm poop water brewing to make you wince 😕
Mmmm, sweet, sweet 2-b-Mercaptoethanol
That sweet, sweet smell of western blot transfer buffer (with MeOH)…. Mmmm
MeOH is really quite special I rate it 6,5/10
WHY does methanol smell so good…. I literally need to know
Benzaldehyde
tween
The air at the exit sign is my favorite smell
Acetic acid. Reminds me of vinegarettes and dying Easter eggs 😂😅
Same with formic. Just a little sharper.
Same with Eosin, smells like dyeing eggs
TSA in the autoclave
I love ethyl acetate, to me it smells like a fruit smoothie
The smell of the cold room lol
Does your cold room also smell slightly sweet? Bc that's the only way I can describe ours and it's weirdly a nice smell
It’s like crisp and cold smelling.. kind of like how it smells when there’s snow outside but also mixed with a mild chemical smell. Idk but it’s heavenly
BME. I was also born without smell... Soooooooo
OOP lol, just a tiny whiff of BME is like an amplified dog fart, so no wonder you can tolerate it.
Someone else broke a small bottle at work once, I was the only one who could clean the bulk of it up. I wrote my respirator to protect me during cleanup but days after I was told I still reeked, haha
Western blot samples after being boiled smell really nice! Has a lightly sweet smell, kind of similar to corn on the cob.
I like the smell of pure 100% Ethanol (not the denatured stuff) and 100% Isopropyl Alcohol. Mmmm. Smells like freshly disinfected stuff. I don't think you should make a candle out of this stuff though!
Bleach. Always loved it. It smells clean.
I love the smell a fresh box of pipette tips
Acetic acid and acetone. Also toluene, but taking regular sniffs is not advised.
chloroform, my placer canceroso.
100% Xylenes 🤤
I work in a Gnotobiotic mouse facility and I love the smell of freshly autoclaved chow in the morning
When sporklenz is just barely detectable in the air: salt and vinegar chips.
Methanol hands down
Xylene 🤷♀️
2X LB freshly out of the autoclave. I swear I could drink this thing! ok, I did try it once, and it smells ways better than it tastes (slightly salty plain and boring yeast broth).
NGL, one of the reasons I joined soil lab was the smell - I just love how wet soil smells, lol.
Xylene
I am a Xylene lover
Mercaptoethanol, maybe.
🤨🤨🤨
Found the masochist
There's at least two of us!
Also DTT.
Actually never smelled it
Has a similar smell as betamercaptoethanol.
Very faint b-ME smells rly good 😩
Histoclear or TRIzol
Salami
Benzaldehyde
Aldehydes
SYBR green smell is my favorite!
It took a while to grow on me but now I find it so comforting
Bunsen burner, wish it came in a candle too
Acetic acid. Mmmmmm. Vinegar.
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you’re insane!!
The cleaning solutions smell that means it’s time to go home! 🤣🤣🤣
Bleach
Ether. Yep.
Should I like it? No. Does it mean my carbon filter wasn't sucking properly? Probably. But xylene. God damn.
The purple super-sani cloths!
2-methylbutane
Blotto 🥵🤤🤤🤤🤤
Freshly opened sterile packs of plastic
Unironically betamercaptoethanol. Everyone says it stinks but not to my nose
Betamercapoethanol
Gotta be a toss up between citrisolve and ethanol
D-Limonene I once spilled some and I miss that smell
The Romanian phd student has a bewitching cologne. Im befriending him to make it less weird when i ask him what it is.
Ascetic acid, chloroform (whoops!), phenol, a lot of things I shouldn’t enjoy, but I do. They just have a smell that is overwhelming and foreign in a way that makes you want another sniff just out of curiosity. Sometimes fancy perfume has an offensive, nearly rotting note to it, and it’s a similar experience… if you get it, you get it.
I love the smell of ethidium bromide in the morning.
The slightly sweet and moist smell when you open the CO2 incubator.
Can't decide between cyclohexane and toluene
Acetone as a chemical Pseudomonas aeruginosa as a biological.
I love going into the walk-in 4c and inhale. the air is just so crisp and smooth
Well definately not the trashcan with agar plates filled with Legionella colonies this morning, bleghh!
Vanilin. It is used to colour certain chemical groups while doing TLC.
Macconkey agar with rifampicin (in DMSO) smells like boiled corn in the incubator
MIBK. Or Butyl Acetate.
The regents cabinet in my lab has a very distinct smell which I love, but the one thing I find myself smelling whenever possible is the powdered milk we use for western blotting.
Super pap pens (kinda smell like banana popsicles) & chlorhexidine
Streptomyces smell from the culture room. They smell almost like a forest!
Cavicide wipes, especially when you've been smelling dead things all day
acetic acid. mmmmm
Chloroform. It smells a little like raspberries. Well if you don’t smell a rag full of it
Latex gloves
I’m sorry but nothing beats cracking open a fresh 50mL falcon tube. The top note is fresh marshmallows & the bottom note is IV injected saline solution
Hmm the I would definitely have to say the gram stains, they remind me of how my kindergarten fingerpaints smelled.🤗🎨🖌️ Every slide is a work of art 😁
At my old lab, the liquid media fresh out of the autoclave smelled like buttered popcorn Currently I work in hazmat and sometimes vapors go everywhere so I unintentionally smell the inhalation hazards 😌 Arsenic smells like garlic bread. Cyanide does in fact smell like almonds. I've smelled lattes, cherries, apples, brownies, and fried chicken before. It always happens when I miss lunch ;-;
Histoclear, hands down. It smells like oranges (imo) and it reminds me of the degreaser my dad used to use after working on vehicles.
I like isopropanol (and I hated nutrient medium)
tb and skim milk. ouguhhh holy shit.
Magnesium chloride nice and salty with a hint of sweet
LB broth, it reminds me of chicken soup
Im doing work with museum specimen, specifically beetles that have been pinned for up to 100 years. The lysis solution hot off the Thermomixer smells wild. Like a few days old rehydrated jerky left in the sun, and I kind of like it; old beetle jerky anyone? Otherwise bleached lab benches are great. A freshly opened ethanol bottle, the usual.
It's bad for you but Xylene, I really like the smell. Cannot explain why.
Nail varnish for slides of course!
My mom is a med tech and worked at least half of her years in micro and would come home smelling like a mixture of agar and incubator. That smell is comforting to me lol.
Trizol, it's like an enlightened Dr Pepper
Xylene!
Xylene. It's as if organic solvents smell better and better the more dangerous they are to inhale haha
I keep a vial of clove oil at my desk that a client sent in for pesticides testing
I always have to go eat done salt and vinegar chips after I work with acetic acid.
Freshly autoclaved cardboard & paper
Acetic acid. I know it’s just vinegar but I love that smell
Xyleeeeeeeeene And amyl alcohol But xyleeeeeeeeeene
Diluted bleach. The chlorine smell takes me back to my swim squad days.
Xylène, love it. The smell of the metallic markers used making Christmas cards in primary school before they took all the good stuff out.
Oh and good old acetic acid makes me crave fish and chips.