Ten Common Things That Smell Like Nothing Else on Earth
Coriander
The plant, not the seed. It's such a strange and wonderful smell, that I suspect it may be extraterrestrial in origin. It refreshes your nostrils, the olfactory equivalent of a sauna followed by a cold shower.
Babies
And I don't mean the various, disturbing by-products of babies. No, I mean the babies themselves. I'm not sure if it's some kind of womb-residue, but they definitely have an odour unlike anything else I've ever come across and it's oddly comforting. I can only speak for my own children, of course, as I've never sniffed anybody else's baby. I think sniffing someone else's baby is probably a criminal offence, or at least likely to earn you a couple of hours of stern police interrogation and a few counselling sessions.
Frying Onions
Try frying something else, anything else, and it won't produce that smell or anything remotely close to it. Even frying leeks don't smell anything like frying onions and leeks practically are onions. Nothing else on Earth smells like frying onions. I suspect the first cooked food man ever ate was a fried onion, because a spontaneous salivary response followed by aggressive stomach rumbling seems to be genetically hardwired into the brain.
Glass
Trust me, it has a smell. You have to hold your breath when you're sniffing a bit of glass, otherwise you just get a whiff of whatever you last ate. I think the uniqueness of its odour is due to it being a transformed material. Glass is essentially sand that has achieved a higher state and purpose. Glass is sand in a sort of geological afterlife. It smells spiritual.
Fresh-Cut Grass
Don't need to say much about this one. It is unique, and so I had to include it, but it's got stiff competition from the coriander. Imagine a field of fresh cut coriander...
Fish Tanks
Particularly fish tanks that haven't been changed and cleaned in a while. A terrible smell, and entirely unique. I mean, it doesn't smell of stagnant water and it doesn't smell of fish. It just smells horrible. But uniquely horrible.
Old Umbrellas
You can't wash an umbrella, so it accumulates a kind of olfactory coating made up of years and years of rain. It's important to note here that not all rain smells the same; it depends on where the water came from and the time of year. The old umbrella contains a faint cocktail of all these different varieties of rain. As well as old umbrellas collectively smelling like nothing else on Earth, umbrellas from different parts of the world smell different from one another. But they all possess that unique umbrellary tang.
Cat Poo
Oh my God, what is that?
Burning Hair
There's nothing else like it. It's also the fastest travelling smell known to man. If you accidentally lean too close to a candle, that small hits you in an instant. Presumably it's some kind of survival mechanism. Like the frying onion, it's genetically hardwired into our brains from prehistoric times (when we were a lot hairier so it was presumably even more important).
Lapsang Souchong
A smell that divides people. Some people react in a similar manner as they would to item 1, others in an identical manner to the way in which they'd react to item 8. I've heard some people compare it to burning wood, burning rubber, burning fish or an old tyre filled with fish and thrown on a wood-fire. None of that quite does justice to the pure olfactory confusion wrought by Lapsang Souchong.
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