The Worst Ever Smell

What is the worst smell in the world? Well, I once smelt a dead sheep in a field in spring, after a snow melt uncovered its bloated remain .....

 

Satan's Backside On A
Throne Of Rotting Vegetables

 

..... that was a pretty bad stench, but it was outdoors so somewhat mitigated by the wind.

 

On another notable nasal occasion I had an open can of processed peas, that had turned, after I forgot to dispose of them and left them for two weeks while I was on a summer holiday .... when I opened the fridge door, I nearly threw up. 

 

I ask this question, because someone posed the question to me recently about what was the worst smell in the world, or the worst smell I had ever come across. Obviously its a somewhat subjective matter as one man's bad smell is another man's scent (or something like that).

According to a survey in Britain (by a waste disposal company) in 2013, baby poo, open sewers on a hot day, wet dog, bin 'juice,' and bad breath all were rated bad or the worst as well as the aforementioned rotten food. More exotic travellers rate the smell of the Durian fruit as the worst smell. One company in the US, once created a 'joke' bad smell which they marketed as 'Liquid ASS' which even a few drops of, are guaranteed to evacuate any room in a building, and persists for a very long time .... hahah not!

Not to be outdone, the US military adopted the Liquid ASS for training its troops in handling rotting bodies in battlefield situations ... so its pretty bad then. They also have their own brand known as 'US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor' .... this was described, by almost every race and culture it was tested on, as being exceptionally foul. 

 

A cognitive psychologist, Pamela Dalton, was commissioned to weaponise the US Army smell, so she tweaked it with chemicals, including those that make a rotting corpse smell so bad, plus sulphur and a rotting fruit combination, to produce "Stench Soup". It has been described as "Satan's backside sitting on a throne of rotting onions" or "smelling something like a putrescent corpse lying on a mound of human excrement laced with rotten eggs and overripe fruit".

So you would think that smell was the outright winner .... but allegedly not. There is a chemical called thioacetone ((CH3)2CS) which is said to smell so bad, that people suspect evil supernatural forces have just farted. When created in Germany in 1889, it accidentally escaped the lab, and caused people in the town of Freiburg to start "fainting, vomiting, and a panic evacuation of the town". In theory thioacetone is only stable at -20 degrees, so its suspected the released smell was actually in a derivative form, but still obviously very bad.

It is such a lingering smell, that when recreated in the1960's, it permeated the protective clothing and containment glass and the two researchers were virtually ostracised by their colleagues, families and in the streets for several days (it had penetrated their skin pores). An accidental spillage, caused people in a building 200 yards away, to start vomiting and experience nausea. The lab where the spillage occurred had to be evacuated and decontaminated, and research was stopped for good .... no one has ever wanted to take it up again.

So pretty conclusively the worst smell in the world .... probably.