Reply To: Can strong smells damage the olfactory receptors?

Curiosity Science Chemistry Can strong smells damage the olfactory receptors? Reply To: Can strong smells damage the olfactory receptors?

Thioacetone. This is so far the smelliest chemical the humans have ever encountered. Read this.

Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant. The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable … and genuinely denied responsibility since they were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile, and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds.