• Got_Bent@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    So you take a bad beer that’s been sitting in the sun for a few months. You know that smell?

    Ramp that up a few orders of magnitude to the extent that it seizes up your breathing and makes your eyes tear up to the point of near blindness.

    • liv@lemmy.nz
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      6 months ago

      Thanks. That was not what I was expecting; for some reason I was basing my imaginary skunk smell on the smell of rotten fish.

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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        6 months ago

        Closer to rotten egg than fish but not quite. It’s caused by sulfur compounds similar to those in weed and bad beer as suggested (or beer that’s bottled in clear or green glass and left in the sun - brown and cobalt glass block the UV that causes the compounds to form) but there’s a wider “pallette” of odors in much higher concentration.

      • LittleTarsier@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        This is so neat! Skunk smell is such an iconic, well known, horrendous animal smell in North America. I’ve never considered someone would not know what it smells like!

        • liv@lemmy.nz
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          6 months ago

          Yeah it’s not really something you export, so I can’t sample it ha ha. Even now that everyone’s telling me it’s still just an imaginary smell to me.