or: a brief pause from my self-imposed exile to figure out why everything smells like pee
i would like to open this by giving the disclaimer that i am not a chemist, nor am i any kind of scientist at all. in fact, i have always been dogshit at chemistry - understand this as a layman's interpretation of data that is, quite frankly, above me. if there is anyone with more knowledge of this subject that wants to correct anything i've written, that would be wonderful - consider this more of an open dialogue to figure out why the hell fragrantica reviews think everything smells like piss, using the data i was able to find and interpret.
the first thing to keep in mind is that scent is subjective. it's a similar problem to the classic "how do you know that your red is the same as anyone else's red?" problem. in this case, wikipedia says that there's around 400 different functioning genes in humans that affect our olfactory receptors. as a result, the way every individual perceives scent is going to be different. certain chemicals picked up when you smell something could be stronger or weaker; you might be unable to smell some at all. one example of how different just one chemical can smell to each person is the common perfume ingredient iso-e super. to some, it smells woody, like cedar or sawdust; to others, it smells very sharp and chemical; and to others, it smells like nothing at all. all of this is to say; smells are very personal, and one person picking up a gross smell doesn't always mean it's gross perfume, it could just be that they're sensitive to one of the potentially hundreds of chemical compounds in the fragrance.
with that said: what makes pee smell like pee?
it's surprisingly hard to find a simple answer to this one. for starters, there's understandably not a ton of research into pee smell. pee is not just pee; it's a mix of water and all kinds of shit your body doesn't want to hang onto; salt, all kinds of different electrolytes, protein waste products, nitrogen waste products, lipids, tannins, hormones - this paper published by the NIH descibes pee as "a particularly difficult substrate to fully understand." to make matters worse, the composition of urine isn't static; since it's all the chemical byproducts from the food you eat and all the different chemical processes that keep you alive, the content of urine is going to vary from day to day, from person to person. which is also why doctors are so intent on making you piss into cups - there's valuable data in there.
so it's hard to figure out why pee smells like pee because we first need to identify what's actually in pee, which is a monumental task, and then figure out which of these chemicals have a strong smell. luckily, Maria Wagenstaller and Andrea Buettner have our backs. in 2013, they published a paper trying to do exactly this.
figure 2 in this paper gives us a graph showing just a few of the selected odorants from the data they collected:
. some of these, to those familiar with fragrance, aren't going to be too shocking; indole, a common fragrance compound found in pretty flowers, is well-known for having a decidedly bathroom-y smell if too concentrated. skatole, predictably, has the word "scat" in its name because of how heavily it contributes to the smell of feces. gross. other compounds here might be more surprising. sotolone is the fragrance compound that gives maple syrup its smell. vanillin is, as its name suggests, the primary component of vanilla extract. it's not all just stuff that stinks bad.
let's go through the other odor compounds selected by these researchers for this graph:
3-methylbutanoic acid: a metabolic waste product that wikipedia describes as having an "unpleasant odor." it's also found in foods such as cheese, soy milk, and apple juice.
4-ethylguaiacol: this is a key aromatic and flavoring component in many products. wine tasters use it as a flavor standard; it's used as an antiseptic in skincare products; it's a preservative used in wine and soy sauce. in perfumery, it has a lightly spicy scent that is described as being similar to soy (or, by aroxa.com, "like hamburger or hot dog", which is a fascinating descriptor to me.)
4-vinyl guaiacol: the compound responsible for the smell of buckwheat and the key flavor in german-style wheat beers.
(E)-β-damascenone: the primary odorant of kentucky bourbon; also has a somewhat fruity scent associated with blackcurrant.
butyric acid: the gross stuff responsible for the bad taste and smell of rancid butter. this is also present in hershey's chocolate as a side effect of the way hershey processes milk.
dimethyl trisulfide: another nasty; this one is detectable to humans at levels as low as 1 part per trillion. it's found in cabbage, stale sake, and stinkhorn mushrooms.
guaiacol: an organic compound used medically, as a flavoring agent, and for fragrance. it's part of what makes smoked foods taste smokey. it's also found in celery seeds, whiskey, tobacco, eucalyptus, and lemon peels, among other things - it's pretty prominent in nature. it's notable as a component in the taste of roasted coffee. vanillin is sometimes derived from it as well.
methional: this bad boy is a notable flavor in potato chips.
so how do we put this all together?
different people can be more or less sensitive to pretty much every chemical responsible for how we smell things.
pee contains a ton of different strongly-smelling chemicals. some are objectively gross, but others are nice enough that they're found in lots of nice things like vanilla and coffee.
my assumption from this is that, if you're more sensitive to one of the many different compounds in urine, you'll probably be able to pick it up more easily in non-urine things and make the connection between the two. if beer tastes like piss to you? you might be sensitive enough to 4-vinyl guaiacol that you're able to detect it in both urine and beer. if hershey's chocolate tastes like vomit to you, you're probably more sensitive to the butyric acid in it. and so on, and so forth. that doesn't mean that vanilla and eucalyptus and wood smoke all smell identical to urine, but if you're able to pick up more easily on the specific compound that links the two together, you might notice a similar thread between them.
anyways i learned more about pee today than i ever wanted to in my life
as a post-script: what are some common notes that seem to be responsible for the piss comparisons?
because there's so many different compounds involved, there's going to be a lot of different possibilities that heavily depend on your own nose. but some of the common culprits i see are:
white florals (jasmine, neroli, ylang ylang, et al.)
blackcurrant & cassis
honey
eucalyptus
sandalwood (interestingly, there's a chemical called androstenone that seems to have a pretty simple genetic on/off switch similar to the cilantro soap gene - you either smell it as sandalwood or piss.)
grapefruit
civet & hyraceum (these are both cheating to include, because they very intentionally and directly smell like piss.)
Maybe the reason my holiday baking never turns out just like mama used to make is because there aren't like five people chain-smoking in my house at all times. Maybe my sugar cookies just need to absorb some wintertime Marlboro miasma. What is menthol if not the peppermint of a low-income 90s Appalachian household.
arguments against marxist class analysis are like "wow, that's absurd for you to say small business owners are 'petite bourgeoisie'. sure, that may be the only definition that term has or has ever had, but have you considered: i'm a small business owner, and being called petite bourgeoisie literally hurts my feelings?????"
the term petite bourgeoisie existed before marx used the term. it has a specific definition. tell us all what you think that definition is.
at any rate, neither myself, nor marx, ever denied that the petite bourgeoisie tend to work at their businesses. Indeed, this was specifically how marx defined the difference between the petite bourgeoisie and the other strata of the bourgeoisie. (again i told you it has a specific definition)
however there is a much larger class of people who work at businesses they don't own. sometimes even working as employees at those small businesses. this class is called the proletariat.
if you want to improve the economic well-being of people in this class, it helps to anticipate who might benefit from, and thus would be likely to assist such an effort, and who might be negatively affected by this, and thus likely to try to oppose it.
so for instance, if cooks are striking for a better wage, the cooks obviously benefit from that. even a well-paid engineer might benefit (can tell their boss "cooks get paid as much as me! give me a raise or i'm gonna quit and become a cook!") but restaurant owners don't benefit, because this increase their labor cost. this is true of both the owners of large chains, and small single-location business owners. regardless of the size of the business, the economic interests in relation to their employee's wages are the same.
you can try to paper over this by lumping together the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie as "workers" but to do this, you ignore significant undeniable material facts. facts which are relevant to any effort by the proletariat to improve our economic standing.
if acknowledging obvious material reality makes me "authoritarian," so be it. besides, that's largely just a meaningless buzzword used by people who are still mad that mommy and daddy didn't let them stay up all night eating candy when they were 6.
I've lost some weight (not intentionally just medication changes), and at first I was like wow ass goes crazy I can really see all this muscle, but these last five pounds???? Ass theif. Give it back.
I've lost some weight (not intentionally just medication changes), and at first I was like wow ass goes crazy I can really see all this muscle, but these last five pounds???? Ass theif. Give it back.
Truly I hate to do this to you all but; you can watch all the videos and read all the blogs in the world but you cannot learn to sew without at some point picking up a piece of fabric and fucking it up. No tutorial exists that will stop you at some point ruining this poor piece of cloth. The visceral act of holding a project and wondering where you went wrong is the only way to learn sewing; you cannot escape it. I’m sorry
This is why you practice on cheap fabric. It's called "making a muslin", because plain muslin is typically cheap to buy, but you can use any inexpensive fabric you have around.
Making a muslin (out of whatever fabric) allows you to adjust the pattern so the piece fits properly. If you destroy it, you are out a few bucks, and you can try again with another muslin.
Never do a first try with your expensive fabric.
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