Sulfur and People's Perception

I called Alex at Anuvia yesterday regarding the horrible smell. (See the post for 3/02/2020) He asked me what their smell is like. I said like a burning, chemical smell. He perceives it as a sickly sweet smell. Apparently, different people perceive it differently. Alex tells me that they aren't releasing ammonia but they could be releasing sulfur.

I personally associate it with the burning stench of Hades.

Posted on the FB group:

I feel like Anuiva has always had a strong stench of a burning poop smell myself🤢😷

I don't know. Today stunk bad at some parts, but it wasn't a sewage smell, and it wasn't a Monterey smell. It was just nasty. Like, death.

I’ve noticed recently that when the poop smell comes so does the wildfire smell. It makes me wonder if their burning to try to cover up the poop smell????

I am smelling That Smell this morning. It smells like fertilizer and sewage treatment.

So I went to Quora to find out how other people describe the smell.

What does sulfur smell like?

via Peter Hand: Not everyone has the ability to smell elemental sulfur. For those that can, how do you describe a smell? It's not very strong but quite distinctive, and very persistent, especially if you draw any powdered sulfur into your nose. What most people mean when they say they smell sulfur is sulfur dioxide (sharp, choking), or hydrogen sulfide (rotten eggs), or a hard to describe the sweetish sulfurous smell that develops on a person's skin after they rub on a sulfur ointment. Sulfur plays a part in very many of the more obnoxious smells, some of which our noses can detect at parts per billion - like mercaptan, the odor added to gas to warn us of gas leaks. It's the trace of sulfur in organisms that's mainly responsible for the evil-smelling decay products of death that we've evolved to sense and avoid.

via Josh Marsilio: It smells good and bad at the same time. Or maybe rotten eggs. It has an earthy, sunshine on a rock in a hot desert kind of smell too.

Some ways to experience the smell of sulfur in person: go to Yellowstone National Park, and visit the sulfur pools there they are alive and well with the fumes of Sulfur, or find a “sulfur mine”, the ambient air will be saturated with the smell of sulfur. I suppose breathing in too much could be dangerous, but in general, the fumes are harmless.

Smoke bombs that people set off during July 4th celebrations… they usually smell of sulfur. Stink bombs do too.

My favorite place I've smelled sulfur though was at Yellowstone National Park at the “sulfur pools”.

LaVonne Davis-Schenck: Rotten eggs. Sewer gas. Match heads. Yuck. It’s a “dry” sensation, hits high on the soft palate, makes you want to clench your throat closed. Hope you’re not smelling it because it’s usually a sign of something wrong.

Hunter Waples: So I used to work at a Combustion Laboratory at my local state university. The research project I worked on while at this lab had to do with the high-temperature thermal decomposition of hydrogen sulfide (H2S). We accomplished such decomposition by heating H2S in a furnace to temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees Celsius. This broke down H2S into hydrogen gas (H2) and many different allotropes of elemental sulfur.

So how did the sulfur smell? It actually didn’t. You see the elemental sulfur we yielded and condensed looked sort of like this:

It was a rock and really did not have much of a smell that I can remember. And this is why all my lab mates liked the sulfur.

Hydrogen Sulfide, on the other hand, smelled putrid.

So while sulfur is pretty bearable, many of the sulfur compounds (H2S, SO2, etc) smell akin to rotten eggs. When we leaked H2S into the lab even in the parts per billion, it was time to call it a day, turn on our ventilation fans, and go home.

However, what is pretty interesting is while H2S has a very strong smell in safe concentrations - which should alert you of a leak that you have to fix asap - H2S also happens to deactivate your ability to smell in higher concentrations (parts per million). So while safe concentrations smell terrible, the potentially lethal concentrations are impossible to smell.

Always use your H2S detectors when dealing with this stuff - nasty.

Best of luck!

Mark B Fischer, Ph.D. Inorganic Chemistry Sulfur does not have a smell. Sulfur compounds on the other hand do.   (aka thiol) compounds (containing the SH group) are the basis of the rotten egg smell that you notice when there is a gas leak because they are added in trace amounts to natural gas so that if there is a leak, you will notice and take corrective action. Thiols are also found in onions, garlic, and skunk spray. Sulfur oxides have an astringent smell because they can hydrolyze to sulfurous and sulfuric acids. Why they smell the way they do is perhaps better answered by a physiologist with a specialization in the olfactory system.