To ask what's the worst thing you've sniffed by accident?

[CheeseAndSprinkleys]

I have sniffed sanitary towels, unsed, and not by accident, it said scented on the pack in the supermarket so I had to have a sniff, but that's not the worst

Pure Acetic Acid.

I used to do chemical testing in my old job. Filled one glass beaker with distilled water, the other with Acetic Acid. Didn't label. Stupidly without thinking picked up one and shoved my nose into it and took a very large whiff. It wasn't water and by God I can still feel it burning!

A whole bottle of poppers spilt on my then boyfriend's shoulder by a squaddie, in the dance tent at a festival. I was right behind him and it sent me off my tits for a few moments.

Oh, I see poppers has already been done!

Was once caught by horrified teenage DS sniffing his underpants ( found them on the floor and was checking if they were clean and not put in the drawers or dirty and not put in the linen basket)

After I has DS2 he was put on the children's ward as he didn't have a suck reflex. I had obviously caught done tummy bug which mean I burped a shit/rotting eggs smell that also tasted like eggs. I totally farted the same smell and shit the same smell in a liquid eggy form. Literally the whole room smelt like shit and eggs ... I've had it twice since .... Arrgghhhhhhh

My granny died and during the weeks before we cleaned her house out there was unflushed pee sitting in the toilet.

When we got there, there was a skin on the toilet like you get on custard. I should have flushed it but what I actually did was to get the toilet brush and give it a poke to see what would happen.

When the skin broke it unleashed a stink of biblical proportions. It was so absolutely unbearable that my legs started to run before I'd even really consciously registered what was happening. On the stairs I passed my Dad, and just as he was about to ask why I was running the wall of funk hit him and he started running too. At the bottom of the stairs we passed my DW. Just as she was about to ask the same thing it hit her as well, and she also started running.

Luckily the front door was open so we all managed to pile out into the fresh air before it suffocated us. After a few minutes of retching the thing had dissipated, hopefully forever. We still talk about it today. We named it the Bog Genie.

TLDR: My family was chased out of a house by the ghost of a dead relative's festering urine.

Melina (sp) when I used to work in the operating theatres.
Untreated leg ulcers.
Cat poo, one of my cats is allergic to most cat foods and the smell if he has eaten them is something I won't forgot for a while.

My sister dared me to take a huge sniff of my Grandpa's smelling salts and I passed out. That was on purpose though.

By accident the worst would probably be dead mouse or rotten meat. Although DS2 had a terrible bought of diarrhoea when he was about 9 months. The smell woke me up on several occasions and twice I vomited while changing his nappy, I was pg with DC4 at the time.

The smell of mushrooms cooking is pretty vile though. I find it hard not to heave at it.

Nothing quite as gross as everyone else but I once coughed up this thing thats apparently called a tonsil stone. Little white ball thing...for some reason I squashed it ans sniffed it. Never again.

It's a tie between decomposing skunk and lymphedema. Both make me retch. Thankfully I had a scented chapstick on me when I encountered lymphedma for the first time. I discretely withdrew at regular intervals to liberally coat the inside of my nostrils. Boak.

Horrid disease

Hahahahaha, some of these are making me chuckle. The festering urine is awesome!

I think my worse in living memory was some joke fart spray that a friend got in a joke shop when we were all 15-16 and sprayed it into an acquaintance's car. All over his seats. This was the height of 1995 summer (if anyone remembers, it was a boiler!) and he had a mini. With no a/c. The smell was so awful it make my eyes water and the last vision I have of him was his head hanging out the window, puking as he went.

Another one was the smell of DDog1 Fat Elvis, after he'd rolled in dead land crab, complete with rotting meat stuck in his long coat. He then decided to add to the mix by rolling in dead iguana. I stupidly made the mistake of throwing a stick into the canal to urge him to swim and get the smell of hell off him. It didn't help, merely added to the delicate stench of hot dog, rotting crab and iguana meat and stagnant canal water.

Oh my God I can recall the smell now and it's making me retch.

Years ago, I had a boyfriend who was a real knob. He took me to this factory where his mate worked and asked me to sniff this white powder in a box. Stupidly I did. It was some sort of chemical, maybe ammonia.
It took my breathe away, I was choking and my eyes streaming, while he pissed himself laughing.

bee024, howling. You are such an evocative writer!

A guy I know word down the window if is Astra as I walked past after school drop off this morning, announcing 'this van stinks'. Reminds me of the occasional sags when your car smells mysteriously of rancid spilt milk and someone inevitably asks you for a lift. Or is that just me?

Chorioamnionitis. You walk on a ward and can smell immediately if a woman has it.

My first cat went missing for a couple of days. Came home looking a bit green around the gills. After a while he puked what looked like two partially digested mice onto the living room carpet. I've never smelt anything like it. I had to tie a towel round my face to get rid of it, and I was still retching.

We drove down a road shortly after a skunk had been hit by a car.

Lived in Naples. All household rubbish for our village and outlying houses went into a couple of huge skips. One August it didn't get picked up for the entire month. Your eyes would start to water a mile away...

Just cried laughing at the Bog Genie

Mine is not so much a smell, but I once sniffed a nettle thinking it was mint (in my defence, it was growing in a pot in my greenhouse!), that stung a bit

Before we went on honeymoon we dropped the two cats off with relatives then headed straight for the airport. 2 weeks later when we returned at around 3am the most disgusted smell greeted us when we opened the front door - I couldn't even make it into the house. Turned out my darling husband had packed the cats up but had forgotten to dispose of the wet cat food that was sitting in the bowl.

The thought of it now still makes me dry heave.

Oh, and tomato soup. Totally irrational but one whiff of that and I have to leave the room, a nightmare in a shared work kitchen in winter

Cauliflowerbalti you have reminded me of my childhood as the school bus used to drive past the tannery and the stench was hideous.

Worse thing I have smelt recently would be vomited back up fox poop, my bitch either rolls in it or eats it, and if she eats it she voms it back up a few hours later and if you don't pick it up within nanoseconds the smells invades the whole house and lingers for days.

Also when the calves used to be debudded/dehorned, they would be burned off with something that looked bit like a round ended gas powered curling tong but the smell of burning horn and hair would get ingrained in your nostrils for days afterwards.

My son's umbilical stump when it was clipped, before it fell off. A smell like no other.

My dogs after rolling in and eating human poo in the woods

dead sheep, all chopped up and sealed into bran tubs. I snuck into the bit where the local hunt kept their hounds in cages and peeked in. Worst smell ever. I was eight.

I got dumped after a v long term relationship and had a few months of going on dates with blokes who suddenly crawled out of the woodwork of my past. One is a v intelligent PhD student at Cambridge university. V clever. Tall, broad shouldered. Handsome. Was a lovely shoulder to cry on by email. Came over one weekend: lovely evening date. Couple of weeks later he came over again: the tension was high, both really excited (or so I thought). Anyway. He doesn't arrive on time. He's two hours late and arrives by train. He STINKS. Gets in my car and I have to open windows. So I ask him what he's been up to, because, wow. He's had a day of doing some sort of research on battery farmed hens for his thesis and has been in the barns with the birds for 8 hours. Then he did some heavy gardening work for elderly neighbour. Then he got on a train to see me. He did not shower at all.
He smelled so bad I couldn't speak to him. Opened all the windows in my flat. Made him have a shower but the smell was in his clothes, in his hair, everywhere. I lived I a studio flat and he intended to stay over and there wasn't a train back to where he'd come from so he did and oh god, I boil washed everything several times and threw out some cushions.
In my darkest moments I still remember that smell.

When I first got my cat, unbeknown to me, he shit on a towel which I then dried my hair with after getting out of the shower. It was absolutely foul. I was happily rubbing into my waist length hair for a few minutes before the smell hit me all at once.

I ran to the shower and was throwing up and desperately trying to wash my hair at the same time.