Smelling Isocyanides: The REAL Stinkiest Chemicals On Earth (WAY Worse Than Thioacetone)

A moment of silence for Matt's nose.

Crafts chemical weapon in public. Drops it on the ground. Refuses to elaborate.

The intro makes me want a video of Nilered’s cameraman reacting to all these chemicals 😂

"Normally, it would be done with a mixture of tin and hydrochloric acid, but sadly, I’m not normal - and I didn’t have any tin."

I think context has a big role in how awful something smells. I remember as a kid, sitting in class and smelling the worst fart I'd ever smelled. It turned out to be one of those glass "stink bomb" ampoules, and breaking one and smelling it again later, not having nearly the same reaction. It wouldn't be ethical, but I think the best reactions would be from randos who have no idea what is going on or where the smell came from. Anyway, the worst thing I've ever smelled, was a bucket full of fish parts and pork trimmings that a coworker had mistakenly lidded and was left in an unused building for several months. We popped the lid thinking it was a bucket of semolina and every single one of us threw up.

Kinda interesting how the impetus for making this was to understand what it smells like, since all sources reported it only as "indescribable"... Only to discover that it's smell is, in fact, indescribable.

Most people can honestly call a smell indescribable and it's no more an exaggeration than people commonly make in casual speech. Most people don't talk about smells in a lot of detail, and lack the vocabulary when they attempt to do so. If I needed to talk about smells with precision, first I would have to smell enough things to serve as points of reference. Presumably this is what people do when they actually need to discriminate smells for a professional purpose. Such as a chemistry youtube channel :P

Normally when YouTubers involve their parents in stuff I find it a bit cringe, but your dad is really wholesome and it's clear that he's actually interested in this kind if stuff beyond the usual level of "supporting your kid's hobby.

I love how all you online chemists help each other out despite taking the micky out of each other and possibly be a bit competitive. It's so fun to watch. Cheers !

I worked with tert-butyl isocyanide in undergrad. It….has the most IMPOSSIBLE to explain smell. It was definitely unpleasant, but I’d say that thiols smell worse to me. The best description i can give for its scent is: “If you took the juice that falls out of a garbage bag, microwaved it with a rubber tire until the tire burned, and then bubbled chlorine through it.” It truly smelled awful, but in a way I truly CANNOT accurately describe.

I recognize that white box your benzene was in. Backyard science 2000 recently hooked me up with a free hotplate since mine died, some wp, and sodium borohydride. Great guy, I've got to get going making videos.

NileRed: Tentatively takes small cautious sniff of nastiness, plays up reaction. LabCoatz: Huffs nastiness like a crackhead, has to downplay reaction and resist the urge to puke. Truly a trailblazer.

CaCl2 can react with amines, so thats probably why it didn’t work well to dry the aniline. Great video by the way! You should do some synthesis of perfumery chemicals for future videos. Also its good for clickbait titles “Turning lice remover into cherry flavor???” for benzyl alcohol —> benzaldehyde for example.

I love how despite being quite professional, this has a vibe of hillbilly chemistry

I glad I found you through Nile Red, he’s great but his nose has been throughly destroyed by chemicals and I sincerely doubt his judgment on stink.

You're crazy for doing chemistry in the back of your car. People are going to think you're the next Walter White.

I just have stop for a minute to appreciate you all... The great, and often painstaking, amount of detail that is gone into with the overall descriptions of what you guys are smelling is wonderful! Y'all have been consistently amazing throughout this whole saga in this regard, and as someone who also appreciates strange odors from time to time--it's like I'm right there with ya! I'm not a chemist although I do enjoy and dabble in chemistry, nor do I have a particularly sensitive sense of smell so far as I can tell. However, I did begin to notice and pay attention to what sense I do have, quite early on my life. Particularly interesting to me, was just how influential certain odors were to me, such as my affinity for the smell of gasoline smelled as far back as I can recall. Or how some people began to smell 'attractive' before I really knew the meaning of that word as we all acquired our own, 'teen spirit' let's say. All the way to today 2-3 decades later, how I look forward to the smell of diesel exhaust or coffee in the morning. It's always been fascinating how certain odors/scents can cause such potent psychological and/or even physical responses such as my first whiff of ammonia. But I digress, That is all to say, I have paid, perhaps, more attention to smell than the average person, and as such I naturally have a reservoir of highly detailed, odd, and often unpleasant, descriptors in my vocabulary that I often use internally to qualify/identify new ones I come across. It is quite striking to me how similarly you or your father sound to my own internal chatter as you rattle off things like, 'plasticky superglue' (which is as clear to me, as if it had been written in some kind of smell dictionary), and all this has really made me feel like I was in the park right there with you guys. In conclusion, y'all are great at describing what these fascinating and niche odors smell like, and I enjoy that immensely! Thanks for listening to my TEDtalk 😛hope y'all have a good one!

One of your best videos yet brother

Shout out to your friends for bearing with that. Also, I loved your comparison of the different isocyanides. After digging a bit, the steric hindrance seems to be the important factor for the different odor intensity of the benzylic and aliphatic isocyanides. So maybe the shorter alkyl isocyanides might be even worse.

Hes just collecting bad smells like infinity stones now