I mentioned this thread to my wife this afternoon, and she reminded me of two instances where I have been exposed to chemicals which left me smelling as she claimed as “far worse than any skunk spray.”
The most recent - I contracted design and installation of a separation system for mid-distilling alcohols several years ago, but was left high and dry during commissioning, so I performed the start up and troubleshooting myself. Unfortunately, their design failed miserably, and I then had to redesign and rebuild on the fly - getting exposed to an alcohol which is used as a perfumant. It’s the chemical which, at 2-3% concentration, causes that dry burn at the back of a shot of vodka, or glass of wine. And I was dealing with a 95-98% concentrate - which also meant I had a splitting hangover headache for a couple weeks while working on the system. As if that wasn’t smelly enough on its own, the chemical is also a powerful perfumant, meaning it helped evolve any natural smell, for example, your body odor, or the smell of work boots - so even when the smell of the chemical itself subsided from my body enough to be tolerable, all of my work clothes, gloves, and boots smelled like a football player’s gym bag after two weeks of two-a-day practices in the summer heat. Just rank... I had to replace all of it, and some of the dress shirts and jeans I’d been wearing underneath.
The other instance, I was working on a non-corrosive, biologically friendly road de-icer product as potential replacement for the salts commonly used today. The primary pilot phase worked beautifully, the system I designed was beautifully efficient and effective, and we were ahead of schedule. The second phase of piloting used a waste stream from a commercial dairy as the substrate rather than the synthetic product we’d been instructed by the customer to use in the primary phase. The “real world” product did not align at all with their promised specifications, and quality was all over - it was largely rotten proteins and rife with organic acids... effectively, if you thought about rotten milk or yogurt, which had then been separated and allowed to rot AGAIN.... that was the feedstock they were sending me. The volatile compounds were incredibly binding to protein, for example, human hair and skin, and were desensitizing to olfactory receptors, so it caused us in the pilot plant to become desensitized to it... basically that meant it made us smell absolutely awful, with a scent which was exceptionally difficult to remove (it took WEEKS to debind and finally go back to normal), AND we couldn’t smell it on ourselves or each other, so we walked around really not knowing that we smelled so d@mned bad to everyone else...
Those were a lot more difficult to explain to other folks than the faint lingering whiff of skunk spray, and a lot more difficult to remove...