Nothing smells quite as wonderful as the outdoors after it's been through the gentle rinse cycle. Rain is such a pleasant fragrance that makers of perfumes, body oils, lotions and even household cleaners all try to replicate it. But nobody can.
Not fully. Try as they may, it always ends up smelling ever-so-faintly like the inside of an old purse once carried by a woman fond of loose face powder. I had an uncle who claimed he could smell "rain was coming.
" Skeptical at an early age, I wondered how that could be. Maybe he could smell rain coming. Or maybe he'd been rummaging through somebody's old purse.
A high-end hotel chain boasts that its rooms smell like fresh rain. It even sells it in a bottle. Its rain fragrance comes with "notes of jasmine and grapefruit.
" When was the last time you stepped outside after a good rain and said, "I think I smell grapefruit"? As the man hawking the Veg-O-Matic on late-night television used to say, "But wait! There's more!" Rain comes in a variety of fragrances. There's fresh rain, clean rain, spring rain, November rain and soothing rain. I imagine soothing rain is the opposite of non-soothing rain that comes with tornado-warning sirens.
The last thing you'd want to do is mix up your rain fragrances. The scientific name for the smell of rain is petrichor. As I understand it — and I could be soaking wet on this — petrichor forms when bacteria in the soil and on plants is hit with water droplets, releasing a pleasant scent.
The process sou.
