"Mash up a ripe avocado and plaster it over your face for 15 minutes - you'll smell like a chicken salad but your skin will feel revitalised, " reckoned Coombe.

BBC: Beauty treatments abroad

The second oddity is that in 1990, or thereabouts, a single Cape bee hatched with a handful of mutations that made her eggs smell like those of African-honeybee queens.

ECONOMIST: African honeybees

The dwellers around him in the hamlet had also finished their dinners, and the smoke from cow-dung fires hung over the darkening roofs, a harsh spicy smell, like rough tobacco.

NEWYORKER: Nawabdin Electrician

And with each new layer of stone the air got warmer and began to smell, at first something like a laundry hamper, then more like inside the mouth of a sun-baked cadaver.

NEWYORKER: Ziggurat