Not for amateurs

G-Face did an experiment yesterday that may have long-term repercussions for us all. Or, well, the us that happened to be enclosed in the same space as her and all her little test-tubes last night.

We were minding our own business, drinking beer and talking about the things we talk about when we hang out,* when G-Face pulled out her equipment for O-Chem class. She was to combine dangerous chemicals to make delightful smelling things--she called it the "perfume lab."


Now, G-Face is a paragon of responsibility, so she made the living room a "well ventilated area" and goggled up.

True scientists are careful not to pour the
boiling beaker into their beer.

THIS IS SCIENCE. 

The living room promptly became drenched in an ever-changing miasma of terrible smells. It turns out that the process of making things smell nice in a lab is decidedly not nice smelling (and is unpleasant in stages), and the products (wintergreen, fake banana, and nail polish remover) do not really make up for wanting to vomit for 45 minutes while the lab is taking place.

She succeeded, of course, and the fog of the experiment drifted away. So did our headaches and nausea. Today, though, I keep getting whiffs of things that I'm pretty sure are impossible smells. The olfactory damage that my dear friend's O-Chem homework wrought on all of us has not yet reached its nadir. Perhaps it never will.


Notes:


* That is to say, we cracked wise at one another's expense.