What does death smell like? I searched for the scent of our final moments

“I remember seeing his body after he died,” my friend tells me, dragging on a cigarette in early summer. “He wasn’t my dad anymore. He didn’t smell of him. He smelled of nothing.” My mind goes to the story of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume – cliché, I know, but I’ve just finished reading it. The book’s protagonist, Grenouille, embodies a predatory devilishness that repulses those around him because of his total lack of human skin scent. But does death – or evil – really smell like… nothing?

“Death can have a scent, but there is not one scent that you can pinpoint,” death doula and author Tree Carr tells me. Apparently it comes down to the cause of death. “If a person is dying of advanced lung cancer they can give off foul odours, especially if tumours are necrotic or infected. Whereas, if a healthy person gets into an unfortunate accident and dies, they aren’t going to be giving off any odours as a fresh corpse,” explains Carr. “A person dying of stomach cancer can give off a putrid, rotten meat odour whereas a person dying of Alzheimer’s disease might have a musty, sweet aroma about them. The ‘death aroma’ is determined on the underlying health issue that’s making the person die.”

Fresh death appears to be not so much about a smell than an experience. Many people posting in forums discussing the smell of death describe an experience similar to my friend’s – a sense of seeing someone once intimately known now seem inextricably other, devoid of an innate humanness that has expelled itself from the remaining body with their last breath. However, in one Reddit feed hospice care workers of ageing folks describe a “stale, sickly sweet” smell that precedes death, likened to an overripe banana. One post describes it as “a putrid vanilla… very unsettling.”

Once a body has been dead for a while, there are almost unanimous reports of a stench comparable to a combination of rotting meat (apparently pig flesh is the closest), faeces, mothballs, rotting cabbage, rotting rubbish and garlic. This comes from the cocktail of chemicals that the body releases as proteins are broken down by microorganisms as it decomposes. “If [the bodies] are kept cool or cold, sealed or wrapped, then that slows that process of decomposition odour down,” explains Carr. “When the body moves into an active decaying process from 72 hours and beyond, then the strong, unpleasant odours of decomposition are present: foetid, rotting, sour and pungent.”

“It’s raw and human, but it’s not something that you could say, ‘Oh, it smells like this, or it smells like that,’” Sara Burn tells me. After training as a funeral arranger during the pandemic, Burn worked caring for the bodies of the recently deceased prior to their burial. “I think it’s deep and earthy and raw, in the best case. There’s also a fungal smell… I don’t even want to say cheese, because cheese is too sharp. There’s a real depth and a real earthiness to it.”

If a freshly dead body is embalmed, the scent is quite a different story. This can be partially attributed to the fact that some of the chemical compounds that make a rotting corpse smell so congenitally repulsive can actually be quite pleasant in less potent quantities. Skatole and Indole, responsible for faecal and sewerage smells respectively, are musty, earthy and flowery at lower doses. Even more unexpectedly, you might already know the scent of an embalmed body. According to one viral TikTok from a trainee mortuary cosmetician, Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry perfume “smells like corpses”. The scent of cadavers is dictated by the use of benzaldehyde, a chemical compound similar to formaldehyde, which is also used in fragrances and food flavouring because of the sweet bitter cherry-almond scent profile. “I’ve smelled this at wakes before for folks who chose to be embalmed,” Carr confirms. “I think it smells like marzipan actually, with a slightly spicy undertone. Funeral homes go to great lengths to ensure that any chemical embalming scents are minimised through using benzaldehyde.”

Death is an inevitably universal experience that transcends full understanding, and its scent is the same.

Not everyone agrees that you can assign a smell to death itself, however. “The scent of death doesn’t exist, or if it does there is nobody left to describe it,” perfume maker David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi tells me. “What is a lot clearer is the smell of witnessing death.” Inexcusable Evil, from David’s brand Toskovat, was the first scent that sprang to mind when I wondered what death in a perfume bottle could be. Reviews both venerate and praise it; descriptions include “smells exactly like a hospital”, “firearm cleaning products” and “dries down to the smell of an amputated limb”. I put off smelling Inexcusable Evil, a sense of trepidation hanging over me, fearful of what this bottle evil might evoke. Cautiously spraying it on my wrist, a heavily uncomfortable chemical smell hits me before something like a mix between burning plastic and gunpowder. This dries down into an acrid spiciness that seems to radiate a cloying heat off my skin.

“It catapults you into an abrasive landscape with nothing to counterbalance the harshness,” Jipa-Slivinschi summises, describing Inexcusable Evil’s scent as, “utterly inorganic, sterile and scary.” I ask why anyone would wear such a bizarre perfume and am taken aback by his answer: “It still surprises me how many people actually put it on their skin. The perfume was created as a protest for war. I specifically formulated it so it would scream off your skin and pull you back into thinking about our violent nature. Either I failed or people have a very strong self-comfort-preserving dissociation.”

“When I used to come home after a day’s work, I would have to literally scrub my body from top to bottom, including my hair, and wash my clothes, because it lingers and it sticks,” Burn told me of the smell of working in the funeral parlour. Similarly, I couldn’t wait to get Inexcusable Evil off my skin, rubbing it with Fairy Liquid, but even a searing hot shower wasn’t enough. I threw the clothes I was wearing in the washing machine. I gagged at the thought of it. Jipa-Slivinschi can rest assured that it had the desired effect on me.

If Inexcusable Evil summases the ambient collective memory of violent, harrowing death, Death’s Elixir from occult brand Cursed is something akin to the mythical, revered death of fairy tales, saints and martyrs. It’s the haunted house the protagonist enters in a horror movie, the ouija board you shouldn’t use, the resplendently gothic Sedlec Ossuary of death scents. Described as “a macabre fable encapsulated in a bottle,” Death’s Elixir is based on a story about a man who makes an exchange with Death for fame and fortune. On my skin, it is incredibly smokey and leathery with base notes of saccharine amber, before drying down to an earthy patchouli florality that I find both alluring and repugnant. The perfume’s creator describes the olfactory journey as “evoking imagery of sharp blades, metal chains, and spilled blood,” before conjuring “the ancient aroma of long-forgotten burial tombs.” I think maybe Inexcusable Evil already took me to places I wouldn’t go with a gun, but if I’m getting anything deathly from Death’s Elixir, it’s the sickly sweet overwhelming rotting corpse sort of death scent that Carr and Burn described.

Death is terrifying and eerie; death is overly romanticised, sticky and pungent. But death is also a fleeting reminder of the delicacy and poignantly fragile beauty of human life. Dead Air by Oddity is the last scent that surfaced in my furious search. A far cry from the previous olfactory journeys, Dead Air opens with a salty sea smell bound with complex spices before rapidly acquiescing to a sticky pine needle green and woody bark. It immediately reminds me of snapping twigs in my hands whilst walking in a gloomy forest alone, followed by the musky sourness of the liquid a ladybug secretes on you when they feel threatened, and an almost intangible sadness of being by the cold ocean at night, alone. This scent surfaces snapshots of memories I’ve buried, and, like a line from a poem that sticks in your mind almost uncomfortably, it hangs in my head paradoxically, feeling known yet alien with a slippery prescience. It feels ancient and newborn all at once. To me, this scent is grief; an overpowering and explicitly human yet seemingly intangible and almost incommunicable experience. If someone close to me died suddenly, this is the scent I might wear. 

My journey down this six-foot-deep rabbit hole taught me that there are many scents of death. Death is an inevitably universal experience that transcends full understanding, and its scent is the same. The smell of Death is whatever your association is, arguably a manifestation of your own dealings with darkness – whether it’s a powdery floral that costs £20 at Boots or an embodiment of the cruel and facile nature of human existence beyond our full comprehension.