The Smells Everyone Remembers From an 80s Childhood

Smell reaches memory more directly than any other sense. The olfactory system connects almost immediately to the areas of the brain that handle emotion and memory, which is why a smell can produce a complete feeling several seconds before you work out what you are smelling.

It also means the memories smell delivers are unusually raw. They have not been recalled and rewritten a hundred times the way a story has. They are stored roughly as they were, which is why they arrive with an intensity that catches people off guard in supermarket aisles.

The duplicating machine

Schools in the earlier part of the decade used spirit duplicators, which printed in purple and produced sheets that came off the machine still damp with solvent.

Every child in every school held those pages up to their face and breathed in, and every teacher told them to stop. It smelled sweet and chemical and was, in fairness, methanol.

The technology was replaced by photocopiers over the course of the decade, which killed the smell entirely and is why it functions as such a precise generational marker. If you know it, you know roughly when you were at school.

Hot electronics

Warm dust on a CRT, warm plastic on a games console, the specific smell of a television that had been on for four hours.

It comes from dust settling on hot components and slowly cooking, plus the plastics of that era giving off volatile compounds as they warmed. Modern electronics run cooler and use different plastics, so the smell is largely gone.

Anyone who spent time close to a television or a computer in that decade has this one, and it is almost impossible to describe except to somebody who already knows it.

New plastic toys

Opening a package and getting a hit of the plastic itself. Vinyl figures had a distinct one. Model kits had another, sharper and more chemical.

It faded within days of the toy being out of the box, which made it exclusive to the first hour of ownership. Which is precisely why it stuck: it was tied to a very specific, very good moment.

Swimming pools

Chlorine, obviously, and it is worth knowing the smell is not chlorine. Properly maintained water has almost no odor. That sharp pool smell is chloramines, formed when chlorine reacts with organic material from swimmers.

So the smell everybody associates with a clean pool is actually evidence of a dirty one, which nobody wants to hear and which does not affect the memory at all. It still means summer, and it still means being ten and having wrinkled fingers.

Cars

Vinyl interiors heating in the sun. Petrol at a station before vapor recovery systems became standard. The inside of a car that somebody smoked in, which was most cars.

The smoke one is complicated. It is genuinely unpleasant and it is also attached, for a lot of people, to being driven somewhere as a child in the back of a car belonging to a relative who is no longer alive. Memory does not sort things by whether they were good.

Books and paper

Old paper produces a specific smell as it degrades. Lignin in the paper breaks down over decades and releases compounds that read as sweet and slightly vanilla-like.

Which is why a library or a secondhand bookshop smells the way it does, and why a new book smells completely different. Both are recognizable within a second and neither has an equivalent anywhere else.

Rain on hot ground

The smell of the first rain after a dry spell has a name, petrichor, and it comes partly from plant oils that accumulate on dry ground and partly from a compound produced by soil bacteria.

Humans are unusually sensitive to it, able to detect it at extremely low concentrations. That is probably not an accident. Whatever the reason, everybody has this one, and for a lot of people it is specifically attached to being outside as a child when the weather turned.

Why you cannot go and get these

Deliberately seeking a smell almost never produces the effect. If you buy the thing on purpose, you have prepared for it, and the surprise is doing most of the work.

Several of these are also genuinely unavailable now. The duplicating fluid is gone, cars smell different, electronics run cooler, and petrol stations have vapor recovery. Whole categories of smell have simply been discontinued.

Which is a strange thing to lose without noticing. There are chemical signatures that a generation of people carry the memory of and that no longer exist anywhere in the world, and there is nothing to be done about it except recognize one occasionally by accident and stop walking for a second.