I have two favorite, natural smells:

1. Dead, wet leaves in a forest - it's a very autumn smell.
2. The moist, warm summer air just before and after it rains.

Outdoor smells: Freshly mown grass, lilacs, cedar after it rains

Indoor smells: Ginger cookies, men who smell of fabric softener, roasting turkey.

I went to a high school in San Francisco, across the street from Ghiradeli's chocolate factory (now a mall). Going to the football games was wonderful.

Favorite outdoor flower smells: Lilacs, Lily of the Valley, Wild Violets, apple blossoms

Part of St. Louis smells like Tums. In Detroit, I lived across the street from a small bakery. That was heavenly (and high contrast to the look of the area).

I like the clean smell after a rain.

Note to Joss: Smell-o-vision!

Mmmmm, apple blossoms.

Jasmine is blooming riotously all over the East Bay right now. Walking past a jasmine plant climbing up a school fence on a warm, sunny afternoon=stoned with sensuous animal pleasure.

I do love Jasmine.

I walk into my house each evening: jasmine over the gate, lilac just inside the gate, lemon blossom three feet afterward. Happy, happy nose.

I have the sort of olefactory acuity that makes most smells wince-inducing but there are a few:

Hazelnut coffee beans. I never drink the stuff, but the smell of the beans makes me so happy, an old boyfriend once ground a bunch up and scattered them on the floorboards of my car. (shortsighted, of course, but romantic none-the-less)

Speaking of ocean...Crabtree & Evelyn's Jojoba products smell like I think the ocean should. My favorite manufactured smell of all time.

I'm with Aimee on the men smelling like fabric softener. It says to much!

eta: ::glances furtively at the thread title::

And I bet Mal smells GREAT. All hero-ey and stuff.

I just had the weirdest thought.

What would your favorite super hero smell like.

Even weirder thought...Mr. Incredible smells like the outside of a shampoo bottle.

Good LORD, I need to stop thinking immediately. Disaster may ensue.

Somehow, the earliest parts of my childhood (like Frank's, in Maine) are all populated by stinky smells.

I don't remember where, but there used to be a paper mill right on the highway (Rt. 1) somewhere between Kittery and Portland. Wow, it stank. Years and years later, when I was in college and we roadtripped up to Dixville Notch in NH, we passed through the mill town of Berlin and those not-from-around-here had to breathe through the Dunkin Donuts box. I was oddly nostalgic.

Before that, though, were the salt flats of Machias, way up the coast near Canada, when the tide was low. There was some kind of bridge from one part of town to another that went over the marshes, and the whole area smelled like farts.