You Can't Smell Metal

Metal has no odor and you can't smell it. But what are we smelling then?

It turns out that it's mostly a chemical called 1-octen-3-one, which is generated when your skin oils react with metal that you've touched.

I thought this was really interesting, and I decided to try making pure 1-octen-3-one myself and to see what it smelled like.

Read the procedure, and background information here.