Illinois Residents Say This Is The Best Smell In The World

If the opinion of your fellow Illinoisans means very little to you, I'm happy to add the fact that the world as a whole agrees that this particular scent, or scents, are our collective favorites.

The guy pictured above may really dig the smell of an oven full pizza rolls, but his preference didn't do much on the overall list of favorite smells.

So, do you think it might be one of these:

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No, It's Not Freshly Baked Bread, Bacon, Or Popcorn...Think Ice Cream And Fruit

The Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet in Sweden set out to find out if people all over the world like the same smells, and are turned off by the same smells. It turns out that we do and are, with some minor cultural differences.

When I ran a search for some random lists of the best smell in the world, I consistently saw things like this:

Bread
Popcorn
Bacon
Barbecue
Rain
Campfires
Chocolate
Freshly cut grass
New Books
Cookies
Apple Pie

I was a bit surprised to see "fresh gasoline" on several lists, along with "new car smell," and "expensive leather." However, none of those are Illinois' and the world's favorites.

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Illinois' And The World's Favorite Smell Is Also A Word Used To Describe Something As Being Plain, Boring, Or Routine

Of all the scents that test subjects sampled and rated in the the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet study, the overall favorite was vanilla. Coming in second place was this:

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Study participants rated vanilla to be more pleasant, regardless of cultural differences, than the fragrance of second-place finisher ethyl butyrate, which has a peach-like scent.

When it comes to the smells we hate, we all pretty much share similar thoughts.

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Mostly people considered isovaleric acid, which is found in cheese, soy milk, apple juice, and foot sweat, to be the worst odor.

Also, my own personal research shows that people who picked "campfire" as their favorite scent have apparently never been seated around the wrong campfire:

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LOOK: Best Beers From Every State

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.