Does cyanide actually smell like almonds?

this video has been sponsored by raycon also please don't try recreating anything that you see here cyanide is probably one of the most well-known poisons and in many movies and shows i've heard them say that it smells like almonds i've also heard chemists say it and i've seen it written in a lot of articles and warnings however i've never actually smelled it myself which is probably a good thing but i've always wondered how true it was it just seemed weird to me that something so toxic could smell good this is because when toxic things have a smell they're usually bad which lets you know to get away from it if cyanide smells like nice almonds though i feel like i'd be more likely to go towards it this just didn't really seem right to me so i decided that i had to see for myself to make this happen what i had to do was pretty simple and i just had to smell some cyanide however i didn't just have a bunch of cyanide sitting around and i had to order some i was originally planning to just get a few grams of it but for small quantities it was really overpriced i'm really not sure how i rationalized it but i somehow convinced myself that it was much smarter to get a full kilo instead however i have no idea how i'm even going to use a fraction of this and if you guys have any interesting suggestions i'd love to hear them okay so i now had a bunch of cyanide and it was all in the form of sodium cyanide this is one of the most common forms of it and what i've always found interesting is how boring it looks when i first saw sodium cyanide a few years ago i really thought its appearance would match its scary reputation but it was about as fear-inducing as table salt it also wasn't as poisonous as i thought i always assumed that it was insanely dangerous and that just a speck of it could kill you however for the average adult you need a few hundred milligrams which is actually quite a bit i mean it's also not a lot but there's no way that you would just accidentally eat this much either way i now had the cyanide and ideally i would have just smelled it to get my answer but it unfortunately wasn't that easy this is because sodium cyanide is a solid and like a lot of other solids it doesn't smell like anything it's just not letting off enough vapor to detect it and it's the same reason why you can't smell table salt when people talk about smelling cyanide they're usually referring specifically to hydrogen cyanide which is a gas this can be detected in extremely low concentrations and it's one of the most dangerous forms this is because you really don't need that much of it in the air for a few good breaths of it to be fatal but anyway with that being said the next thing that i had to do was make some hydrogen cyanide to do this i started by measuring out just three milligrams of the sodium cyanide which was basically a single crystal i then added about 25 ml of water and i stirred it until it completely dissolved what i had now was a solution of sodium cyanide but it was insanely dilute it would probably take a hundred times more cyanide to kill me and even if i took this whole thing as a shot i'd still be fine i then put the beaker into a small chamber along with a cyanide meter that i had rented initially it didn't look like much was happening but after a few minutes the meter started detecting cyanide this was happening because when sodium cyanide is exposed to water or moisture it slowly hydrolyzes and turns into hydrogen cyanide as a gas this then escaped the beaker and it started filling the chamber the goal now was to get it concentrated enough that i could for sure smell it but not enough that it would be dangerous to find out what this would be i did a little research online and i was able to find this table it was honestly a bit scary to see the words immediate death but it was also only at very high concentrations when it got down to between 20 and 40 parts per million or ppm for short it said that it only caused slight symptoms after a few hours for me to smell it though it would probably take at most a few seconds so i figured this would be totally fine i also found this on the cdc website that set up to around 50 ppm can be tolerated for 30 to 60 minutes based on this and a lot of other info that i was able to find it seemed totally fine to go with something like 40 ppm but i wanted to be as safe as possible so i decided to start at around 15 ppm and i figured if i couldn't smell it i could always just increase it after a few minutes it was only around three and a half ppm and it was going to take a while to get to 15. so i decided to give it a little boost by shooting in some extremely dilute sulfuric acid this would immediately react with the sodium cyanide and convert it to the hydrogen cyanide i then close the chamber and very quickly the concentration started increasing in this case adding this acid was okay because i was working with barely any cyanide however it can be extremely dangerous if it were added to a concentrated solution or pure cyanide it would start pouring off a crazy amount of hydrogen cyanide this can be very hard to control and depending on the scale it can quickly fill a room with a fatal concentration in general you usually do everything you can to avoid mixing the two and there are very few circumstances that you ever need to when it got just slightly above 14 ppm i was ready to test it okay so i have my scary little box here and i guess i just have to smell it it's honestly not very it's not as strong as i thought it would be but it's also it's not at all like an almond i would not associate this at all with food it really has a chemical smell it kind of smells like weak bleach or chlorine and maybe a little bit like an indoor pool that has too much chlorine in the air either way it's not almonds i don't smell anything that resembles almonds here maybe i just don't remember what almonds smell like maybe maybe i've just never smelled an almond before i think that's possible so i think i have to go and see what an almond actually smells like okay so what i had to do next was smell some almonds and i picked up a pack of some gourmet ones from the dollar store now all i had to do was cut it open and test it out it kind of just smells like nothing yeah nothing smells like nothing i was honestly a bit surprised by this but i figured that it was just because they all still had their skin on them so i started thinking that maybe if they were crushed up it might make a difference when they all looked more or less destroyed i tested them again okay uh okay it still kind of smells like nothing as a last attempt to get anything from it i added some water i was hoping that by turning it into kind of crappy almond milk that it might help release something okay hmm just smells like almond milk it just smells like almond milk tastes like really bad almond milk actually after all of this i think the main thing that i learned was that almonds don't actually smell like much of anything from what i could smell though it wasn't anything like the cyanide however i have to be honest and say that i kind of expected that this is because when people say that cyanide smells like almonds they aren't talking about the regular sweet almonds that you find at the store they're instead referring to bitter almonds which are very different unlike the sweet ones bitter almonds contain a decent amount of cyanide and they're a lot harder to get a hold of i tried buying them years ago but i gave up because i couldn't find them anywhere however recently i did a random search and i found them on amazon which kind of surprised me i mean they do have some limited and legitimate use in cooking and stuff but it seemed like they were there mostly because of alternative medicine some of the reviews were genuinely scary and at least a few of them talked about using it as a treatment for cancer one of them even claimed that they were using it on their sick dog which is kind of not okay after reading all this i was a bit morally conflicted because i really didn't want to support this type of market however it was also my only source of them so they arrived a few weeks later and i figured i'd test them in the same way as before okay and it smells like nothing okay so just like last time they were practically odorless and the next thing that i had to do was smash them but before doing that i really wanted to taste one they did have cyanide in them and eating them wasn't ideal but just one wouldn't have enough to hurt me i'd probably have to eat a good handful of them before i really started to have problems i think i've like a dud this doesn't taste like anything i literally taste air it's not even bitter i think i've been dud i'll take another one okay hopefully i'm not dying of cyanide okay there oh god it tastes like a hint of cherry but it's like really bad it's like super bitter it tastes like a bit of cherry ah no this is no good it's awful it also is occurred to me now these are raw almonds and i don't know they've ever been washed oh it's awful no okay so i think i overreacted a bit but it really didn't taste good at all it was way more bitter than i expected and it kind of made my tongue feel numb before this i was kind of scared about the idea of accidentally mixing up the bitter ones with the regular ones however at least from my little experience here there's just no way that you could eat this by mistake and somehow not notice but either way i then moved on to smashing them [Music] okay so uh it smells it actually smells like something this time but it's really faint and kind of just smells like generic plant with a bit of earth so this time it might have actually kind of smelled like almonds and it was probably because of all the benzaldehyde unlike sweet almonds bitter almonds have quite a bit of benzaldehyde and it gives off a characteristic almond or cherry smell because of this it's often used as an artificial flavor for both of those things but in my opinion it reminds me a lot more of cherry but anyway based on what i smelled here i started thinking that it was also wrong about the bitter almond because it still wasn't anything like the pure cyanide however i hadn't tried adding water to it yet unlike before though i didn't just pour the water directly into the bag and i instead dumped all the almonds into a beaker i then put this into the chamber along with the meter after that i added a bunch of water and then i waited for the first few minutes it didn't do much but then it jumped to half a ppm and started slowly climbing the reason this was happening was because the almond didn't just have free cyanide floating around and it was all trapped in something called amygdalin in this form it's kind of like the sodium cyanide and it's not something that you can smell in the water though enzymes from the almond are able to attack the amygdalin and split it apart into benzaldehyde sugar and hydrogen cyanide to get it going a bit faster i tried just stirring it around and it did work however it was maybe working too well and it was making way too much hydrogen cyanide and it quickly maxed out the meter to be fair i was kind of expecting this to happen because between all these almonds there was quite a bit of cyanide from what i found each one can contain between four and nine milligrams with an average of around six and i had at least a dozen here i thought that maybe i could get rid of some of it by venting it but right when i put the lid back on it would quickly max out again to make a safe setup like before that i could actually smell i decided to try it with just one almond so i quickly smashed one and dropped it in a fresh beaker i then put this in the chamber added some water and mixed it around over the next several minutes the concentration slowly rose and when it got to around 14 ppm i was ready to test it out okay so uh i guess it's time to smell some cyanide again uh it's i mean it's it's just it just smells like cyanide but it might be a bit different uh i think i can detect some of the benzaldehyde which has a slight cherry hint to it but besides that it still doesn't at all smell like almonds so i guess my conclusion from all this is that it is technically accurate to say that cyanide smells like bitter almonds but it's also kind of misleading it's confusing because you tell people that it smells like bitter almonds but nobody has smelled bitter almonds and then people have never heard of them so they just assume they're like regular almonds and then they're prepared to smell something like sweet and nice like almond cookies and that's not at all what you get also a lot of people apparently aren't even able to smell cyanide at all it was hard to find sources for it but some said that up to 50 just can't detect it at all even at toxic levels so it's pretty misleading and i think maybe even dangerous and bad because you're preparing people to smell something that they're never going to smell i think that's worse than just not even knowing at all what it smells like or even having an idea now besides just myself i wanted to get at least a couple other people to try it out and i was able to convince my brother and our friend reggie who works with us to also try it it smells like a ta like a pool towel that you forgot to wash basically okay yeah it smells like chemicals and i used to have a swimming pool and we would dump buckets of chlorine into it to clean it and it smells like that except stronger and uh stronger yeah it's like a stronger smell of chlorine right now from what i'm getting and it pierces my brain their opinions ended up being pretty similar to mine but it was still only a sample size of three i really did want to go out and find other people to give their opinion but none of my friends were really very excited to help out sounds so sad at the end okay so i think that's about all i have to say about cyanide i really did enjoy putting this whole project together though and i would like to do something like this again i already have a few things that i want to try but if you guys have any suggestions i'd love to hear them i also want to give a big thanks to all my patrons for supporting me and to raycon for sponsoring this video earlier this year reikon sent me a pair of their everyday e25 earbuds to try out and since then i've been using them pretty regularly when i first got them i was a bit worried that they would fall out of my ears but they fit really well and i've had no issues i was also able to easily pair them with my phone without reading any instructions which i really liked on top of this they have good bass and a noise isolating fit and with six hours of play time they can easily last for most of the day in terms of price they're surprisingly affordable and despite sounding just as good they start at half the price of other premium wireless earbuds i personally really like them and i definitely recommend checking out raycon they also have a 45 day free return policy in case for whatever reason you don't end up liking them with all that being said though if you decide to pick some up you should be sure to use my special link in the description by recon dot com slash nile red which will give you 15 off your order but anyway i hope you guys liked the video and i will uh as usual a big thanks goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before i post them to youtube you'll also get access to all the older videos that i had to take down and if you support me with five dollars or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music] [Music] so you

Channel: NileRed

Views: 4,372,644

Keywords: nile, red, science, almonds, smell, chemistry, cyanide, sodium, hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, ppm, poison, poisonous, nilered, toxic, bitter, almond

Id: WYagO-nup6c

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Doctrina_Stabilitas]

As a scientist who does OSHA this wouldn’t even failed workplace hazard regulations for a lot of places since the exposure was so short in duration and the TWA would be really small

[u/drew_sleaze]

Tldw: No, no it doesn't.

[u/ravangers]

wouldn't using the sulfuric acid change the smell? I'd assume if it wasn't 100% converted it would probably overpower the smell, and he couldn't even smell crushed almonds so this was kind of a a flop imo

[u/Marblerunr]

I thought this would be a disaster but it ended up just being really informative and interesting. I like it

[u/belabacsijolvan]

The first rule of chemistry: Do not smell stuff by directly leaning above it.

[u/PieFrolic99]

Love his yt channel.

[u/Cmbush]

I thought it was the breath of someone who had ingested a dangerous dose that smells like almonds.

[u/MouseleafTheFangirl]

Why am I not surprised it's NileRed.

[u/Scully__]

I always thought it was meant to smell like pear drops