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Author Topic: G1 Ponies are scented?  (Read 4250 times)

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lostpony

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Re: G1 Ponies are scented?
« Reply #30 on: August 01, 2017, 03:03:28 PM »
While I am skeptical of such summary conclusions from secondary sources as mentalfloss.com describing "a study" with no citation to such study, or any conclusions based on "studies" which are neither science, complete, or fully disclosing any logic or math behind their conclusions,

it's interesting that actually quite a lot is actually known now about how sense of smell works.  I watched a documentary some years back (also a highly questionable source, so I'm as bad as anyone as to consumption of "scientific" knowledge, haha and I acknowledge that), focused on how perfumers do their work in creating scents.  While not a source of scientific conclusions per se, they did have a great demonstration illustrating how (according to the current understanding) sense of smell works.  We have a number of receptors in our olfactory which are connected to the brain's somatic sensory memory similar to other senses, and different molecules fit into certain of the different receptors.  An odor is actually a group of some multitude of different compounds and when those are fit into the receptors, our brain interprets the pattern as best it can and we become aware of a "smell" similar to the way our brain interprets a set of data from the receptors in our retinas through the optic nerve, for example.  The example used was some scent we find pleasing that is the same as something offensive plus just one more compound....I think the foul odor was acetone and the pleasing odor might have been vanilla but I don't remember exactly.  The smell testors confirmed the bad smell, and then the missing compound was added to the same solution that had the foul odor, and they then confirmed the good smell. 

So it's not surprising how different things smell similar to each other.  Plastic is not exactly "inorganic" actually, because remember organic things are generally some combination of Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen atoms, for example sugar and other carbs are all molecules made of C, H, and O atoms in different numbers with a huge variety of different molecular structures that of course have different amounts of energy stored in the molecular bonds and so much of biology is about converting the CHO from one molecular version to another to store or release that energy.  Oil of course is that same CHO made by life and stored billions of years ago (not millions like many of us think, dinosaurs from 65-265 million years ago are not in oil, it's all from the early life on the planet like 3.5 billion years ago) squashed under great pressures from billions of years of sediment crushing all the CHO into really big and complex molecules that we know, in a big slurry of different actual CHO molecules, as crude oil.  Plastic and fuel and all that stuff is all made from that crude oil and so is all a combination of other CHO molecules and considering all the most important control hormones in our brains and everything else is all CHO too, it's easy to see why making things from crude oil is a dubious practice at best.  Nonetheless, that plastic in our ponies ends up exuding some combination of different compounds that fit into some combination of our olfactory receptors so this is why our brain interprets those combinations as other organic smells that we have naturally found in our environment over our evolution, such as vanilla.

Whew.  Sorry about that longwinded explanation but it's fascinating stuff and there is so much more to it, but this is what little I know about it so now you all know as much as I do.  Hope it made some kind of sense...I'm sure it's not hard to find a much better explanation that reads easier with a Google search for anyone who wants to know more but didn't follow my ramble.

All that being said, I don't think the "pony smell" is necessarily from the breakdown of the pony plastic because people in this thread are smelling the same smells that came out of the package when the ponies were new.  Those of us who never got to smell new G1 ponies might be smelling something else, and the ponies I've collected have had a number of different smells but it's the subtle and pleasant one that is almost but not quite vanilla that I think is the one that people smelled when the ponies were new, and therefore the true "pony smell" that people love so much.

So......hope this is informative and fun to read, and ....smell you later!
« Last Edit: August 01, 2017, 03:09:19 PM by lostpony »

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Re: G1 Ponies are scented?
« Reply #31 on: August 01, 2017, 03:22:30 PM »
I can identify the origin of the "vanilla" smell that G1 ponies have: it's caused by deterioration. There was a study performed on old books and the origin of their distinct smell (which is strangely similar to old pony smell): http://mentalfloss.com/article/31235/what-causes-old-book-smell

While ponies are made out of plastic -- not organic materials like books -- they probably still have similar chemical reactions to deterioration which cause the vanilla smell.

That might be true if ponies all smelled now, and didn't back then - but the opposite is true.
All new G1's out of the package that I can remember had 'pony smell', while most now do not.  That doesn't fit with a deterioration hypothesis.
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Re: G1 Ponies are scented?
« Reply #32 on: August 02, 2017, 12:03:17 PM »
I can identify the origin of the "vanilla" smell that G1 ponies have: it's caused by deterioration. There was a study performed on old books and the origin of their distinct smell (which is strangely similar to old pony smell): http://mentalfloss.com/article/31235/what-causes-old-book-smell

While ponies are made out of plastic -- not organic materials like books -- they probably still have similar chemical reactions to deterioration which cause the vanilla smell.

That might be true if ponies all smelled now, and didn't back then - but the opposite is true.
All new G1's out of the package that I can remember had 'pony smell', while most now do not.  That doesn't fit with a deterioration hypothesis.
The problem with that is that peoples' memories are very sketchy -- ALL memories. You might think you remember a smell from 30 years ago, but you may be creating a memory from what you have heard other people say and what you smell now. I had a friend who thought all ponies had a smell and she would always sniff my ponies whenever she was around, but we figured out that she had had a scented pony as a child and her memory had recorded ALL ponies as having a smell instead of just the one.

It's very difficult to link to an actual scientific study, as usually these things are printed in journals that you have to pay for (and if you find the study online chances are it's not there legally). It would have been nice if Mental Floss had included a bibliography or works cited section, but those types of news sources don't always include their sources.

Here's an online source that DOES have sources cited: http://www.compoundchem.com/2014/06/01/newoldbooksmell/ (Note that the adhesive, paint/ink, etc. mentioned could have been used on the ponies, as well.)

Here's a wikipedia entry on misattribution of memory, which (of course) has a lot of cited sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_memory

EDIT: Mental Floss DID cite their source -- they just linked it within the text of the article.

lostpony

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Re: G1 Ponies are scented?
« Reply #33 on: August 02, 2017, 12:33:42 PM »
I clicked the links in the mentalfloss article while reading it as i always do, and none of them contain any facts about the described study but are only information about the substances it discusses.  It is interesting, but not convincing.

While regular memories are malleable through a variety of mechanisms including suggestion and repetition, actually somatic memories tend to be a lot more accurate and childhood scents can trigger other memories.

While some molecules in plastic do break down quickly, other molecules last for millennia.  There are thousands of different molecules in any kind of plastic so there is no reason to conclude that the "pony smell" isn't made up of some of those original molecules.

 

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