Study confirms that ancient Egyptian mummies smell "pleasant"

Here's a study you might want a little sniff of. It's from the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the scientists wanted to know if, well -- if mummies still smell nice after being deceased for thousands of years.

You may not have known this, but during the embalming process, the Egyptians stuffed mummies with all sorts of good-smelling stuff to cover over the smell of death. Hence, Dr. Cecilia Bembibre and her team decided to find out how the mummies smelled 5,000 years later.

Conservators have reported the smell of mummified bodies as pleasant, possibly due to balms and resins, but this hasn't been systematically investigated.

Perhaps no one has investigated it because of the mummy's curse? No really, there was an earlier study that showed the mummy's curse shortens lifespans.

(That was one we paid for via the NIH.)

Or maybe no one has investigated the way mummies smell because it's weird.

Regardless of the reason it's never been done before, thanks to Bembibre's team, we now know that mummies smell kind of nice.

'We were surprised by the pleasantness of the smell,' Bembibre said.

So, what exactly do mummies smell like? Mostly woody, spicy, and sweet.

In other words, mummies smell like Christmas.

That's an association I'll never be able to erase from my mind.

Thanks, science!

But wait, there's more:

Bembibre and her team thought the smell was so pleasant, they're going to share mummy scent with the world by recreating it at the Museum of Cairo.

'We want to share the experience we had smelling the mummified bodies, so we're recreating the smell to be presented at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,' Cecilia Bembibre, one of the researchers, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.