I like the slightly stale smell of a large body of water. Sort of like the watery freshness plus all the seaweed flora, some dead some alive, combine into the smell of adventure.
Tobacco smoke, but only when it is someone else who's smoking.
Tea tree oil is just great.
My absolute favorite smell is shitty airport coffee drifting from across the terminal, the kind that gives you a slight headache, especially if I'm on the verge of falling asleep. It makes me think of all the traveling ive been fortunate enough to do with my family, and of being a kid trying to catch a few minutes of rest before a night flight. Airports (and mass transit stations in general) can be such beautiful spaces, but even the simplest of them share a singular loneliness at night that makes me feel a mixture of relaxed and slightly creeped out. Anyone who's watched Airplane! can guess what I mean- it's that well-lit emptiness, both amiable and foreboding, the washed out colors and dated furnishings and geometric carpets, glass terminal windows looking out at darkness, making you feel small and displayed. It's wonderfully uncanny, and those experiences were probably a big contributing factor to my love of liminal spaces, as well as my architectural predilection for tile walls, brushed steel, and frosted floor to ceiling glass windows. That, and the first couple of Resident Evil movies, which I was just the right age to enjoy completely unironically and whose slick, richly smooth aesthetic is my favorite thing to this day.
Basically, whiffing cheap coffee at a certain level of sleep deprivation sends me into a dreamlike aesthetic reverie