I realize this is my second post in two days about smells, but it is totally unrelated, I swear.
I am in the UK, but I have been trying to explain this smell to my wife for days…
The bathroom in the place we are renting short-term has a really weird smell in it. It’s not a good smell, but it’s not a smell that makes me want to run out and never go back in. I would describe it as ‘sort of unpleasant.’ Like absolutely tolerable, but I wouldn’t want to hang around.
It doesn’t smell biological. It doesn’t smell like human or animal or mold. It doesn’t smell like some sort of cleaning or construction chemical either.
The closest I have come to be able to describe it is like the stale breath of a smoker, except without the burnt things part. Like everything else in old cigarette smell but that. Except that’s not really right either.
This place used to contain (I think) a printing press and then was turned into apartments, so maybe it’s something left over from that? I don’t know, but I wish I could explain it!
I think you just answered your own question, by describing a smell I’ve never smelled before.
But I didn’t because it doesn’t actually smell like that. It’s like describing a circle as something that looks like a blob of Silly Putty before you squish it up. Only vaguely similar.
If its only vaguely similar to what you basically described as the breath of a cigarrette smoker, it could be that the bathroom was fairly regularly smoked in for a while, like multiple months or a year, and then the smoking stopped, and either a bit of time passed, a few weeks or months, and/or some kind of chemical was used to try to mask/remove the cigarrete odor baked into the walls.
That would then be ‘like smoker breath, but a bit off’.
A chemical used to mask it sounds like a very good possibility!