An adult version of scented markers exists… as thermal paste

Before today, I had never heard of Japanese thermal paste maker Clock Work Tea Party. But I’ll never forget them thanks to this Tom’s Hardware article; the company makes limited-edition scented thermal paste. It previously released apple- and strawberry-scented pastes, and on April 12th, it’s releasing a new scent that supposedly smells like an Osmanthus plant in full bloom. All its scented pastes are part of the company’s Ekusuri Mugurisu series, which also includes standard thermal paste.

Osmanthus, also known as sweet osmanthus or tea olive, is a sweet-smelling, fragrant plant native to eastern Asia that blooms a seemingly endless amount of tiny flowers every spring (and sometimes the fall). It’s part of the olive family, and the tiny flowers are what give the plant its strong fragrance. If you have ever stuck your nose hairs close to one of these beauties, the honey-covered apricot scent is hard to forget.

Are scents a practical feature of thermal paste? Absolutely not, but I don’t care. I want to glob a tiny bloop of sweet osmanthus grease onto my CPU and inhale it deeply before attaching my cooler and destroying the smell between two hot pieces of metal. Give me a bouquet of plastic syringes filled with osmanthus-scented paste!

The sick curiosity of seeing how close a non-edible thing can smell like the real thing never left my brain. It probably started the first time my friends and I passed around Mr. Sketch Scented Markers in the back of our 5th-grade classroom, arguing over which one smelled the best and inhaling them until our heads got fuzzy. (I’m sorry, Mrs. D. If this is why we had to sit through D.A.R.E and S.A.N.E lectures from Deputy I-don’t-remember-his-name, I totally get it.) Scent is a powerful human sense, so why not add to an already memorable experience of building a desktop gaming PC with something that smells good?

Unfortunately, the CWTP website shows all the scented thermal pastes (and the regular ones) as sold out, so you might have to wait a while before you can share the experience with your co-workers in the breakroom — minus the D.A.R.E. lecture. Hopefully.