Reference point
Smell a polymer banknote just taken from a cash machine.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Faintly metallic, plastic, with a very thin pungent layer of ink. Less smell than people expect.
Old paper money is quite different — it carries the smell of thousands of hands, and that is almost an entry of its own.
Vietnam switched to polymer notes from 2003, so two generations have two different reference points for the same object.
How to smell it
Smell a new note and a worn one side by side. If you can find an old paper note from before 2003, even better — three states of the same thing.
Why this one is hard
Because the smell is very faint and overwhelmed by associations. People say “the smell of money” with a social meaning, not as a description of smell.
Scientific note
Polymer notes are made of biaxially oriented polypropylene, almost odourless when new. The smell comes from the printing ink and protective coating. Old paper money, on the other hand, absorbs sebum, sweat and bacteria from people’s hands, and its smell is mostly that of the people who handled it — the same group of compounds as dried sweat.
In Vietnamese life
Vietnam is one of the few countries using polymer for all of its large denominations. Small denominations are still paper, but for the generation that grew up after 2003 the note most familiar to the hand is polymer — and for them “the smell of money” is quite different from that of the generation before.