A new born baby doesn't actaully smell like 9 months of stale urine like you might expect (isn't that what the amniotic fluid is mostly made of?). It doesn't smell bad at all. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't smell so great that you would buy a bottle of it to spray under your arms, but it is a hard to distinguish aroma.

The closest analogue to the smell of a newborn was one day when I was walking through a shopping mall's food court. It was the end of the day and the kitchens were all removing the warming trays for cleaning. There was a fog of steam coming from the shops that filled the food court and that's when it hit me. Newborns smell like old bain-marie water at the end of a busy day, a kind of soupy smell enriched with the scraps and spills from food that you would never tell your doctor you were eating.

But don't let that stop you from having a baby.