>>I had the pleasure to sit next to someone drinking (and loving) one of those vanilla flavored ones. Maybe she did sense some vanilla - I smelt coconut oil. And since I skipped breakfast that day, my internals were rotating :).
>
>God, they make me wanna retch - just the smell of them. Don't like the vanilla "smell nices" for the car either - make me nauseous, but my favourite ice cream is vanilla. Go figure.

There's vanilla and vanilla. The only taste that still can't be reproduced artificially is coffee - because it has about two thousand ingredients. Also most of the good tastes have quite a few, and any artificial replacement is an approximation. I've found that despite having lost some of the sense of smell to smoking (which is often good :), I still can tell the difference between the real thing and bad fake. Good fake can fool me, of course - that's what makes it good.

The tobacco factory in my hometown makes vanilla-flavored pipe tobacco... which probably doesn't smell exactly like vanilla, but surely smells nice (to me) and reaches far. Once I was looking all around the restaurant to see whether anyone was having a vanilla cake... and it was a guy smoking a pipe, just leaving. And the door was about ten tables away.