One of the most frequent questions I get is “Jon, do bones smell? Your showroom must stink so bad!”

Good news! They don’t, and it doesn’t, except for when Chonk eats some bad tuna. 


While bone is living it has flesh, grease, cartilage, and matter attached to its calcium structure. Human remains with any amount of soft tissue will have an odor, due to the process of rotting. Fortunately, all medical skulls go through a long, intense cleaning process to clean the bones down to their white calcium infrastructure. This process for bones begins with an ammonia bath that strips the grease away, and continues with an additional hydrogen peroxide dip that bleaches the skull. Given that the bones I source went through this process decades ago, they are completely odorless! What a relief.

‍