I made this methyl salicylate from only stuff you can buy at lowes and walmart. It's still cloudy though, might have some water or sulfuric acid. It has a delicious sweet root beer smell, very close to mint lifesavers.

I love esters because of their diverse smells. Change either the alcohol or the carboxylic acid side of the ester, and you get a whole new smell. Hundreds of combinations. They're easy to make.

One day I want to have a collection of many different esters, made from chemicals like formic acid, acetic acid, propionic acid, benzoic acid, salicylic acid, and methanol, ethanol, 2-propanol. wiki says ethyl formate smells like rum, and both chemicals are easy to get. Formic acid and sulfuric acid from dudadiesel.com, and ethanol from everclear and molecular sieves. But dudadiesel is currently out of stock on formic acid, and they're the cheapest source by far, ugh.

Other sources of chemicals for the hobbyist are elementalscientific.net, ebay, amazon, and chemsavers.com, but they're more expensive than dudadiesel.com because they're ACS analytical lab grade and not crude