Nowadays, fraudulent means of bird's nest emerge one after another, and merchants' rhetoric about pure bird's nest is becoming more and more abundant, making it even more difficult for consumers to distinguish between true and false. Take the smell of bird's nest as an example, there are many explanations from merchants, such as: strong protein smell; Sour orange flavor; Sawdust smell; The smell of the sea and so on.

In fact, the main effective components in bird's nest are collagen and sialic acid, and the content of protein accounts for about 50% of the total nutritional components, so the pure bird's nest will have a unique faint protein fragrance.

However, due to the harsh nesting environment and long-term oxidation, some inferior bird's nest raw materials have been covered up by the odor of the harsh environment. In order to make them sell at a good price, businesses need to "facelift" them, and many chemicals are used in this process, such as hydrogen peroxide, sulfur dioxide and sulfur trioxide. So after the "plastic surgery", the smell becomes the smell of chemicals, such as lime water. Because the content of bird's nest in some inferior raw materials is too small, merchants have to add colloid to it to increase the weight, such as fish glue, pectin, pigskin glue, seaweed glue, tremella glue and so on. And then there will be a strong protein flavor, or fried flavor, or seafood flavor.