How to tell Orange grisette from Destroying angel

The cap is 5 to 12 cm across, egg-shaped as it breaks out of the sac, then bell-shaped and convex, finally flat with a low, darker central bump.

It's yellow-orange to orange-brown with an apricot tinge in the centre, paler towards the edge. The surface is smooth and shiny, slightly sticky when wet, and almost never carries patches of veil. The edge is grooved like a comb.

The cap is 5-12 cm across, egg-shaped when young, then bell-shaped or conical, often slightly lopsided, and finally spreading with a boss. It is entirely white or creamy white, slightly yellowish in the centre in old mushrooms. The surface is smooth and slightly sticky in wet weather. The mature cap has no scales, no warts and no veil remnants (unlike the fly agaric or Caesar's mushroom).

The gills are free, crowded, white to cream, with shorter gills of varying length in between.

The spore print is white.

The gills are white and free (not attached to the stem) and moderately crowded. The spore print is white. As in the rest of Amanita section Phalloideae, to which this species belongs, the gills stay white and free even in mature mushrooms, unlike those of Agaricus.

The stem is 10 to 15 cm tall, up to 20 cm, and 1 to 2 cm thick, tapering upwards, hollow and brittle with age, pale to deep orange with a white-and-orange zig-zag pattern of soft scales, like snakeskin. There's no ring and no bulb.

At the base is a large, thick, loose white sac (volva), often lobed and hidden in the soil.

The stem is 8-15 cm tall and 1-2 cm thick, cylindrical, long and slender, with a sac-like volva at the base (a remnant of the universal veil that looks like an eggshell). It is entirely white. Near the top is a white membranous ring, firm in young mushrooms and sometimes gone in old ones. The stem surface often has thin white flaky scales and fibres.

The flesh is thin, white, soft and fragile, and doesn't change colour when cut.

The flesh is firm and entirely white and doesn't change colour when cut, like many edible mushrooms, so that tells you nothing. The smell is like radish in a very young mushroom, then turns unpleasant and sickly sweet, sometimes with a hint of chlorine, hence the epithet "stinking" in its Ukrainian name. In young mushrooms the smell is still faint, so don't rely on it as the only sign.

The smell is faint: some sources call it sweet and mushroomy, others indistinct.

Faint, unpleasant and sickly sweet, sometimes with a hint of chlorine, especially in old mushrooms and when the flesh is damaged. It tells you nothing about safety: the smell develops only with time, and a young mushroom with no distinct smell can still end up in the basket and cause fatal poisoning.