It’s been around 10 days since my boyfriend quit smoking (don’t know if he’ll succeed) but he still likes being in the company of smokers and finds the smell pleasant. He has been a smoker for about 15 years.
I remember when my friend quit smoking some years ago, and she started HATING the smell of cigarettes and avoided it.
So is it individual/depends on the person? What happened in your experience? (I’ve never smoked and cigarette smoke always smelled awful to me)
I had quit for nearly ten years without noticing a bad smell from cigarettes. Then it seemed like all of a sudden the smell was really bad. So I guess it took that long for my sense of smell to come back? I still don’t notice it very much out in public but my DH smokes and sometimes it’s really disgusting.
By the way this is probably better suited for IMHO?
I quit smoking a few years ago. The smoke coming off a cigarette, if it’s just a whiff of it in the air, doesn’t really smell bad to me. It’s not exactly pleasant, either, though, and if I walk into a cloud of it, it’ll make me choke.
If it gets into fabric and hair, though, it’s horrible. Smokers stink. If you’ve just been out for a smoke, stay away from me for a while, please. I can’t believe I used to go walk around smelling like that. That’s one reason why I will avoid smokers and smoke if I can - I know that if I’m in a room where someone is smoking, I’ll walk out smelling like an ashtray.
Yeah I wasn’t sure, I thought there would maybe be some factual answer about how the brain chemistry works. If the mods want to move it that’s fine.
I appreciate the replies so far 
It’s been almost 30 years. For the most part, secondary smoke in a car or clothes is mildly aversive. However, pipe smoke, or someone smoking my preferred brand, and I get a bit of hankering even now.
Agree with the others, when I quit smoking I found stale smoke smell just gross. But fresh smoke wafting from a cigarette…mmmmm.
Chimney here. Cigarettes smell bad even when you’re a smoker, except when it’s you doing it. I personally hate being around smokers when I don’t have one of my own. But when it’s yours, it’s different.
Also your sense of smell in general goes right down the drain, so you don’t notice it as much when it’s from across the room, or the smell of smoke on people’s clothes, that sort of thing. But when it’s right in your face, yeah, stinks. Old, cold tobacco smell is even worse, but then I really have to have my nose in the ashtray to smell it at all.
To give you an example of just how muted your sense of smell gets, I once was tasked with cleaning a stable that hadn’t been cleaned for 15+ years despite being in heavy use. The old owner had simply put a new layer of straw once in a while and called it a day. There were a good two feet of shit stratas, and the bottom layers were just a diarrhoeic magma of steaming putrescence. I cannot possibly make justice to just how foul the whole thing was. My sis and my cousin both puked a couple times, but to me it just smelled kinda like public toilets. Not pleasant, but not a big deal either.
(And I’m not saying this in a “haha, pussies” kind of way - sis is a vet, the things she does for work every week make me run away squeaking. As for cousin, last I heard from him he’d enlisted in the Foreign Legion so…yeah.)
I quit 5 years ago. People smoking around me does not bother me and I still have the odd craving but the smell of the ashtray, butts, and my clothes afterward really repulse me.
Yes, I didn’t like the stale cigarette smell. I guess I never noticed fresh smoke much. But I discovered that my mother stank. I asked my wife, who never smoked, how she put up with me and she replied that it just went with the turf and she tried to ignore it, but was very happy when I quit. My daughter made her BF give up smoking before she agreed to marry him. He did and is happier for it.
Did your friend use Welbutrin to help him quit?
I tried that once and one of the side-effects was that the smell of smoke was absolutely nauseating to me. It was extremely unfortunate that I lived with 2 smokers at the time. I had to put Vick’s under my nose like I was in a morgue.
When I quit for real this year I experience no such aversion. But like the others who posted, I am indeed more averse to “stale smoke” than I used to be but that’s just because I arrive cleaner than I used to be.
Personally, I always thought stale cigarettes stunk on people’s clothing, hands (including my own) when I smoked. So it was about the same when I quit. I still like the smell of someone smoking cigarettes, cigars or pipes but it is the same stale smell that is yucky. I think heavier smokers have their sense of smell lessened and it comes back after a while which is why the start hating it. I never had that issue. Smokers and smoker’s homes and cars always smelled awful to me. Even when it was mine.
I quit smoking a bit over a year ago. I still enjoy the smell of “fresh” tobacco smoke - I mean, that’s one of the basic appeals of tobacco - it produces a pleasantly “aromatic” smoke as opposed to the acrid, harsh smell of most burning vegetation.
But even when I still smoked, I disliked the “stale smoke” smell, the smell of a dirty ashtray, etc.
That’s a good point. When I quit I definitely gained some sort of “super smelling” ability. I started thinking everything stank. Everything my roommate cooked made me nauseated. My house no longer smelled like smoke it smelled like eew.
It took me months to get over it.
When I quit I actually enjoyed the smell of second-hand smoke. But after about two years, this became a strong aversion. Since then I can’t stand being around smokers, even if they’re not presently smoking.
Pretty much straight away, back in January-February of this year, when I’d been off the weed for a few weeks, the smell was annoying.
More irritating was the way my apartment smelled – the way stale smoke clung to things like rubberized parts of music equipment (carried in bars from years ago when smoking was legal in bars), clothes, etc. I only have ever smoked in my office in my apartment, and usually with the window open, but the smell was overwhelming – the smell of dead smoke monster.
I’ve since moderated cigarette smoking to one or two per day on average (maybe a pack one day, then 9 days without, maybe some other configuration), and the smell of cigarette smoke itself doesn’t bother me (nor, apparently, the fact of inhaling the smoke). It’s actually kind of a comforting smell, second-hand smoke – it’s something I’ve been used to my whole adult life. Like cookies baking in the oven, maybe, for those with a sweet tooth. (OT factoid – yesterday I was too rushed to begin an eighteen hour day at campus to make breakfast and too broke to buy any food, so I raided some leftover halloween mini-candies and subsisted on a handful of them for the entire day – I think I probably lost an entire pound of weight that day alone, but I’d forgotten why people eat sugar. Gives energy, and so forth, and turns you into a stoned-looking and acting retarded when the energy is converted).
Technically, the cigarettes have always smelled bad - you’re just noticing it more now.
I quit smoking about 5 years ago and found the smell of cigarette smoke, ashtrays, and smokers immediately distasteful, but not extremely repulsive. I notice it more than a never-smoker, I guess, but it’s no worse than smelling cologne too liberally applied.
I have never had smoke smell cause me to crave cigarettes, but that might be because I used Chantix to quit, and by the end of the first week I didn’t even find my own cigarettes appealing.
I’ve quit five times this year. (None of them successful.) During four of those times, I was drawn in by the smell, the other time I was repulsed by it. But I think that it’s the fresh/stale thing that makes the difference.
When I was a kid I loved it when my father lit up in the car.
After about a year after I quit (22 year habit) I started disliking the smell of lit cigarettes. It’s like inhaling ashtray now after almost four. I can’t stand it. My roommate smokes and it’s gotten to the point I want him out because it makes me sick every morning to smell it. When I go to the store I have to hold my nose coming up to the entrance because I know there will be a line of smokers there and it just turns my stomach.
This is how it is for me. I love the smell of opening a pack of cigarettes and smelling the tobacco, burning isn’t that great and the stale after smell is horrible. If I visit a friend (who now smokes in her house, she didn’t for years but she started after I stopped meeting her at the gate to chat and smoke) I have to dump all my clothes/jacket in the laundry and hop in the shower or it lingers.
I also love those sweet smelling cigars and such, but I’m afraid if I smoke one I’ll start smoking them more and then be right back where I was before, smoking a couple packs a week. That’s pretty much what happened to me last time I started again, only it was cloves that time that started it. I don’t need the (literal) headache again.