I have noticed on English buses that I can smell the Indian or Pakistani people next to me, and that they have an unfamiliar flavour to me. I wouldn’t call it offensive, just different. I had Nigerian friends and they and their house had another distinctive flavour.
My Dad’s personal flavour is to me, the most comforting and lovely smell, but even as a little kid, I never liked my Mum’s. Why?
And in my marriage to a Japanese man, I am the smelly one of the pair! He absolutely does not smell. He had never had BO in the time I have known him (ten years or more) and he has never used deodorant. Add to that fact that he is in the military (remember the recent stinky soldiers thread??) and he goes on exercise for weeks at a time. He comes home so dirty that he is frightening, and I make him strip off in the hall and go right into the bath to clean up. He is scraping the dirt off himself with his fingernails, and his breath would slay a horse. But his body - nothing. Not even ANY smell. Weird, eh?
I wonder if some of it is the diet, but long-term. I certainly smell less than I used to living in England, and I exercise more and live in a hotter place (in the summer.)
I noticed the other week that the 3.30 at Ascot racecourse was a lot smellier than the 2.30, prolly 'cos there were more runners and one of the previous runners took a dump at the winning post
Clean hair should smell like shampoo. I don’t know if mine ever smells like wet dog, but I guess if it does I don’t notice it.
I’m very attracted to the smell of my bf’s neck and chest. His chest hair is maybe the most comforting smell in the world.
I don’t notice a difference in the way whites and blacks smell, but I have noticed the way Indian people smell spicy. I guess it’s whatever you’re used to.
There is a large Ethiopian/Somalian (yes, I get the dichotomy) presence in my neck of the woods, and - while I detest incense - every one I’ve met has a strong and VERY pleasant generic incense scent.
I’m a white male of central European extraction (German/Polish), and I have a sharp garlicky tang, but I almost never eat onions or garlic or anything like that. My diet is mostly ramen and rice.
The only effect of that, as far as I can tell, is that I have poor muscle tone and my feces are almost odorless. Still, my apocrine sweat has this sharp garlic smell to it when it accumulates; otherwise, I’m practically odorless.
My sister smells different from me—it could be just that she’s female and has a different body chemistry than my own, but it also could be that she has a very different diet from my own. She tends to eat more meat and junk food than I do.
I’m sure the answer to the question is very hard to grasp, simply because of all the variables involved. Culture, diet, frequency of bathing, body chemistry—it’s pretty hard to isolate just one of these variables and experiment on that alone.
I lived in Japan for a while in high school, and had a friend who had lived there for ten years or so (most of us Americans spent a year or two there, then moved on–very transient society). Anyway, my friend spoke fluent Japanese, as very few Americans in Japan did. She told us that she’d gotten onto an elevator once, on which were two older Japanese women. The doors closed, the elevator began to rise, and one of the women said to the other, perfectly audibly but in Japanese…
“You’re right! They DO smell different!”
I can only imagine the horrors of self-consciousness my friend endured until she was able to get off the elevator.
Your friend should have said something that indicated that she had heard them as she left the elevator. That would teach people to talk behind people’s backs…in front of them.
Lived in Germany a long time and talk about white-bread noses!
Germans always complained about the stink of foreigners. At first I thought they were just crazy. Then once, I ate a pizza on a Friday night that had garlic.
On Monday morning at work, the Germans all said to me, “eee…you had garlic!”
Mind you, I had brushed my teeth Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning…they could still smell that pizza from Friday night!
However, now living with a German in the US, he can no longer smell garlic on people unless they ate it within the last couple of hours.
I think the problem is that you can smell anything “strange”, meaning anything you don’t normally smell, long afterwards. Non-smokers can tell if you smoked, women can tell if their husbands have a different perfume on their shirt, and as much as I still love NYC, that city simply stinks to highheaven! Walking down the steps to a subway is the lovely combination of roasting chestnuts and urine.
The one odor I have never been able to understand is that of the rather chubby man who has come out of the shower…what the hell soap were they using! It is the most pungent overpowering odor of SOAP that I have ever smelled in my life!
My sense of smell is almost nonexistent, but I still smell a difference on Indian/Pakistani people. I also knew within seconds of walking into my first dorm room that my roommate was black, by smelling her clothes. (Hey, come on! I just wanted to see if we wore the same size shoes by chance, and the smell just hit me.)
I suspect there are more subtle odors associated with other races, though, because my dogs bark like crazy when a non-Caucasian walks by the house or gets close to the door, without a visual. (There are a few exceptions, U.S.-native Hispanics and Asians being the most prominent.) It’s kind of embarassing, actually, when we have mixed company…damn racist dogs.
When my brother was training at the New Canadians centre where he was placed (during his time with Katimavik), the instructors explained that Westerners smell completely gross to other races because we generally eat more meat than they do.
What I don’t understand is why people of other cultures, who are not so fanatic about bathing, don’t understand that this choice is not beneifical to them socially or in business when they choose to live in the US.
I went into a stationery store once, the owner was an Indian woman. She was beautiful, beautifully dressed in a lovely sari, she had the jewel, the whole nine yards…and I swear to you the stench coming off of her could knock a buzzard off a shitwagon. I kept moving away and she kept sorta following me around the store. I could literally smell her two aisles away, I was gagging and I was shocked. I really wanted to say to her “honey, if you want to be successful in business in this country, you really have to re-think your personal hygiene.” Cuz I never went back to that store.
I provided the straight line for this several days ago. I can’t believe no one has fill in the punch line yet. I’m very disappointed in all of you. It goes like this, Bakhesh set it up:
Straight Line: “How do you smell?”
Punchline: “Awful!”
The classic joke is “My dog has no nose.” It’s a little bit obscure but I thought at least one of you would get it. Christ, they even used it in a Monty Python sketch once!
There is no such thing as normal.
Hmmm, there are no other cultures. Or maybe we’re all other cultures? Some of the people in the world don’t smell like you, or your family. You are as different as they are. You are not normal, and they are not odd.
White americans from the southeastern united states tend to smell like pesticide, from the ck one style modern perfumes, or funeral homes from the “traditional” scents.
But not all of them.
French people don’t all smell funny, and yes, some europeans do actually bathe. Sorry. I will admit that most people on this thread have actually been fairly stating that these smells are not hygiene based, but, for the few who missed the memo–We have things in our bathrooms to use to keep clean ya’ll ain’t even got, so to speak. The Georgian in me escaped. Most of the smelly people mentioned have pretty elaborate ideas about cleanliness and consider many groups especially dirty, due to their lack of bidet (or equivalent) or the practice of eating with the same hand used for hygiene.
Having said that…lll tell ya what demographic sho do stank…folks who drink coffee and smoke, as in, togther, then, give them an hour or so to ferment, hot damnation. Funkay.
Us English smell strong to the Japanese… the Japanese word for someone who is in their eyes is something on the lines of ‘milky’ - no cite, perhaps a Japanese doper could verify?
Us English smell strong to Americans… our national dish is curry.
The OP title had me wondering about being in the pack in the penultimate lap of a 10 000 metres race on a hot day…
or being behind half a dozen raw meat fed huskies in a sled race.
