Just to keep this balanced, let me just say that some black people think Caucasians smell “funny,” as well. A basketball player I knew in college complained that his white teammates smelled like “wet dogs” in the locker room.
Like you with the face, I’ve had intimates of both races, and I’ve never noticed a difference in body odor among them.
Everyone smells different, regardless of race.
Haven’t you ever noticed that every house has its own smell, based on the family that lives there?
I once knew a girl whose entire family smelled like warmish milk. Not a pleasant odour.
I’ve noticed a “wet dog and baloney” smell amongst white people. Not all of them, true. But they are more likely to smell like this combo than others.
Black people tend to smell like hair product (this was true especially in the 80s) and body lotion.
Poorer people tend to smell like fried foods and musty furniture.
These are the things I’ve noticed in my travels in the world.
I’ve noticed some people whose body odor smells like mildew. And they always come stand near me in the bus.
If anything, this thread suggests to me that our lack of smelling ability compared to other mammals may well have been an imperative for our survival as a species.
One aspect of the topic that has not been explored, yet, is the aspect of crowd vs individual. Several posters have mentioned knowing individuals of different ethnicities (even intimately) and not noticing distinctive odors. On the other hand, several of the places where posters have noticed different odors have been crowd situations–with one subgroup of us particularly noting the differences in shower rooms–notably warm and humid environments that might enhance (or exacerbate) aromas impinging on one’s consciousness.
I have a similar memory as a child of being in a crowd of people on a hot, humid day and noticing that they smelled different than I was used to.
I wonder whether (for the most part) the differences are actually pretty subtle, but that a closed environment with a large number of people makes those differences more noticeable.
That’s actually true. They contain a pigment in their skin which converts sunlight to energy in a process called “photosynthesis”. Also, they can fly.
I taught in predominately African-American schools, but could not distinguish among the “races” that I taught.
Some of my students would notice when I used a hair product that was supposedly manufactured for Black people. There was one in a yellow bottle with a red cap and narrow red stripes that encouraged curl and smelled wonderful. That was indeed in the 1980’s.
The fragrances of the hair products and the lotions were subtle – not heavy like overdone perfumes.
OMG! Zoe had a Jheri curl!
In my experience, what they (well, some of them) smell like is used dental floss. Or tonsolliths. You know, plaque. Don’t know what, if anything, that signifies.
I hope nobody reading this thread thinks I’m a racist – I just think the smell issue is one of the problems tragically obstructing the destruction of racism. It’s something white supremacists seem to invoke all the time.
I’d put in another vote for hair products being a major contributor. I play basketball a lot and usually I (the token white guy) am outnumbered by black and hispanic guys. The hispanic guys smell about the same as white guys, the black guys smell like hair tonic, IMO. And they seem to spend a lot of time grooming before and after games, for what it’s worth. Just sayin’.
I too have noticed this black body smell, but I’ve never talked about it for fear of someone yelling “racist!” I certainly haven’t noticed this on all black people (e.g., not my black roommate in college), or even the majority of them. On the other hand, it is a distinctive odor that I have never smelled on anyone else but black people.
I’m thinking it has more to do with body odor than diet or hair product. I first noticed this when I was an adolescent, and was at an amusement park on a summer day, standing next to a group of sweaty black folks. I would occasionally smell it when riding on crowded buses on hot days. And then once when I standing close to a black co-worker, out of the blue there was that same odor that I hadn’t smelled in over ten years.
It’s not a chemical or artifical smell like you’d expect from hair product; it’s a very earthy, meaty smell.
Everybody smells different, and body chemistry plays a big part. My grandmother thought black people smelled different, but I had a very sensitive nose (still do, but not like when I was a kid) and the people I knew all smelled different although sometimes in similar ways.
I have noticed that quite often when someone (male or female) is wearing too much fragrance that person is dark-skinned. I’m thinking the darkness of the skin might affect how the fragrance is dissipated. Either that or the people in question are afraid of smelling bad and are applying too much fragrance to counter that. Please note that I am not saying that all dark-skinned people wear too much fragrance or that they are the only ones.
When my favorite uncle was diagnosed as bipolar (actually, so long ago that the diagnosis was manic-depressive) and put on lithium he smelled so different that I didn’t want him to hug me any more. It wasn’t that he smelled bad, just not like the uncle I loved. He smelled like a stranger.
When I was in a college dorm about 20 years ago about 1/2 of the black students had pretty sensitive facial skin that prohibited them from shaving with standard shaving cream, soap, etc… and had to use a shaving powder (or something) that smelled just like human poo, and it would smell up the dorm for at least 50 feet. We always knew when one of the brothers was shaving.
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The only people I mix with who have a distinctive body ordour are some of the Middle Easterners. It’s not particularly different to white BO (maybe a little “sharper”), just stronger. A couple of Lebanese co-workers had complaints made against them about it. Thing was, these guys generally had excellent grooming and personal hygeine. I think they just needed to lay off the cardamom in their coffee a bit (I’m sure that was the cause). The whites were next in line - people like me who are just generally big and hairy, and can get a bit sweaty by the end of a shift, and the Vietnamese generally had no smell at all (except one guy who was absolutely repellent - but I don’t think he had a huge soap habit).
In the toilets, however, was another thing. The Vietnamese guys could make the paint peel off the cubicle walls. They said the same thing about us though : fish sauce and chilli versus mincemeat and cheese.
Definitely diet, I reckon. At least amongst my workmates. I haven’t particularly noticed any one culture favouring a certain shampoo, deodorant, perfume, etc.
Interesting information here:
When I was in Detroit, it amused me to see that soul food restaurants served what I thought of as southern cooking: pork chops, greens, etc.
I’m surprised this thread has gotten this far without anyone mentioning that, from a scientific standpoint, there is no such thing as race.
If food determines our odor, then based on the above, this white boy smells like the Apollo Theater. Southern cooking is my mainstay.
Of course, I have also smelled Korean, on purpose. I’ve found that the ingestion of large amounts of kimchee before backpacking repels mosquitos, bears, ticks, and most other campers. 
I have read this before. But if it were true, why so many medical studies saying black women are more likely to get…, and black men are more likely to get…
Here is a good article in today’s New York Times:
A VERY GOOD THREAD, by the way.
Generally, such studies identifying “black” medical issues are actually not talking about every person who would be included in the (excessively large and, therefore, socially constructed) “black race.” Those studies generally are in reference to the (socially constructed) “black” population of the United States–which draws from a much smaller pool of people than whatever the word “race” might indicate.
Clearly, there are populations of people with genetric associations. However, those populations (the word more typically used in biology) are smaller than the multiple populations that would be identified by the word “race.” If we talk about a “black race” as if it had a biological reality, we wind up including all the peoples of the Southern Sahel of Africa, the peoples of the Western coast of Africa, the peoples of the Eastern coasts of Africa and its highlands, the Khoi-San, and other groups–all of whom are actually separate ethnic populations that have only a similarity in skin color and a presence on the African continent.
Race is a social construct. The reason that medical journals in the U.S. can get away with using it as a biological term is that the overwhelming majority of people with African ancestry living in the U.S. came from a specific region of Africa where they included closely related populations (generally from the region stretching from Sierra Leone to the Northern region of Congo). If more slaves had been imported from Southern or Eastern Africa, most of the “racial” determinations would break down because the populations would be more widely dispersed. (For example, Sickle Cell Anemia would not be considered a risk for all black Americans if there had been more slaves imported from what is now South Africa where that genetic trait is pretty much absent.)
Even the NYT article to which you linked notes that doctors are studying populations of “Dutch, Icelandic, Ashkenazi Jewish, Finnish, . . . or Swedish” people, not “white” persons by race. Populations are real. Races are only social constructs.
(The author of the article also makes an odd assertion regarding the NEJM’s editorial arguing against “race based” medicine: "But the same issue of the journal also included an article and another editorial suggesting there were some important racial differences in the way people reacted to various medicines, including drugs used to treat high blood pressure, heart failure, depression and pain. " She ignores the fact that the reason the editorial was written was that the study linking race to the efficacy of heart medication had suffered flaws in which better results could be obtained by examining the patients according to age, income, and general health and ignoring the artificial index of race.)
There may be places where a (perceived) race is somewhat useful (as in the U.S. where one (perceived) race is actually a more limited population that an accident of history has placed into a larger group, but we have found no evidence of any medicine or illness that affects persons by “race” when the whole world is surveyed.
