How bad can one person smell, and what was their scent?

ANY perfume, but there’s a tie between perfume that smells like bug poison (yep) and strong musk. Ew and Ewww! And the runner up, any perfume that gets on me when someone hugs me and makes me stink so bad I need to change my clothes and wash.

(I have been known to make a stink of my own when this happens.)

And of course strong cigarette smoke. Ick!

Oh yeah, I have a nearly identical example. I had a coworker who had maybe 10–15 cats at home. She always smelled slightly catty, but one day it was eyewateringly horrible. It was so bad that the people in the desks near her were unable to work. We all suspected that a cat peed directly on her sweater right before work or something.

One time my grandfather went to a church Christmas service. On his way over he stopped to fill his car up with diesel fuel. He spilled it all over his shoes by accident. Diesel has a different smell than gas. It’s a shockingly bad smell if you’re not used to it. But my grandfather worked many years on the farm with his tractors, so he barely took notice. But when he got to the very crowded church, everyone around him noticed. They were covering their noses and looking around to find the source of the smell. My grandfather realized what was happening. He was really embarrassed and covered his own nose and pretended to look around. He thought that would keep everyone from figuring out that he was the stinker.

And @snowberry just reminded me… Once when I was 12, I tried on barely a drop of Liz Claibourne perfume. Seriously, it couldn’t have been more than a drop. I guess my body chemistry is totally wrong for that perfume. Wherever I walked in the mall, people would back away from me. I rode the elevator once and I made everyone else so miserable that my mom made us take the stairs the rest of the way down. When we drove home, my mom rolled all the windows down, even though it was January or February. I took a shower, a bath, and then one more shower before my mother declared me decontaminated.

I was in the grocery store one day, and was hit with a cloud of cat-pee odor. It was hideous.

I was two aisles from the pet food aisle.

When I reached the pet food aisle, I found a couple pushing a shopping cart with hundreds of cans of cat food.

They smelled from two aisles away!

BO is plenty bad.
I was walking through a store once and walked through a fart that another person had left in their wake. They weren’t even in the aisle any longer!!! But that fart sure was! WOW!

@kritiper Actually I’d rather smell bad BO, fart or any other natural but unpleasant smell rather than any perfume. And that includes that nasty “deodorizer” crap people use to make a room “smell good”!

Thank you all for reminding me why I don’t want cats. I was having occasional moments of weakness.

@Judi—People who own cats that smell like that shouldn’t own cats at all. There is absolutely no reason for people to smell like cat urine, spray, or anything else. It’s just a reflection of how unhygienic the people themselves are.

Thank you all for reminding me why I don’t want cats.

I’ve had one cat. No smell. In fact, my girlfriend moved in and said “if anyone says the place smells like cats, I’m out of here!”.

It was not a problem.

I smelled bad in high school. It came from the recycling of milk jugs without rinsing them out first. Took me awhile to figure it out. I was burning myself in the shower to get it off me.

I’ve smelled BO on some homeless people that had probably not bathed in months, or maybe years, that was so overpowering that I had to stifle my gag reflex.

I’ve owned cats my entire life. Most of my friends have cats. I house sit for people who have cats. None of them has ever had a cat pee on their clothes or their furniture, or have that smell on them, personally.

I had a boss who once announced to us that he never used deodorant because he didn’t need it. He was wrong.

@talljasperman Why did you have recycled milk on your skin?

@anniereborn The milk rotted in the containers. The smell was airborne.

The music festival scent is quite profound five or so days in to one of them. The combination of Pot, B.O., urine and beer cannot be masked by any amount of patchouli oil.

The neighbor upstairs came to see me once, and she smelled like poop. It was disturbing. She’s always doing drugs, so maybe she crapped herself and didn’t know, sounds so like much fun.

@ARE_you_kidding_me—your concert story reminded me of this.GenCon is this huge gaming convention. Thousands of geeks from all over the world get together for four solid days of playing games, walking around in costumes and just about everything geek related. I go there every year, but I go home at night where I can shower and get a decent nights sleep. For those who get hotel rooms, they play almost nonstop and frequently give up showering so they can play more games. This convention also takes place the first week in August—probably the hottest week of the year. Also, no offense to gamers (I’m one myself) but they are kind of legendary for their lack of personal hygiene habits in general.

Everything is OK on Thursday, but each day, the overall odor of the entire event gradually worsens until you can barely breathe the air safely on Saturday night. Sunday is better only because most people start going home in the morning so the convention is much less crowded. Everyone notices it, but of course everyone is blaming everyone else for the stench. It’s sometimes referred to as gamer funk.

Gamers have a good sense of humor about it overall. A few years back, someone asked what they should call a large group of gamers. Like, you have a flock of birds, a herd of cattle, a pride of lions… It was quickly decided by the gamers themselves that you should call the group ‘a stink of gamers.’

For those who don’t personally know gamers or have never seen an entire stink of them together, these pictures can help you have the experience. You’ll have to imagine the smell but it won’t be hard. When the news media takes pictures of gamers, they will show you all the people in elaborate costumes. The majority of gamers you’ll see look like the ones in these pictures.

@keobooks The “gamestop” smell LOL!

@keobooks Geez, does everyone show their butt crack there??

Oh yeah. Well, maybe not everyone but enough to make you think that you were at a plumbers convention.

Char ming, @keobooks ~

We always had cats when I was a kid and cat smell in the house was only a problem when ‘my’ rescue cat decided that he would punish me by spraying my bed, punish other family members by spraying the curtains behind the TV (and above the baseboard heat vents) and punish my mother by peeing down the burner of the electric stove.
I have no idea why my parents tolerated it, and I don’t rememeber how it stopped.