Ask Alex: What makes people smell?

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By Alexander Castillo

I am going to assume you mean to ask why people smell a certain way. When a person says something smells, the smell tends to be bad. Not all people smell bad though.
Usually it’s only the people who are sitting right next to the only open seat on the bus, or the people you share a cramped elevator with. I’ve known those people to smell like an alleyway dumpster filled with skunks and cheese.
The people on the bus are impossible to avoid because you’re sitting next to the only open seat.
If you stand, they will know you didn’t want to sit with them and then they will be stinky and sad. The elevator people are easy to avoid by taking the stairs, which always smell weird, but not exactly bad.
ll these smells are picked up by your olfactory senses. Mostly it’s your nose. In fact, it’s all in your nose.
People smell because humans have all sorts of glands that ooze human juice that smells like people.
This “juice” is mostly sweat, but can also be pheromones and whatever else squirts out of people’s pores. So some “juice” just smells better than others.
I’m sure you have experienced your fair share of your own smell, most likely after a workout, or when the girl of your dreams smiles at you, or when it is very hot outside and somehow you believed your mother when she said she would only take a minute in the store and you decided to stay in the car.
Other people juice themselves artificially in an attempt to increase their attractiveness. Girls especially, do this. It seems to me that girls believe they only smell beautiful when their scent fills a large room.
To get this sort of coverage, a lot of smelly liquid is required. That’s why perfume comes in big spray bottles, while cologne is always sold in tiny, pourable bottles.
Also, perfume can be bought to smell like anything on the planet mixed together. There’s warm vanilla sugar peach sunrise when you want to smell like the sun is coming up over some yogurt; and cool blueberry banana apple mango, for when you want to smell like the produce aisle at the grocery store.
Cologne tends to smell more like places rather than things. Men can smell like Australian beaches or a wintry forest.
People smell purposely and people smell accidentally. Some people are so smelly you can almost see the smell from afar and you hold your breath as they pass you.
On occasion, someone beautiful will pass you and you wait for the wind to hit you so you can find out if they smell pretty, too.
They almost always do. Just please do not go around smelling beautiful people. We don’t like it.