Reddit, what is a really inappropriate question you’ve always wanted to ask?

Everyone has a unique smell based on various factors affecting the physical health of our own cells as well as the health and composition of our bacterial cells aka our microbiomes.

A majority of the factors affecting microbiome are environmental in fact, and genetics don't actually play as important a role as we thought.

With this in mind, it makes sense that sharing not just a locale but also a culture increases the likelihood that two people would have similar environmental influences on their flora. Flora composition, we are learning, affects many areas of our lives, including producing most of the smells other humans can sense. While there are physiologic properties that play a role too, a vast majority of what we conscientiously smell when we smell another person is a product of that person's flora. And a floraprint as far as I've read happens to be as unique to an individual as a fingerprint is.

So you could just say yes, in that sense, all people smell different so I would indubitably smell different than a black dude, or any dude for that matter. In fact, I once had an ex tell me she missed my bad breath and stinky smell. Reasoning being about her new boyfriend, generic white male like me, just not having as nice a stinky smell like do. Another ex once mentioned my unique stink too. No one else has though, and I doubt many people would be able to tell that difference.

From personal experience wrestling, ff the two of us, me and my ex's bf that is, were stuck in an elevator with a 99% of people, I would bet they would probably just smell a uniform stank that smells like any other stinky dude.

Now if I was stuck in the elevator with, say, an nfl sized black dude from Baltimore, would he smell different? He would probably still smell like stinky dude to most, but it's also culturally and environmentally far enough away that I'd guess those with a more keen sense a smell most definitely probably would be able to tell a difference. Now I'm assuming this dude to be a similar age, clean clothes, and not a dirtbag because those smells would interfere with our natural ones. Other things like Antibiotic use, diet, and whether you wear socks and underwear also have enormous effects on natural smell. The more differnt those factors are, the more likely you could smell two distinct stanks in that elevator if it were stuck long enough.

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