I remember when the smoking ban was introduced in the UK and the smell of smoke in pubs and clubs was replaced by the stench of body odour, I was actually wanting smoking to return as it was a more tolerable smell!!
Either I’ve got used to it now or people have learned to wash because I don’t notice it anymore!
It was sick near me, the pubs now clean up properly.
Look at pictures of people in their 30s back in the 70s, and compare them to people in their 30s today. It’s a massive difference, I hypothesize that it’s the leaded gasoline and secondhand smoke that makes it although I’m not aware of any science to back that up.
Probably a lot of it was first hand smoke.
There is a lot of science to back it up, but all of it is on the opposite direction (those things cause aging), and we can’t really tell if the aging we saw was caused by any of them or if there was something else going on.
it was the chaos demons
I remember going into cafés and things when I was a young man about 14 years old… You wouldn’t be able to see across a small room for the sheer fog bank of cigarette smoke.
We didn’t think anything of it
Friends and I love to dance to live music, and back in the day this was often in a local bar, where people were drinking and smoking. It was policy to remove our clothing outside to let it ‘air out’ rather than bring that smoke smell into the house. Of course we were all dancing HARD, in a smoke filled rooms. I wondered if I was in training to be a fire fighter, or what?
And 500 more cigarettes
Experienced this when I went to Barcelona a few years back. Lovely city, but stepping out into the street felt like stepping into a cigar bar.
Same experience in Paris a while ago. My sister was about to dig into her spaghetti when someones cigarette ash drifted onto it…
I don’t mind it in the streets. I mean, as long as it’s outside it’s okay.
However, I remember a hotel in Spain where clients would be allowed to smoke indoors. It was hell.
I tie it to Germany. I remember getting off the plane the first thing I got hit with was the smell of cigarette smoke. And then wandering through parks and seeing kids smoking with their parents.
You should go to Cologne (or I bet any other major city), now it’s weed smell everywhere 😂
It’s still this way in the place where I live 😖
I hate nicotine so fucking much
I’m so glad the USA had such a strong anti-smoking campaign when I was young.
Well let’s just hope the tobacco industry doesn’t get the good idea to cut Elon or Trump a check…
Vapes are way more popular with younger audiences though. I don’t think tobacco companies care about getting more people hooked on cigarettes anymore, and they don’t need government help to make vaping more popular.
I wonder if our current world has a specific smell that people from the 80s would notice
Cannabis. At least most major cities in Europe/North America I find it really common now to openly smell cannabis all hours of the day. Combination of the strains being MUCH stronger and legalization. Even just 20 years back, of course in the Haight in SF or certain parts of NYC you’d smell it, or outside clubs/bars at night. But today I walk through Downtown SF at 830am and smell it every other block. Was in the design district in NYC a few weeks back and same deal.
It’s common, but absolutely not omnipresent the way cigarette smoke was. Even now it’s quite distinctive and noticable, even if common.
There’s more methane in the atmosphere now. It probably smells like a fart.
Methane needs 5-16PPM [PDF] to be detectable with human smell. Atmospheric Methane is at about 2ppm. So the vast majority of people would not notice a difference.
People from the 40s would recognize the current smell of the world.
I feel like it’s probably the people from the ~1880s-1920s would know the smell of the world today
You used to be able to light the rivers on fire too but Nixon helped ruin that.
