They can't smell it on themselves. You get so used to the smell that it is completely unobserved by them.

When you smell something all day, every day for years, your brain just ignores it. It's called nose blindness.

I wasn't and that's actually what finally motivated me to quit. I had just started a job where nobody else smoked and I didn't want to stink up the cramped office every time I walked in the door. As of this summer it's been 13 years.

I admit, though I have no interest in smoking myself, it definitely has a cinematic allure in fiction when establishing a character a certain way.

I’m also grateful for it in Hitman, where you can create gas leaks near smoking spots and trigger a convenient accident kill.

I mostly see homeless people and people in rough shape smoking. Probably in their lives it doesn't matter if they smell like cigarettes. I worked once in a place where one guy of all the employees smoked, and he was basically a social pariah. And people like borderline harassed him for smelling like cigarettes.

He used to smoke out front, then he was asked to smoke on the side of the building because people coming in the building complained, but then people complained about him being on the side of the building and walking near his cloud to their car, so eventually he literally had to smoke either in his car or walk all the way around back and smoke against a brick wall with no windows away from the parking lot. 🤣

It's crazy how far away you can smell someone smoking. I think it smells awful. Strangely, my grandpa used to regularly smoke a pipe in his office/study at their house in the evening, but he always dumped his pipe outside and kept everything very clean, and it always smelled wonderful in there to me, and even to this day I love the smell of pipe tobacco, so I guess it's just kind of what you're familiar with. Or maybe pipe tobacco just doesn't smell as bad or something idk.