Your hands stay stinky even when they’re clean. Such as a fish smell lingers on the skin hours after fishing and labourously washing hands. Why is that?
In: Chemistry
The outer surface of your skin is covered in many layers of overlapping dead skin cells. Unless you have a skin infection, bacteria don’t make it past the first few easily-washed-off flakes, and your immune system destroys them if they do.
Smelly molecules like fish or skunk are much smaller than bacteria, so they can penetrate much deeper into your skin; also, your deeper skin layers don’t actively clear them away like they do bacteria. To get rid of them once they’ve soaked in, you’d have to scrub your skin raw, or just wait for them to slowly diffuse away on their own.
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