55 Comments

  1. aravisthequeen +18

    NOO BLACK LICORICE IS THE BEST AND THE BEST SMELL

    I loved the black marker. Black licorice 4ever.

  3. Janie_S +26

    Brown Mr. Sketch markers smell like themselves, and like nothing else that exists on the planet.

    1. mkpatter +4

      I was just gonna ask “what DID the brown ones smell like?” because I honestly can’t remember.

  4. Fluffernutter +26

    Fuck! The Toast! You are killing it SO HARD TODAY!

    I want to go out and buy a pack of these markers and spend all night drawing more than anything right now.

    1. dakimel +3

      I gave a pack to my son for his 18th birthday.

      (I mean, I gave him other stuff too. The metal head-scratching implement is the favorite, but the markers were close.)

  5. sednarea51 +27

    You said cinnamon and I just got a full-on flashback to that cinnamon smell. Actually, I can still smell it. I’m smelling it RIGHT NOW. This is eerie. oh God now all I want to do is buy an entire pack of these things and inhale deeply for about an hour.

    1. CordeliaFitz +2

      I remember both! So maybe there was another brand/a Mr. Sketch expansion pack. I also remember there being a dark red that was raspberry scented, but that might have just been my obsession with raspberry everything.

  8. meetapossum +40

    “Correction—Runts tried to go banana.”

    That got a big, genuine belly laugh from me. Thank you.

      1. meetapossum +5

        Have you ever had Runts? They vaguely taste like the fruits they’re supposed to, or at least fake versions, but the banana one isn’t anywhere NEAR banana flavor, real OR artificial.

        1. bgprincipessa +8

          Ah! Ok. I am familiar with Runts but don’t typically associate with candy that isn’t chocolate, so I did not know about the flavor disparities. Maybe I’ll find a quarter and a candy machine to try a handful… (those don’t even exist anymore, do they)

  10. thiscalls4soap +32

    Poor Marty, he thought he’d be the wacky fun guy and this would endear him to the others. “That Marty, what a riot!”, he thought they’d say. “You never know what he’ll do next – it’s like a roller coaster ride!”

    Sorry Marty, take it from me, it never works out that way. They just think you’re weird and ignore you when they’re not outright insulting you. Don’t be yourself.

  12. ofTrebond +3

    I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing aloud in the office. I was not entirely successful.

  15. paperbgprincess +20

    I use these markers every day at work and it’s one of the best parts of my job.

    Also, they really ARE non-toxic! It’s vegetable dye. A colleague’s son ate one, and was totally fine.

  18. mollyculetheory +5

    Thissss is my favorite thing I’ve read all week I am sitting alone in the dark chortling gleefully. (I’m doing work in the microscope room so it’s not as weird as it sounds)

  19. bgwee +4

    I was also really into scented crayons around this same time, I guess it was a trend or something. Anyway, I’ll never forget the smell of the stinky ‘black leather’ crayola.

    1. evieskye +30

      Black leather crayola is cracking me up! I am imagining a small child using it to calmly color in a picture of a dominatrix.

    3. cuntessvonfingerbang +12

      I grew up poor, so I usually got second hand crayons and stuff, and I remember the day I got a single scented crayon in a bag of mixed normal crayons and it BLEW MY MIND. I loved it. I’ll never forget that weird artificial banana scent. I would sit in my room and just smell it sometimes.

      Ok, reading that comment back my childhood sounds practically Dickensian, but it really wasn’t that bad and I’m really not that weird, honest.

    4. Rose

      I was given a packet of scented crayons and a colouring book when I was like 13 as part of a weird summer camp secret gift exchange and I loved the smell of the black “leather jacket” crayola so much I used as much black as I possibly could because the smell released better after being coloured with.

      I still love the aroma of that crayon, and the mint aroma of the Mr. Sketch Markers.

      But really the whole box of those markers smells like pre-school to me.

  20. robotosaur +55

    NOTE FROM US GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL: in training, we use Mr. Sketch scented markers all the time and all of us are pretty into it. All your government is trained by smelly markers. END NOTE FROM US GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL.

  23. deleted1892326 +7

    In daycare we would just color squares with these and use as much ink as we could without breaking the paper – and then smell them until that ran out too. Good times.

  24. elsamac +12

    Head Suit: You’re right. I still vote for cinnamon then.

    Marty: Still not a fruit.

    Jeff: We could do like, tree bark.

    Boggs: …Excuse me?

    Please tell me Boggs is saying “… Excuse me, cinnamon IS LITERALLY TREE BARK,” because CINNAMON IS LITERALLY TREE BARK THIS IS AN OUTRAGE I AM OUTRAGED.

    (My best friend had the scented markers when we were little, but I instinctively knew not to mention them to my parents, who would disapprove of training children to huff paint or ink products.)

    1. bgprincipessa +5

      So I believe you and all, but like, how do they get the bark into those rolled up sticks then?

      I mean, I am definitely that person who clicks on the Buzzfeed article about things you didn’t know grew like that, because I do not know how things grow.

      Recently a few friends and I determined cork must come from a tree via the Fall Out Boy album titled “From Under A Cork Tree,” so, I’m just really sorry.

      1. elsamac +10

        I’m guessing (which is just another way of saying “I don’t know”) that the bark is shaved off in flattish pieces and that it curls up as it dries.

        [goes off to Google] BLAMMO, YES: “In several European languages, the word for cinnamon comes from the Latin word cannella, a diminutive of canna, ‘tube’, from the way it curls up as it dries.”

  25. dcbrierton +14

    I never knew what the turquoise was meant to smell like and am disturbed to find that it actually is mango. I have no idea whether it smells like mango or not, because I didn’t know what mangos were as a child, but I do know that there is no conceivable reason to associate them with turquoise. What even is that?

  26. Passing_Strange

    I did this! Well, I drew a strip underneath my nose, and I think it was dark blue.

    Also it was grade one.

  27. whittingly +21

    I just want to throw this out there that when I was little, my mom taught for the Too Good For Drugs (it’s like D.A.R.E. for elementary school) program, and I would sit in her office after school reading all her pamphlets on drugs (ranging from The Evils of Marijuana to actual scary shit like PCP), and I was lectured strongly on the dangers of huffing markers. All of this is to say that when these markers came out, I was terrified of them and thought they were a corporate plot to trick me into using drugs. I was a nervous child.

  28. alex_geedee +1

    I can still clearly remember what most of these smelled like and I haaaated black because I always hated black licorice. I mostly just tried to use red for everything because you can’t go wrong with that artificial cherry smell.

  29. katzenklavierr +1

    I can’t be the only one who tasted these when I was a kid (yellow was the only one that tasted like what it smelled like, in case you were about to run out and buy some to lick). In high school my stoner friends and I got really into creating new scents by smelling multiple markers at a time. Pink and light green smelled delightful.

    I was always mildly grossed out by brown because of the poop association. And I hate cinnamon to this day. Not sure which came first!?