As Serendipity said, when cleaned on time, they don’t smell at all and my female’s heat smell is not really that strong. You feel it only if you take her in your hands and hold her near your face. Other than that, no smell at all from neither my female or my male. The female one is actually a cleaning freak. She basically cleans her cage herself, throwing the trash out from the hidden spots. Last weekend she took out all her sunflower seed shells out from her nest and piled them in the spot I could collect them from. I think the myth about hamster smell came from people who never cleaned the cages. I once was in a pet store and there were a child with his grandmother and he was asking her to get him a hamster, to which she replied that they’re smelly. I told her that they aren’t , and she replied that she used to own them and they smelled, and I said that you just need to change the bedding regularly and she was so surprised by that fact! As if it’s unthinkable that every creature’s habitat should be cleaned once in a while.
Shortly, hamsters are one of the best pets in the smell department.
Even my mom who has some kind of super nose and smells everything, doesn’t hear their smell))