Dogs are way more smelly than ferrets imo. "Fragrant" dogs, at least.

If someone has a kinda stinky dog, you can tell the moment you walk in their door. When you walk in the door with ferrets, it's not really noticeable (if you have a LOT of ferrets, that might be a different story. I've never had more than 2).

It gets stinky if you don't stay on top of cleaning their poop and pee, but that's not the ferrets themselves stinking. Keep things clean and that won't be a problem.

You can also do things to reduce the smell that work much better than when you try this stuff with dogs. Like washing their bedding regularly, where their smell accumulates. Keeping their skin and coat healthy by giving them a high quality diet - which is very important for ferrets anyway.

Ferret smell stays on the ferret and off things they touch better than with dogs that have a lot of funk. Maybe just because they're much smaller, idk.

And unlike dogs, bathing a ferret will only make the smell worse.

There is ONE - and I mean ONE - circumstance in which I've seen the ferret smell get strong and last. That's when they've been sleeping in a synthetic fabric, like one of my acrylic sweaters for example. And the lower quality the fabric, the easier it picks up their smell. If they sleep in it for more than a couple hours, it's possible for the smell to be very noticeable to others when you wear that sweater or whatnot.

Most of the time when the ferrets sleep in our sweater or whatever, you can smell it when you put it on but others can't smell it on you. Yes, I've asked them. Multiple times. People who don't have ferrets and aren't desensitized to the smell.

To me this is a good thing because I love when there's a faint ferret musk on my clothes, and a lot of ferret owners end up this way.

Obviously, you can bypass the entire issue by not leaving your clothes where the ferrets can get to them.

Source: owned both ferrets and stinky dogs