Back years ago, before all the anti-smoker bans and most of the anti-smoker nonsense, I used to work with a guy that was just rank. No other word can describe the guy. We worked at a radio station and every studio had a can of Lysol in it.
The Lysol was just for general use because of the mikes -— but anyone who went into a studio after this guy would spray the entire studio down because it stunk so bad. He was also one of the few non-smokers on the staff and the very first anti-smoker I ever encountered. He never said a word about the smokers and smoking in the AM or FM studios, or the production or interview studios, but constantly whined abut me smoking in the newsroom.
He never took the hints, and not very subtle ones, that his odor was offensive to the rest of us. That ended when he brought and “air cleaner” into the newsroom so he could tolerate the cigarette odor. I asked him where he got the contraption so we could buy them for each of the studios to get rid of his offensive odors. Nope, not subtle at all on my part.
He still hadn’t cleaned up his act by the time I left, but no one had to put up with his incessent whining about smokers after that day.
Actually what you did was a refreshing breath of subtlety compared to the way I would have handled it.
One of my coworkers was stuck on the other side of an outsourcing software bullpen. The kind where they bring people in where the toilet is a hole in the ground (don't ask what the bathrooms looked like after these people stood on the rims).
I'd go visit him and it smelled like a dead sweaty rhino. They started getting the hint after the cubicle border was a solid line of renuzit deoderizers to shield him from the smell.