Smencils

Smencils launched in 2003 as a school-fundraising product built on one sharp insight: kids would rather sell — and buy — something cool than another candy bar or tub of cookie dough. The maker, The Smencil Company, grew into Scentco Inc. on the strength of it, and the scented pencil became a staple of fundraiser catalogs, book fairs, school stores, and checkout counters everywhere kids had allowance money.

The pencil itself was cleverer than it needed to be: sheets of recycled newspaper wound tight around a No. 2 graphite core, soaked in a 'gourmet' fruit-and-dessert scent, and sealed into an airtight plastic tube with a collectible topper so the smell survived until you bought it. In a mid-2000s classroom the tubes functioned as currency — traded, sniffed, ranked, and confiscated — alongside gel pens and whatever else lived in the pencil pouch.

Unlike most fads of its era, Smencils never actually went away. Scentco still makes them (plus scented pens, crayons, and stickers), and the fundraising machine that launched them keeps introducing them to new classrooms — one of the few 2000s playground crazes you can still buy new today.