Dr. Smellgood

You know what really irritates me about working for a regular housekeeping company?

Besides the chemicals.

It's when clients remark on a job well-done by breathing deeply and sighing, "It smells so clean in here."

"Lady, that stuff doesn't smell so good when you have to breathe it all day."

OK, I have never once uttered that response. But I think it every time.

How did we become hard wired to equate stinky chemicals with clean?

We've been brainwashed

I couldn't find an authoritative "History of Stink," but I did run into an old Wall Street Journal article that explains the recent explosion of scent varieties in household cleaners. (And a newer one here.) It doesn't say how the demand was manufactured, though. And the only hint it gives that strong chemical scents might not be desirable is in a quotation at the very end of the story:

This is from a Pine-Sol magazine ad campaign that
emphasized the cleaner's "knockout" smell.

"We realized that clean doesn't smell the same to everybody," says Mr. Campbell [Jeff Campbell, the author of books on speed cleaning,]. "There really is no relationship between odors and clean. To some extent it's the opposite. The lack of odor is clean."

Somehow, Americans have become brainwashed to think that funk-masking chemicals mean things are clean.

Remember when Febreze first came out? The original unscented odor-killer went over like a lead balloon. An anecdote about that's tucked into the third section of this New York Times article from last year. Apparently, consumers were so thoroughly under the spell of Dr. Smellgood that they couldn't accept the idea of removing stink without adding new stink from perfumes.

Dirt and germs cause odors. Clean does not have an odor.
Here is Inspectapedia's massive guide to identifying and fixing household smells."Clean" is not among the multitude of home odor sources listed. 

The wages of stink

What's wrong with proliferation of scented products? So what if people want the kitchen to smell like "Fresh Linen" and the bathroom to smell like "Ocean breeze"?

Well, the thing about perfumes in cleaning chemicals is, manufacturers don't have to say what ingredients they're using to create them. Nearly all of the time, the most you'll see on a product label is "perfume" or "parfum."

A University of Washington prof was so intrigued by the subject, she and her team analyzed 25 products and found they all contained undisclosed ingredients, and more than a third of them had at least one hazardous compound.

Here's that study.  Here's an essay by that same professor that sums it up and urges people to free themselves from Dr. Smellgood. There are some chilling anecdotes in the comments section.

Here is a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council about the hazards of chemical air fresheners. Air fresheners? More like air polluters.

And it's not just perfumes. The original point of those was to cover up the even less pleasant smell of household cleaners' other ingredients.

Here is a simple and thorough factsheet from University of Washington that sums it all up. The Cleveland Clinic has a handy chart of household chemicals and dangerous ingredients here. The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (Yes, we have one of those. It's in Atlanta.) has a handy booklet about what chemicals can hurt what body systems here.

So how "fresh" does your favorite cleaning product smell now?

Happy Earth Day.