Why You Should Use Unscented Products
You wake up, trudge to the bathroom, where a faint hint of toilet bowl cleanser offers its greeting to the day. Off to a great start, you use a shampoo that smells “fruity,” a body wash that smells “fresh,” and a face wash that thankfully only smells a bit like “fresh linen. “
Your deodorant smells “sporty.,” your face potion a hint of “rose.”
Your socks pulled out of the dryer hold on tightly to a distant cousin of “lavender..”
Your soy milk should smell like “vanilla.” It does so much more than your creamer smells like “Crème Brûlée.” When was the last time you ate something that just had a date with a blowtorch?
Your healthy breakfast cereal has “real strawberries,” but smells like someone went a bit wild with their natural flavorings.. It is probably a good idea to continue to ignore the soft red apple on your counter.
You step out of your apartment, assaulted by a happy citrus carpet cleaner, which, admittedly, is better than what the carpets smelled like before they were cleaned. The elevator has a different smell from the mixture of scented anti-viral solution on the handles and buttons and the pine-scented floor cleaning solution.
The scent button you have on your car’s ventilation …. the scented wreath on the door to your office …. someone’s “lemongrass” reed diffuser in the office next door.
Nose Fatigue
At a certain point in the day, you stop really smelling any of these things. The term “anosmia” refers to the complete lack of ability to smell one or more scents for a period of time or permanently.. Hyposmia, or a reduced ability to smell a specific scent or set of scents., is related to anosmia.. Both of these conditions are likely to have permanent (e.g. Parkinson’s Disease) or temporary (e.g. sinus infection) medical causes.
In the case of your scent environment degrading your ability to enjoy meaningful scent experiences during your day, we are talking about nose fatigue, olfactory fatigue, or olfactory adaptation. Sensory adaptation occurs with all of our senses so that sensory overload does not impede our ability to identify and respond to threats or opportunities.
The problem with the near constant exposure to relatively safe levels of scented products is that they lead to ongoing olfactory adaptation to key chemical compounds that make the scents we want to experience smell good.
The basil in your Thai salad does not lift out of the bowl because your nose isn’t picking up the linalool or the limonene because of the high exposure to both compounds you have had throughout your morning. You don’t enjoy the floral notes in your afternoon light roast coffee so carefully brewed at the shop around the corner. And you overspray your fine fragrance before your evening date.
Masking Toxic Exposure
Perhaps the most important risk from the overuse of scented products is the way that fragrance materials can be used to mask the smell of toxic main ingredients. There is very little if any evidence that the fragrance compounds used in commercial and household cleaners have a direct effect on respiratory irritation. At the same time, there is growing concern about the respiratory effects of exposure to household cleaners, particularly the mix of cleaners like bleach and ammonia. Using harsh cleaning products may sometimes be advisable.. In many cases, soap and water or a weak acid like distilled vinegar will work just as well. If bleach or other strong chemicals are necessary, one shoud use these products without any fragrance material so that you can smell the full toxic effect. You don’t want to be lured into smelling high concentrations of bleach with a nice smelling perfume. Daily exposures, even at low levels, can lead to irritant asthma.
Obscuring Poor Cleaning Practices
What is the purpose of laundry scents and dryer sheets. Perhaps to hide the fact that your clothes are not clean or started to grow mold during the cleaning process. We recently purchased unscented hand soap. Soon after, we cleaned up a very messy dog poop, trying to be careful not to get it on our hands. After what seemed like a thorough hand washing, our hands still smelled like poop. We would not have picked this up with the scented hand soap. How many times has scented hand soap masked the presence of feces on your hands?
What Should You Do?
Ignore “fragrance-fee” or “unscented” labels. These have little to no meaning. Instead, check the ingredients to see if “fragrances” or specific fragrance ingredients are included. For something like bleach, you don’t want any fragrance material to be included at all. Getting scents out of all of your cleaning products is a good first step.
Don’t use spray bottles for any cleaning solutions. This will substantially reduce your risk of aerosol exposure
Find as many unscented personal care products as possible to fit into your health and beauty routines.