Recently I did a favor for a friend who smokes. She was out of town and I stayed in her house caring for her dogs for four days. I only spent abut four hours actually with her and a lit cigarette, but of course the house was full of that scent.
I came home on Saturday. Since then I have washed my clothes twice, and my hair four times, but they still smell of cigarette smoke. I also carried my favorite foam pillow with me, double casing it with very thick cotton pillow cases. But even so the foam smells of smoke as well.
I tried washing my hair with dawn dish soap, and also soaking it in conditioner for an hour then re-washing. I tried washing the (100% cotton) clothes with oxy stuff, and also with borax. Also used unscented Tide each time. I have no idea how to begin washing the pillow, it’s just been relegated to the closet for now.
Does anyone know of a hack for getting rid of this smell? I am really sickened by it, and SOOO ready to be rid of it.
The smell of tobacco is primarily from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAC), which are colloquially referred to as ‘tar’. They are concentrated by the curing process in tobacco and released as volatiles when the tobacco is combusted. There are some additional combustion stabilizers, preservatives, vasodilators that are added to cigarette tobacco, and of course the nicotine itself, which tend to make the PAH ‘stick’ to textiles. Just washing in normal laundary detergent won’t remove these as they get embedded in the fibers; similarly, for hair, it is absorbed into the keratin in hair, so while vigorous shampooing will remove the residue in oils, it will still remain in the fibers of the hair. The PACs will eventually break down in fresh air, and exposure to sunlight or ultraviolet light will accelerate this, but there isn’t really any way to just wash it out. There are available enzyme treatments that are advertised to consume PAH; I have not used them but I’ve heard pretty disappointing things about them. You can try to cover of the smell with other scents, or Febreeze the shit out of the dress but in my experience it will take time. The open cell foam pillow may be a complete loss because the PAHs will probably have soaked into the foam and will be released every time you use it.
I had some books that were my only ‘inheritance’ from my father, and I ended up trashing them because I just could not get the smell of his wife’s exceptional noxious cigarette smoke (“More” brand cigarettes which smell like someone bought the cheapest cheroot and soaked them in cat piss) out of them regardless of how much I tried to air them out, so I am sympathetic to your plight.
12-ish ounces of vinegar per load of laundry works for me.
Sunshine works wonders. If you have a large, flat surface outdoors (clean picnic table) lay out your stuff flat, obtain spray bottle, fill with our old friend, vinegar, spray items until not quite soaked, let evaporate/soak up rays, repeat for other side. Launder.
This happens to me, frequently (YMMV): If I’ve laundered all the stuff and still have the smell in my nose, it’s my nose. Blowing the schnozz has no effect, spraying whatever up there does little good. I take a paper towel, fold it lengthwise, under the tap it goes with the hottest water my fingers can stand. Stuff those nostrils, as much towel as you can get up there. Really pack it in. Wait 15 seconds or 3 days, whichever you prefer. When towel cools, remove. Repeat if necessary.
A pretty impossible task, as per SOAT. When we were house hunting, I could walk in the door and instantly tell if smokers had been living in it. An automatic “no”, as you can’t get that stench out of the paint or anything else.
Some people seem to be very sensitive to the smell of smoke, at least what remains of smoke on materials. I wish I was, probably lost that sensitivity as a child because my parents smoked. Consider it to be a blessing if it stopped you from ever picking up the habit.
I have no sense of smell, so I haven’t experienced what y’all are talking about. However, way back in the olden days, Brooke Shields did some commercial where she talked about how she hated being around smoke when she had just washed her hair, so I was aware of the issue. My husband smokes cigars and weed; I’m always having to jump up and move away. And now I’m finding out that’s not even enough!
Actually I bought a condo about 8 years ago that absolutely REEKED of smoke, and I got rid of the smell. Here’s how I did it. (Steps 4 and 5 were recommended by the owner of the paint store.)
Throw out anything they left behind (curtains, shades, etc.).
Wash bathroom, kitchen, etc. as you usually would, but be VERY thorough. Use Q-tips to get in the cracks.
Get the heating ducts cleaned (condo had forced hot air heat).
Hire someone to wash the walls and ceilings with TSP.
Hire a painter to prime everything with Bin and then paint.
Fortunately there were no carpets, but if there had been, I would have torn them up and gotten rid of them.
I’ve been told that you can bury a book in cat litter to remove mildew smells. I haven’t tried it yet, and I don’t know if it’d work for cigarette smoke. What say you, @Stranger_On_A_Train ?
In addition to the smell, the tars stain everything. I had a friend in the military. Both he and his wife smoked unfiltered Camels, as in chain-smoked. I went over to see him just after the Navy packed up all his household goods and I could see where every picture had been hanging on the walls for the past three years. His wife liked to bake cookies for our kids, but after she dropped them off, they went straight into the garbage because the flour she cooked with was stanky.
The cat litter will absorb anything released by the book but I don’t think it will force the aromatics out. If you have a book with unsealed paper (most mass market and cheap hardbacks, and pretty much anything that ism’t a textbook or has glossy pages) it will absorb nearly everything it is exposed to.
I once worked for a library that received some extremely valuable reference books that had survived a housefire. We were able to save the books by using a combination of things which included gently sanding the edges of the pages as well as individually cleaning every page. It took months and was super labor intensive plus took a lot of room because the opened books needed airflow between them.
As Stranger noted, this wouldn’t have worked with regular mass marketed books, these books had been printed to last.
My Dad used to fix TVs and whenever he got a call about “We can’t get the color to behave,” well, 9 times outta 10, you could wipe the cig gunk off the screen and that was all that was needed – he said once, the gunk was just shy of 1/4 inch thick.
Gag. I quit smoking 42 years ago, so I’m one of those people. My brother smoked an incredible four packs a day. He got up once an hour at night to get a fix. It nearly killed him, but I won’t go into details.
