What is the idea behind lighting a match in the bathroom to get rid of the smell?
I assume it’s not to burn off the methane, as the methane will have dissapated throughout the room. And a tiny little flame ain’t gonna cover it all. And the flame does nothing to cover the smell.
It seems to me that once you blow out the match, the smokey sulfur smell covers the odor. Is that the idea? So should the saying really should be “Jeez, somebody blow out a match!”
It is the burning of the sulfur that does the job of killing the odor. Blowing out the match only saves your finger from getting burnt. 
Disagree. The smoke after extinguishing the match does much, IMO.
Methane has no smell, which is why malodorous compounds (e.g. tert-butyl mercaptan) are added to natural gas so that it can be detected by smell. I’m sure the chemical composition of bathroom odors has been discussed in another thread. (Searches will be left as an exercise to the reader.) Clearly the match just covers up the smell with the usual sulfur/phosphorus burnt-match odor. I don’t think there’s anything special about match-smoke that makes it effective for covering up bathroom odors. It’s also a fire hazard, though I suppose a very special episode of King of the Hill has done much to help protect America’s children from the danger of lighting matches in bathrooms.
I provide a can of Glade so that the bathroom at work can always be minty fresh. However, there is a very cute young lady who insists on doing the match thing. Then, she insists on pointing out to me and her co-workers that she has lit a match in the bathroom. She goes out of her way to walk out of the bathroom waving the recently extinquished match. I guess she feels she is “warning” everyone to stay out for a while.
Bleeech. TMI. And she is soooooo cute…
And I thought all the good Straight Dope questions had been asked…
Big WAG: I assumed it worked because you’re making a small amount of activated charcoal which mops up the smell molecules. Maybe?
so btw, the smell of a burned matchstick is rather erm, nice. it is bad for you?
Yes, the sulfurous odor from the smoke upon extinquishing the match is what covers your perception of the foul odor molecules… called scatole and indole. [note1] You’re not doing anything to the smell, you’re just adding a new smell that dominates the olfactory response.
[note 1] Yes, those are the same word roots as scatological and indolent.
Some people really like the smell of burned matches.
I knew a guy who actually carried matches so that he could light them and smell their burnedness.
But then he got distracted once and smelled the match * while it was on fire.* He lost some nose hairs to that one.
I couldn’t find a cite for my contention concerning the sulfur, but I note that nobody has given a cite for any of the other contentions either.