I saw a commercial for Febreze last night. Febreze, apparently, comes in scented varieties.
For those unfamiliar with the product, Febreze’s claim to fame is that it eliminates–not covers up–scents.
So how can they produce a scented version? Wouldn’t it eliminate its own smell?
I realize this is a cousin to the “how do they get non-stick coatings to stick to the pan” but it’s a serious question (that I’d like to sell to whomever it was that did the Teflon on the pan joke).
FTR I never had a chemistry class in school. Due to a strange set of circumstances, I skipped that program. I did have physics though, which is fortuitous since there’s a new episode of The Big Bang Theory on tonight.
I hates hates hates Febreze with a passion, and so have never tried to buy any, and was not aware that it came in unscented at all. However, I’ll bet that this is a marketing ploy, like having sixteen flavors of potato chips; more choices = better in many consumers minds. And the kind of person that uses Febreze must have focus-tested as thinking “[getting rid of bad smell] AND then [adding good smell] is better than just [getting rid of bad smell].” And finally, many people think, on some level, that if a thing doesn’t have a commercial perfume smell, it’s not clean. Most of the “clean” scents you can actually buy as perfume or scented candles or whatnot mostly smell like the synthetic musks that our laundry has reeked of for the last several decades. Laundry soap makers initially included them because they were cheap and strong and lasted a long time. There’s nothing intrinsically “clean” about them, and in fact they were first developed to smell similar to real musk, which is the seriously nasty scent of certain critters’ butts, but which in very small doses can both balance other, sharper smells and make them last longer (through some interesting chemistry). IOW, it’s largely because of social conditioning.
ETA: Oh, and I’ll bet the “odor eliminating” properties of Febreze aren’t supposed to eliminate *all *odors, just the nasty organic ones, such as the bacteria responsible for feeding on human sweat and excreting B.O.
I hate it because of the added scents, which are very strong and very persistent. I notice and am affected by smells more than most people – I don’t know whether my “sense of smell” is actually stronger than average or if I’ve just somehow come to notice odors more than most people do, but either way, I find most deliberate commercial scents distracting. Many of them also seem to contribute to my migraines. I seriously doubt it’s the “odor molecules” that directly affect my brain, as many migraineurs seem to think; it’s more likely that when I’m bothered by a smell I tense key muscles or something. Whatever. It sucks.
If I didn’t have migraines, or got cured of them, I still wouldn’t want Febreze-like scents. I have always loved the natural but subtle scents of many things, and don’t like Febreze “shouting” over them. I would also like to use tiny doses of particular perfumes myself (I don’t, but I wish I could) and I wouldn’t want the interference. My taste in smells, the odors I find most pleasant, don’t seem to match up with prevailing industrial perfumery well at all. My hottest-burning ire is for synthetic fruity scents, which seem to be especially common in bathroom products; thank you very much but I do not want to smell strawberry-scented poop. Or fart-scented melon. And my subconscious thinks something that smells like fruit is probably sticky with fruit juice, and I don’t want that in the bathroom, either.
I try to buy unscented everything, including body soap and shampoo and such, which is often challenging to find.
I buy a lot of things, especially clothing, on eBay. If I accidentally buy something that’s been Febrezed, it may take three or four washings through regular laundry to get the smell out. Sellers who Febreze things *think *they’re doing something nice – like wrapping the item up in paper like a gift, only olfactorily. I find Febreze harder to wash out than anything but intact male cat pee; even cigarette smoke is easier. I would much rather deal with the original stink, if there was one.
Febreeze doesn’t not smell. It has a smell. It doesn’t JUST cover up odors with it’s smell - it does something chemically to get rid of odors AND leaves a smell behind.
Regular Febreeze is not unscented. It has a very distinct smell. Some people do not like this smell. Thus the new options.
I don’t know whether it exists to cover up smells the product can’t eliminate, or whether it exists to hide the smell of the chemicals, but I do know that the smell is not inherent to the effects of the product. The offbrand stuff always smells different.
My guess though is that Febreeze contains multiple ways of covering up smells. The reason I say this is that I can clearly detect in it the nasal numbing sensation used by nearly all air fresheners. There would be no reason to include this if the product completely eliminated all odors. Plus it makes sense: how could a single produce cover all odors? Of course it’s going to attack the odor in different ways.
I dunno about air fresheners specifically, but I know of at least two decent unscented odor eliminators: Wildlife Research Scent Killer (unscented rather than Autumn version) and SCOE 10X. Scent Killer is marketed for hunters to eliminate all their own scent so the deers won’t smell them sneaking up. SCOE is marketed for getting animal-made smells out of carpet and upholstery. Both are, as far as I know, non-toxic and safe to use on things you handle, but neither do what they do to the air. As the SCOE page goes to great lengths to explain, not particularly articulately, you’re never going to get rid of a problem smell by spraying the air. My understanding is that both products a) kill the bacteria that are actually making the stink, and b) do something to the existing stink molecules. Whether they “neutralize” or “envelop” or “dismantle” or “french kiss” those molecules I don’t know. I’m not sure the chemists who make them know, frankly, as the science of odors – of how we perceive smell – is apparently not all that advanced.
Based on stuff I read years ago that I remember poorly, the active ingredient might be hydrogen peroxide. I may have to go looking for that information again. There are peroxide-based recipes, I think, available online for very cheap homemade versions of hunters’ scent eliminator.
What I don’t think any of them do is get rid of the thing the bacteria were eating such that they were shitting out stink molecules; I think the “pre-stink” molecules are still sitting there, covered over in the dried-up anti-stink juice that is preventing new bacteria from moving in.
Conversely, if you’re spraying stuff in the air, it’s never going to make contact with the stink-producing stuff, and so the only way for it to work is to interfere with your nose function. Which does not seem like a good idea to me. I do think it exists, though; I’d check janitorial supply places if you really want some.
You have to remember that Febreze was originally marketed not as an air freshener but as a fabric freshener. Even the least scented version has a distinctive odor. I use it occasionally on my sofa which gets pretty doggy on wet days and I don’t particularly care for the unscented-Febreze scent, but it seems to fade quickly and “take away” the wet-dog smell. (Where it takes it is an entirely different question.) When I smoked and worked nights in an office where I shared a desk and chair with one of the day shift workers, I sprayed my chair at the end of the night to be sure it didn’t smell smoky for her.
If you google “how does Febreze work,” you get a lot of links, but I’m scientifically challenged enough to not really get it. Here’s one example.
Cool link. I don’t totally get it either, but I think this is the part that concerns us:
Translation (I think): “On contact, Febreze dissolves some of the stink molecules, then binds to the rest of them, holding them down and keeping them from wafting around where you can smell them.”
So it’s not so much that it gets rid of all odors, but that it gets rid of a lot of things that people, in general, might find objectionable. It’s own scent, then, doesn’t fall under the “objectionable” heading.
Ayup, I think so, though of course the “objectionableness” must be due to some chemical property the susceptible stinks have in common. Its own scent doesn’t fall under the “susceptible” heading.
Really the science of how we smell things is fascinating, and there isn’t agreement on how we do it, unlike, for instance, hearing or sight. Somehow we breathe in these very dilute quantities of molecules and identify them. How? What kind of receptors do the IDing? What exactly do they do? And how do we smell newly synthesized chemicals that have never existed before? In the case of fake musks, why is it that they somehow smell like real musk, despite being chemically dissimilar? the are a few popular books on the subject, though I understand they aren’t all equally respected by scientists who ought to know. One of the apparently questionable, but totally fascinating, ones is The Emperor of Scent, about Luca Turin, a sort of rogue perfumery expert.
Are there actually any air fresheners that don’t claim to be different from all the others, because they seek out and magically annihilate odour molecules in mid air?
Cyclodextrins are basically big doughnut-shaped molecules, the interior of which can attract and trap organic molecules. Smells are mostly caused by small, volatile organic molecules - the cyclodextrins trap them inside and, being big chunky doughnuts themselves, are too big to float around and get up your nose.
That’s where I learned about the nasal anesthetics. I am nearly certain Febreeze contains them, as I know I find it harder to smell something I know is odorous right after smelling it.
I’m wondering if that process by which we get used to an odor (sorry, can’t think of the term right now) comes into play. You know the bathroom stinks, so you spritz the “odor elminator.” But your nose (well, brain, actually)is already becoming used to the smell and can’t detect it very well. The burst of Pine Fresh or Morning Meadow is supposed to signal you that yes, the product is working, and now your bathroom smells fantastic (or at least fake fantastic)! I believe some consumers wouldn’t really think the product was eliminating anything unless it smelled like a chemist’s interpretation of a tropical garden.
And I thought of another metaphor for why I hate Febreze, as I walked past a schoolbus blasting “Rudoph the Red Nosed Reindeer” this morning: Febreze is the olfactory equivalent of an earworm. It lasts and lasts and lasts, way after I’m sick of it, and I can hardly think of anything else while it’s around.