Have you ever noticed that there is a huge industry devoted to making deodorizers and “home fragrances”?
And it seems like there is a new product to make our homes smell like vanilla or lilies or roses or winter breezes every couple of months — especially from the SC Johnson Company, whose Glade brand brings us new smells constantly. The newest products are a scented oil candle and a decorative glass thing with scent plastered on the back.
You know what all the hundreds of home scent products have in common? None of them actually fill your home with scent.
Now, I would like a fresh-smelling house as much as the next person, but doesn’t it seem like the scent industry is putting out one thing after another, pulling things from the market before people realize it doesn’t work, then touting an all-new way to freshen our homes? Isn’t this just another way to keep us constantly consuming in pursuit of a lifestyle rather than a life?
It’s like when you go into a “home” store or a candle shop. It always smells so wonderful, and one wishes they could pick up a candle or a bag of potpourri and bring that smell home — but it always turns out that if you want your home to smell like that, you have to have 1,482 candles just like the shop has.
My new home, when I bought it, had a musty, mildewy kind of smell. I tried Febreze, but it didn’t really work. You know what did? I had three new vents cut into the crawl space, giving some cross ventilation. Within a few days, the smell was gone.
The moral of all this? Ditch the chemicals. Open a window. Assuming, of course, that the air outside isn’t laden with chemicals as well.
I’m with you on this one. Being allergic to scented thing you can guess how I feel about people that fill their houses with little plug in scent makers.
My mother always thought if the house smelled like pine-sol then it smelled clean. It took me a long time to convince her otherwise. (my allergies came later in life no doubt from the years of breathing pine-sol)
The fact is if you smell nothing the house is clean. If you smell something bad (musty) adding a scented plug in won’t cover it up. Find the source of the bad odor and correct it.