I made a post a few weeks ago about this smell I keep smelling everywhere lately, like an unpleasant cross between nasty perfume and laundry detergent. This exact smell seems to be everywhere and on everything now, items in shops, letters that get delivered, people, everything. Some of you said you had also noticed it.
Today people on reddit were talking about it, someone said it’s some “petrochemical derived synthetic terpene” that has been sold to the masses via scent marketing - some petrochemical company pushing this onto companies.
So its in the diffused crap they disperse via HVAC in places like supermarkets, its in perfume, its in washing detergent, it’s in everything. And apparently it destroys human health, hormones, fertility, causes emotional dysregulation and various illnesses.
In other words, it’s not just a nasty, annoying smell - we’re being purposely poisoned.
I’m incredibly skeptical of that description from reddit, this sounds like a rehashing of the chemtrail conspiracy theory. It’s a nonspecific chemical described as being omnipresent and having very concrete negative health effects. What benefit would it be to companies for marketing if everything smells the same? Without differentiation, it’s pointless. How would it help marketing if the smell is unpleasant? Conspiracy theorists constantly keep dipping back to “mind control,” which is just not real.
Given your further description of it, it sounds like it could be acetone. Acetone is the main chemical in nail polish remover, and has a sweet, fruity, chemically smell that’s similar to a cleaning chemical smell or a perfume smell. It’s also a chemical humans breathe out when their body is in ketosis, and it’s both very noticeable and very sticky, so it would remain on things people touched or in a store full of people. Food insecurity is now affecting 1 in 4 people in the UK, so almost everyone is in ketosis much of the time. Acetone is also in your own breath since you have quite dramatic dietary restrictions.
Have you had Covid? Covid impacts your sense of smell pretty dramatically for a really long time. When parts of your sense of smell recover many months or even years later, a lot of people find that they are incredibly sensitive to certain smells and that these smells are different from the way they used to be.
I don’t think I’ve had covid, although currently I have a cough that I’ve had for months. Also this scent I’m smelling is definitely artificial.
Try giving some acetone nail polish cleaner a whiff. Waft from a distance, don’t stick your nose in it.
There are tons and tons of “artificial” smells that aren’t artificial at all, we just have culturally associated them with being that way. Most things we smell are Volatile Organic Compounds, and the three top VOCs smells which are reported as chemical smells are chlorine, ammonia, and sulfur, all of which have totally natural sources as well as some synthetic ones.
Do those three count as VOCs when they’re not organic and some of them aren’t compounds?
Sorry, I worded this poorly. VOCs which contain chlorine, ammonia, or sulfur are all commonly reported as being artificial or “chemical” smells regardless of whether the source is synthetic or a natural process.
I love a good conspiracy theory but this is too far fetched for me. If you or someone can identify the specific chemical or group of chemicals (besides just saying “terpenes” which have been blamed for lots of random things lately), and why they are intentionally being spread around, then it just doesn’t hold water
Commercial scent marketing through HVAC systems is real: https://help.scentair.com/en-US/can-scent-marketing-integrate-with-existing-hvac-systems-5599357
Iso E Super is a globally proliferated substance and has produced degraded reproductive effects in high-dose mouse experiments: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6839564 and https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/publications/reports/tox/tox092
But that same study also found that inhalation of lower doses of that same aerosolized substance did not cause any similar reproductive problems in mice.
So, of course this results in epistemic hedging like, yeah, health risks from fragrance chemicals is possible and demonstrated, but widespread poisoning via diffused aerosolized fragrances, has not been proven, and not demonstrated to be physically possible.
Frankly, I am willing to give wildly powerful and unaccountable incorporated industrial actors in modern capitalist economies the presumption of guilt, given all the heinous shit that has been proven about the nefarious shit they’re constantly doing.
I am not a scientist so I won’t be able to do this.
while some shops do use scents, it’s certainly won’t appear on letters, the commercial paper/cardboard packaging smells as well, but it’s not detergent-like, it’s closer to plastics/plasticizers and very weak smell (probably due to waterproofing or some shit) (or candles, cause it might be close to stearine, the common items is those heating candles from ikea, do they smell similar?)
very sharp smell is usually solvents/paint and, in some conditions, your body might start producing acetone (do investigate if it’s acetone (!), it signals some malfunction)
on the other, safer spectrum limonene and derivatives smell sharpy of lemon, but they are generally harlmless (ish)
I haven’t noticed, but without researching that, it might just be a cheaper way to get rid of toxic chemicals. You know these toilet rim blocks? They are (or used to be, again, don’t have time to double check if it’s still the case) toxic waste. It would be costly to dispose of it and it’s illegal to just dump large quantities. But in a toilet, only small amounts get washed down each time you flush, so that makes it legal somehow. All of it still ends up in the environment.
Maybe some clever capitalist figured out a similar scheme to get rid of and make money from a different kind of toxic waste.
(Take this random idea with a grain of salt, additional research needed)
They don’t and never made toilet rim blocks as a method of disposing industrial toxic waste. They are made with bleach and a bunch of surfactants and designed to clean the toilet. The cleaning chemicals are toxic, thus every time you flush you’re creating a bit of toxic waste.
But that also happens when you do things like run your dishwasher or dump out your dirty bucket after mopping the floor. The toxic waste is just the cleaning chemicals that you intentionally purchased as a cleaning chemical.
Are you sure? I heard that from my professor once and just one quick search told me 1,4-Dichlorobenzene is a byproduct of producing dyes and other chemicals. It’s produced in large quantities but doesn’t have much use itself. It would be produced wether toilet cakes existed or not, so it’s true that a use was found after the fact. It’s poorly soluble, has no desinfectant or anti-odor properties, so it doesn’t help to clean the toilet at all. It is hazardous to the environment, water organisms and human health, a suspected carcinogen. It it the characteristic smell of urinal cakes (vaguely similar to raspberries). They put it in there to get rid of it and make a quick profit and because it’s poorly soluble so what I said earlier about circumventing regulations applies.
Dichlorobenzene absolutely does have disinfectant properties, I have no idea where you got that misinformation. You’re right that it’s the primary component of urinal cakes, and like most chemicals is a byproduct of another chemical manufacturing process. The fact that it’s poorly soluble and highly volatile is exactly what makes it a useful cleaner, because it sublimates at room temperature and becomes an airborne disinfectant for the bathroom. Its inclusion in urinal cakes has nothing to do with cleaning the urinal and is about disinfecting surfaces in the bathroom like the walls and countertops.
It’s also notably not in the toilet bowl cleaners that people buy and place in their homes. Those things are stupid anyway, because the actual active ingredients are bleach which damages the seals and plastic components that make a toilet actually work.
Okay it’s an airborn desinfectant. It doesn’t help with the surfaces of the toilet, but with the air around it. Though that application is dubious. It’s not what you think when you put it in your toilet, plus it’s s forbidden in the EU as an air freshener because of it’s carcinogenic effects.
Unlike most chemicals, it was produced as a hazardous byproduct in large quantities, that would have been expensive to get rid off, if a use that no one really asked for and the consumers don’t understand, hadn’t been invented in precisely the right way to circumvent regulations about dumping it in the water.
Oh wow. I didn’t know that about the toilet blocks. Capitalism just gets nastier the more you find out about it.
Toilet rim block? What country are you from? I don’t think we have those.
