With fall well on its way, cooler temperatures bring people inside. While there are many great perks to autumn—like the approach of end-of-year holidays or time spent with friends and family—extra time spent indoors, often with the windows shut, leads to a lack of fresh air. Consequently the house can get stale or start to retain cooking odors long after the meal has been finished. Smells from pets, coats, or shoes can also become more noticeable as you spend time indoors.
When you want to freshen the air in your home, many people reach for an air freshener—either a spray, plug in, diffuser, or gel—to get the house quickly smelling nice again. But is there a risk to using fragrances—and what other options do you have? Here, we’ll break down the basics of air fresheners, and what you can do to help you keep your home clean and fresh.
What are air fresheners, and how do they work?
When you think of the selection of air fresheners available, you can probably envision the huge variety of options out there. While air fresheners might come in a few different varieties—aerosols, gels, waxes, plug-ins, and diffusers, for example—all tend to work in one of two ways.
The first kinds of air freshener eliminates odors in the air or in fabrics. Some of these products contain baking soda—a neutralizing agent—some are made of compounds that surround the particles that put off bad smells and stop them from getting out into the air. You can find some of these types in sprays or aerosol cans, and in some types of plug-ins.
Most of those plug-ins—along with many diffusers, gels, waxes, candles, and many sprays—fall into the second type of air freshener, and work by covering up smells in the home. They don’t eliminate other odors, but put out a smell to cover them and create a pleasant scent in the space. Over the past years, these have fallen out of favor as consumers turn to more natural alternatives, but they remain popular and easy to find in stores.
How can air fresheners be dangerous?
Even though air fresheners are in wide popular use, there are ongoing concerns about hazards to people and to the environment that can come from them. Getting air freshener on your skin can cause irritation, redness, or a rash—they can also irritate eyes. While these minor issues often can be resolved by rinsing the area with water and waiting for the irritation to pass, more serious issues can occur if the products are ingested. Liquids or gel beads can be hazardous if accidentally consumed, and breathing in too much air freshener can cause coughing and throat or sinus irritation, and in rare cases rash and skin irritation.
That last point might come as a surprise—if the point of air fresheners is that the product is in the air, how can they be hazardous to breathing? While there is a difference between directly spraying an aerosol freshener into your mouth and nose and passively breathing in the freshener dispersed through the air, there are grounds to be concerned.
That’s because some air fresheners contain carcinogens, or cancer-causing agents, like formaldehyde, or other Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) like phthalates, benzene, and more. Some of these can mix with ozone in the air to create secondary compounds that can also be harmful, and can increase the risk of health hazards.
What are the alternatives?
If you’d like to freshen your home without chemicals, there are options even safer and more natural than those marked “green” or “organic” in air freshener aisles. In fact, you might have some right in the pantry—baking soda and coffee can both work as air fresheners. A spray made with water and baking soda can absorb unwanted odors, while a dish of ground coffee can block out unpleasant scents. Allowing a cup of vinegar to sit in a smelly area can clear the air, too.
If you’re looking for a more distinctive scent in the air, you aren’t alone—smell is a powerful sense, and has a lot of impact on how we feel. Its links to memory and emotion meaning that smells can bring back memories or feelings like nothing else. Light, natural scents—like lemongrass or eucalyptus essential oils—tend to be associated with pleasant and relaxing moods, and can be a good, natural alternative to other types of air fresheners.
For other natural scents, you can try pomander balls—oranges studded with cloves—or potpourri made with dried flower petals. Live flowers or live houseplants can leave a pleasant scent while purifying the air, too. An indoor herb garden with plants such as basil, rosemary, lemon balm, and oregano is a natural option. Just having house plants in general can clean the air.
The following is excerpted from a TIME article dated January 17th, 2018: “A NASA experiment, published in 1989, found that indoor plants can scrub the air of cancer-causing volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde and benzene. (Those NASA researchers were looking for ways to effectively detoxify the air of space station environments.) Later research has found that soil microorganisms in potted plants also play a part in cleaning indoor air.”
How can The Tub Pros help me?
One of the easiest ways to keep your home smelling fresh is—you guessed it—to keep it clean. But even the most devoted housekeeping can run into challenges cleaning if there are sink, counter, or bathtub cracks that are hard to clean around—or if they leave the space looking worn and dirty no matter how much effort you put into cleaning.
That’s where refinishing, or reglazing, comes in—no need to look into expensive bathroom or kitchen remodel ideas to totally revamp the space! By gently stripping away the top layer of a tub or counter, repairing damage, and adding a new coating—in a color that you love–you get a look that feels like new and a surface that’s easy to clean and maintain. All at a rock bottom budget price and in half the time or less to remode.
So when you’re looking for corian countertop repair near me or bathtub reglazing near me, turn to The Tub Pros—the leading kitchen and bat refinishers in the Mid-South serving Memphis, Collierville, Germantown, Mississippi and Arkansas. You can check out our full list of services, too—we repair countertops, sinks, and tubs in a variety of materials, and provide accessibility solutions with bathtub conversions. If you would like more information just give The Tub Pros a call at ( 901) 871-8827 or use our online form to get started on your project.
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