Air fresheners and their potential health effects
Musty, smelly bathrooms. Need I say more? Most of us would rather find another bathroom to use than sit there and inhale such a glorious scent. So, the solution, especially in public restrooms, seems to be to douse the room in whatever spray air freshener there is available, usually with a scrunched nose and face, and continue on with our business. However, this has been proven to be problematic. Store-bought air fresheners that range from lemon citrus to pumpkin pie have become increasingly popular in homes, restaurants, schools, and other restrooms alike. I know I frankly love a good wintery pine air freshener just to get in the wintery mood, or really any mood year-round. Air fresheners range in a variety of prices and scents, some ranging from cheap two-dollar cans to more expensive luxurious spray scents. No matter what the price tag is, they all emit any kind of fragrance you want. My favorite air fresheners are the concentrated room sprays from Bath and Body Works. When I paid close attention to the label, it read: “Contains fragrance oil and ethyl alcohol…Avoid spraying over finished surfaces as this may cause damage. In case of contact with surfaces, wipe immediately with damp cloth.” This got me thinking. If this spray isn’t safe to land on a wooden desk or a couch, what are the effects of it landing in my more delicate nose or lungs?
Air fresheners, specifically potpourri, go back hundreds of years, to when women would put a small wooden box of it in their undergarments. For those who don’t know or haven’t heard of the French term, potpourri is a mixture of dried spices, and flowers that are put in a sack to emit their fragrances. This was used to not only fragrance clothing and rooms, but to also ward off insect infestations. The podcast below from Newstalk goes over the history of air fresheners and what they’ve come to mean today. Sean Moncrieff, the Irish journalist who hosts this podcast, argues that today air fresheners have come to depict a sort of lifestyle. Air fresheners no longer are necessarily meant for canceling or masking bad odors, but instead for implementing a new odor that matches the kind of lifestyle we want (FM, n.d.). For example, he states that air fresheners like alpine fresh scent and new car smell are used to portray a certain kind of lifestyle or give off a certain kind of image. Check it out!
https://player.fm/series/highlights-from-moncrieff/stuff-that-changed-the-world-the-air-freshener
I’d like to branch off this idea of air fresheners being used to help illustrate a certain image or provoke a certain kind of feeling. Air fresheners go hand-in-hand with the culture of everything smelling nice, especially bathroom business. Big businesses have made a fortune off these air fresheners without much regard to the health consequences. Febreze, a household name, is a company that is worth more than $1 billion, but frequently list ingredients that are questionable to human health. Another brand that seemed to have been a gag gift at first, but now has taken over the smell-good market is Poo-Pourri, valued at more than $300 million (“On Resilience: How Suzy Batiz Rose From Two Bankruptcies To Build Poo-Pourri, A $300M Empire,” n.d.). This is a company that sells a spray that you spray directly into the toilet before you use it, in order to mask the smell from forming in the first place. Below is an advertisement for the product that highlights the silliness of the idea, but as a matter of fact is a great representation of our current smell-good culture.
Now that air fresheners aren’t being used as underwear deodorizer or insect infestation repellent, the spray air fresheners we use today are problematic for a few reasons. They can cause mild to severe health problems even with only a little bit of exposure; the exposure doesn’t have to be chronic. Here are a few health problems to be weary of:
1. Respiratory effects. Air fresheners can trigger asthma. Shocker. The chemicals in air fresheners like d-limonene have direct causation with putting people at high risk of asthma and respiratory desensitization (ter Burg et al., 2014). Emphysema and bronchitis are also linked to exposure to the chemicals in air fresheners, especially VOCs, or volatile organic compounds. The higher the concentration of VOCs, the more severe the asthma attack is (Sanghwa Kim, Seong-Ho Hong, Choon-Keun Bong, & Myung-Haing Cho, 2015)). In other words, the more air freshener you inhale, the more wheezing you’ll experience. This is very much a case of ‘pick your poison’ — enjoy alpine-scented air for about five minutes or enjoy a wheezing and coughing attack for about five hours.
2. Skin reactions. Fresh cotton in an aerosol can doesn’t feel so soft when it makes its way into your nostrils or lands on your skin. One place air fresheners of many forms have become increasingly popular are in rideshare cars, like Uber. In rideshare cars many people come in and out each and every day, bringing in all kinds of germs and smells from the streets or wherever they’ve been. Not only can these scents be bothersome to the driver themselves, but it can also be so bothersome to the next riders that they lower the rating of the driver, which in turn lowers the drivers’ income. So, the solution seems to be masking the scent with air fresheners. However, diffuser air fresheners have been proven to cause severe airborne contact dermatitis (Perper, Cervantes, Eber, & Tosti, 2017). Contact dermatitis is a red, itchy rash that isn’t life-threatening, but it is uncomfortable. This kind of rash is usually contracted by touching something that you have an allergy to. Airborne contact dermatitis just means it’s contracted through the air without skin to object interaction (“Contact dermatitis — Symptoms and causes — Mayo Clinic,” n.d.).
Above is a picture of contact dermatitis on the eyelids, which is a common place for airborne contact dermatitis, or ABCD. In one really rare case, a woman reported chemical burns due to an air freshener. She had an AirWick automated air freshener dispenser about 2.5 meters away from a lit gas cooker that was on low flame for ten minutes. When she reached for the dispenser, the dispenser immediately caught on fire and caused her severe flash burns (Sarwar, Nicolaou, Khan, & Tiernan, 2011). Again, specifically air freshener burns may be rare, but aerosol burns are not. However, the point is, they still happened, and you should still be cautious about these freshening aids. Below is a picture of this woman’s burns to the hands and forearms.
3. Heart rate. May your heart forever flutter when you see the love of your life, or a cute puppy, but not when you inhale some apple cinnamon-scented chemicals. The frequent exposure to air fresheners has shown to overall increase heart rate variability. The more your heart rate varies, the higher your chances are of developing cardiac autonomic dysfunction and cardiovascular disease (Caress & Steinemann, 2009). Do you have lung disease already? Do you smoke? If so, then your chances are much higher than normal.
Now that you’ve gotten a little taste of the harm air fresheners can do, here’s a few things you can do to have clean smelling air without the asthma attacks, chemical burns, or varied heart rates.
1. Open a window. Don’t underestimate the power of just popping a window or screen door open and appreciating the nice ventilation it allows. No chemicals introduced, no overwhelming artificial scents, just pure outdoor air. If the majority of your smells come from stovetops, perhaps installing an overhead exhaust fan would do some good (“The Dangers of Air Fresheners,” n.d.).
2. Start loving plants. Indoor house plants are actually extremely beneficial to us. Not only can they liven up a drab room or add some color to a darkened area, they can actually help the quality of our air. Some indoor plants are exceptionally good at absorbing toxins in the air, which can make our air less musty and purer. The English Ivy and Spider Plant are two rockstar plants that absorb a ton of chemicals including formaldehyde, NO2, xylene, toluene, trichloro ethylene, carbon monoxide, acetone, and benzene, just to name a few (BEGUM & GOPINATH, 2017). If you don’t have these plants in your house, get them. Seriously.
The TV show The Doctors had a segment that focused mainly on scented candles, but they touched on the dangers of spray air fresheners as well. Among their safer alternatives was a more creative option — baking cookies. The segment is linked below, and although the beginning is a little cheesy, the information is definitely relative!
Apart from human health, if you care about your loved furry ones, air fresheners can be particularly harmful to them too. Pets can suffer from coughs, vomiting, nasal discharge, sneezing, lethargy, or loss of appetite from air that has been sprayed with air freshener Pets can also suffer from surfaces on which the air freshener has been sprayed, like their beds, floors on which they sleep, and any surfaces that they may lick. (“Are Air Fresheners Safe for Pets?,” n.d.). This ingestion of these chemicals can be particularly harmful to animals and lead to more serious gastrointestinal and respiratory issues.
“You wouldn’t open a can of paint in your living room to improve the quality of the air, but this isn’t too far removed from what happens when you break out an air freshener.” David Kramer, PetMD contributor
A general conclusion that has come from all the research on air fresheners, is that there is a really big issue with labeling and education. Most of these air fresheners tend to tell half-truths by labeling either only some of the ingredients on their containers and/or bombarding the consumer with long chemical names that have no meaning to the average buyer. Also, I can guarantee you not many people who do buy these air fresheners read the ingredients, and I can also guarantee that fewer people research those ingredients. However, if the products aren’t listed, then how can consumer research even begin? There must be a push for companies to entirely list their ingredients onto their containers.
“Most brands use broad terms such as “odor eliminator” or “fragrance”, among others; which may hide dozens of chemicals, many of which may never have been assessed for safety.” -Karen Alexander, Oncology Wellness Specialist
The image below is taken directly from Febreze’s website. Listed are the ingredients in their Febreze air fresheners, specifically the spray one and not the fabric freshener or the plug-ins.
Three of the ten ingredients listed on here are listed as “odor eliminator.” In an air freshener, I’d hope they do eliminate odors! However, what these ingredients actually mean, their consequences, their normal names, and all sorts of information about them are lacking. It is in these ingredients that lie the concerns and harm to our health. This is not an attack on Febreze, as several other home fragrance companies dumb down this chemical information to consumers also. However, this is to bring awareness that consumers should do their own research in finding and picking the prettier poison.
The general conclusion when it comes to all this research is simple. Air fresheners do have ingredients that have been proven to cause a multitude of problems with our health. In small doses, they tend to be okay to use. However, even with small doses, asthma attacks and shortness of breath can still occur within short exposure. One thing is for sure, and that is all research roads have lead to the praises of ventilation. Air fresheners simply mask the unwanted scent, which can actually make the smell worse. The best scent is no scent, and the easiest way to achieve this is to open a window, or turn the vents on. It’s much healthier, more natural, and much cheaper.
References
Are Air Fresheners Safe for Pets? | petMD. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://www.petmd.com/dog/care/air-fresheners-and-pets
BEGUM, K. A. A. J., & GOPINATH, R. (2017). DEVELOPMENT OF STEP-WISE RANKING FOR INDOOR PLANTS AS INDOOR AIR POLLUTANT PURIFIERS. Annals of the Faculty of Engineering Hunedoara — International Journal of Engineering, 15(4), 53–56.
Caress, S. M., & Steinemann, A. C. (2009). Prevalence of Fragrance Sensitivity in the American Population. Journal of Environmental Health, 71(7), 46–50.
Contact dermatitis — Symptoms and causes — Mayo Clinic. (n.d.). Retrieved November 4, 2018, from https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/contact-dermatitis/symptoms-causes/syc-20352742
FM, P. (n.d.). Stuff That Changed The World: The Air Freshener Highlights From Moncrieff podcast. Retrieved November 4, 2018, from https://player.fm/series/highlights-from-moncrieff/stuff-that-changed-the-world-the-air-freshener
On Resilience: How Suzy Batiz Rose From Two Bankruptcies To Build Poo-Pourri, A $300M Empire. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bogardandhoffman/2016/12/13/on-resilience-how-suzy-batiz-rose-from-two-bankruptcies-to-build-poo-pourri-a-300m-empire/#3dc3689a3679
Perper, M., Cervantes, J., Eber, A. E., & Tosti, A. (2017). Airborne contact dermatitis caused by fragrance diffusers in Uber cars. Contact Dermatitis (01051873), 77(2), 116–117.
Sanghwa Kim, Seong-Ho Hong, Choon-Keun Bong, & Myung-Haing Cho. (2015). Characterization of air freshener emission: the potential health effects. Journal of Toxicological Sciences, 40(5), 535–550.
Sarwar, U., Nicolaou, M., Khan, M. S., & Tiernan, E. (2011). Air-Freshener Burns: A New Paradigm in Burns Etiology?. International Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2(4), 291–293.
ter Burg, W., Bouma, K., Schakel, D. J., Wijnhoven, S. W. P., van Engelen, J., van Loveren, H., & Ezendam, J. (2014). Assessment of the risk of respiratory sensitization from fragrance allergens released by air fresheners. Inhalation Toxicology, 26(5), 310–318.
The Dangers of Air Fresheners. (n.d.). Retrieved November 4, 2018, from http://ackermancancercenter.com/blog/the-dangers-of-air-fresheners
