'New car smell' is the scent of carcinogens | Hacker News Reader

'New car smell' is the scent of carcinogens

sciencealert.com

502 pointssamizdis376 comments

Keep in mind this is a meta-analysis using data published in papers that are up to 30 years old and from overseas including China, then applying it to California's carcinogen list (prop 65) and California commute times.

I am sure a followup study will be done to see if this is actually a problem in the USA in 2021.

The article is published here (Open access) : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

Edit: I found this news article from 2003 discussing the issue of carcinogenic new car smells and how manufacturers were trying to eliminate the the dangerous smells while simulating what consumers expect a new car should smell like:

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15133792/new-car-smel...

California "may cause cancer warnings" may cause people to ignore "may cause cancer warnings". Is this coffee carcinogenic or cigarette carcinogenic?

The "This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer ..." warning is so common that I'm sure most people just ignore it.

In other news, 600K people in the US die from cancer every year.

The point isn't that cancer doesn't matter. It's that by putting cancer warnings on things with a 1-in-a-trillion lifetime chance of causing cancer, you desensitize people to cancer warnings on things that actually do pose a significant cancer risk.

Yup. The joke around here is that 'everything causes cancer in California'. Nobody takes those labels seriously because they're on everything and give 0 indication of risk level compared to other items with the same label.

It's just another example of feel-good legislation that does more harm than good.

It’s an example of well intentioned legislation poorly implemented.

Name one piece of modern legislation that isn't regarded as "well intentioned" by those passing it.

I guess I am judging the intentions of those passing it, not reflecting how they would judge their own intentions.

There is a whole philosophical bent about what "good" intentions might be which is way off topic.

Reminds me of a similar observation with drug side-effects on WebMD: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

When the side effects for ibuprofen read similarly to those of far more dangerous prescription drugs, then they're really not helpful

That's true, but it likely has more to do with pollution from industry and cars and harmful habits like smoking, and less to do with eating baked goods.

And a lot to do with eliminating a lot of death from infection, being prey to animals, and war. Cancer is largely a symptom of old age: it’s what’s left.

No doubt, the warning could be helpful. But when they are on literally everything, they get ignored. Am I just not going to eat or buy home appliances because "something" in the box or part of the build may cause cancer?

One of the key problems with the California Prop 65 warnings is that there is no penalty for erroneously posting the sign. As a result, the sign is posted on nearly every building and establishment and many goods—without necessary need, in order to protect from lawsuits. It doesn't take much effort to see that this is roughly equivalent to not having the warning signs at all.

If you look at the list of chemicals, the signs probably aren't erroneous; almost all buildings will have at least trace amounts of one of those chemicals.

Your post is correct but overly generous. The aforementioned lack of penalty for erroneous sign postage means that even if the list was a single chemical, every building would still contain the notice 'just in case' and because it is cheaper to not bother to keep track of materials or to test.

There are of course other problems as well, including lack of context (do you need direct contact, exposure over time, etc), and lack of a requirement to list the particular chemicals. As a result, there's no actionable information and the signs are entirely devoid of meaning.

I can guarantee you that every building will contain something on that list. The problem is that Prop 65 requires notice of chemicals whether or not you'll actually be at risk from that chemical. For instance, BPA is in many plastics, such as those in light fixtures, but you're not at much risk of consuming it unless you drink warm/hot liquids from the light fixtures.

The light bulbs/tubes/LEDs also contain a number of P65 materials, as do all the electronics...

I think that you're just reiterating things that OP understands.

We know that if the chemicals are there, we have to have the sign. And we know that the chemicals are everywhere.

So what benefit does the sign bring?

None.

I agree that the signs are usually useless, but the parent says a/the problem is that there is no penalty for erroneous signs. The problem is that the law doesn’t take context into account, and those signs are actually required.

> The problem is that the law doesn’t take context into account, and those signs are actually required.

Not actually true.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

Companies are choosing to CYA because if they're sued the burden of proof is on them.

This isn't true anymore. The laws was changed, prop 65 warnings are required to have the specific chemicals listed. There are penalties if this is not done.

The biggest problem is not even prevalence... it's the content-free message. What part of the product contains these chemicals? What chemicals are they? Will I be exposed just by touching the product, or only if the product is burned? etc. It's almost completely non-actionable information.

It also bothers me on a pedantic level that "the State of California" is portrayed as a sentient being.

I can't think of an equally concise but more accurate phrasing so long as a reference to California remains, but maybe brevity isn't such a high priority.

Every judge does that with their court and if you look close enough “the state” does this everywhere. All of them.

The California notices are one of the only examples of it being put in your face everywhere

Surely there must be at least one federal or state judge who quietly whispers to himself 'I am the state' every time he/she signs a court document in that way

They've actually started including the names of the specific chemical(s), example: https://news.llu.edu/patient-care/california-s-cancer-warnin...

Not only that but I have nothing to base it off of. What concentration is thought to cause cancer? What concentration would I expect to be exposed to it?

There have been significant changes to the law in the last few years. The chemical that causes cancer needs to be listed on the label. A lot of products that never should have had these labels don't have them anymore.

It goes even farther than that. "Not for sale in California" is practically a marketable feature on any chemical nobody expects you to ingest, anything that could cost you a limb if used wrong enough and anything powered by a small engine because it signals to the buyer that the manufacture didn't jump through a bunch of hoops, often compromising the product, for compliance.

Yeah my multimeter has it on it. And I’m not even in the US.

(deleted)

GP was using "coffee" and "cigarette" as adjectives. In other words, asking "is this thing as carcinogenic as coffee, or as carcinogenic as cigarettes?", not "do cigarettes cause cancer?".

It's not an additive, it's byproducts of roasting.

And it's not just coffee you see these labels on. You see them all sorts of random places, and often not in a way that helps you make informed decisions.

It's basically equivalent of cookie pop-ups on websites or ToS.

Proposition 65 is such garbage that pretty much any manufacturer wishing to sell ANYTHING in the state of CA just puts a blanket warning on things. It's a real problem that they want to address, but a really lazy solution that doesn't accomplish anything.

I suspect the cigarette companies love it. If everything else causes cancer as well, then they look less bad.

There have been some important changes to the law in the last few years. Coffee doesn't have a prop 65 label.

A bit off-topic, but I never liked the "new car smell" and I'd prefer they just eliminate that or substitute it to something else rather than they trying to emulate it.

> then applying it to California's carcinogen list

I've seen prop 65 warnings in hotel rooms, likely due to lead pipes in the toiletry. The application, and to an extent the compounds included, are a little overkill. Keeping that in mind, It would be worth scrubbing through the article and seeing what the components are that are not just "California Carcinogens". That's what would be the really valuable information here.

Even the jar of hoisin sauce I bought at Safeway has a prop 65 warning.

Perhaps someone misread it as poison sauce?

No, I think most fermented sauces (soy, hoisin, worchestershire) have to carry a prop 65 warning

MSG?

The bread Franz sells has the warning too.

So here's what I'd love if other people here could help me understand.

Sensitivity to VOC's is extremely dependent on the person. My father, for example, had the carpet redone cheaply in his office, and worked there happily 8 hrs/day without smelling anything and without any ill effects.

For me, on the other hand, the smell was noxious but bearable, but I'd start to feel lightheaded after about 15 minutes in there. My brother would get a terrible headache after just 5 minutes. (And this is us as adults, same size as him.)

Memory foam (e.g. in a pillow) also affects me, even after it's offgassed for weeks. I don't smell a thing, but it gives me a burning sore throat after I'm close to it for a couple of hours. But again, zero effect on my dad.

And so my big question is: I'm well aware that people have drastically different responses to VOC's. But does that mean VOC's harm people differently too, or are we all harmed the same?

In other words, does my dad have some kind of "protective" genes where the VOC's don't bother him because they harm him less, so he doesn't avoid them? Or are my brother and I better off because we're super-sensitive to them, so we escape the harm he might be suffering?

It seems like such an urgent public health problem, especially given how many people use memory foam mattresses and pillows. It just boggles my mind that I get a sore throat after just a couple of hours with one, while other people sleep peacefully all night.

It seems the older generation is so much more tolerant of toxins than us younger ones. For instance, at company lunches it seems at least 50%+ of the 25-45yrs have allergies/glucose issues while the older generation pounds down whatever they want. I have so many friends that have crazy allergies and sensitivities to toxins and almost no boomers that do. Maybe all the weak boomers were weeded out in their youth with lawn darts and no bike helmets or something? Or more likely not exposed to so many toxins when younger?

> Or more likely not exposed to so many toxins when younger?

Or perhaps inversely, the older generation was exposed to more industrialized chemicals and their immune system developed a tolerance. Something akin to the hygiene hypothesis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

There's a big difference between common traditional natural substances and industrialized chemicals though.

My understanding is that our immune system learns through exposure that things like peanuts, pollen, gluten, etc. aren't bad, so lots of exposure to these things and playing in the dirt is healthy for kids.

On the other hand, from my understanding, we don't build up protection to industrial chemicals. They're just poison, plain and simple. The more you accumulate, the more you're likely to die.

Here's a good counter,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6454566/

> Hundreds of chemicals (e.g. metals, epoxy and acrylic resins, rubber additives, and chemical intermediates) and proteins (e.g. natural rubber latex, plant proteins, mould, animal dander) present in virtually every industry have been identified as causes of allergic disease. In general, allergens can be classified as low molecular weight (chemical) allergens and high molecular weight (protein) allergens. These agents are capable of inducing immunological responses that are both immunoglobulin E and non-immunoglobulin E-mediated.

---

IgE receptors can match against almost any shape. And they're not the only immune receptors or signalling pathways by a long shot.

The problem is we often sample our environments when we're experiencing unrelated inflammation. Inflammation is a signal to our immune system that something's up. Unfortunately, a match during this time can and often does teach the body the wrong thing. If they find signal, they'll self-amplify against it, and you could be stuck with a new allergy for life.

Huh, thanks.

So now I'm incredibly curious -- the sore throat I get from memory foam. Is there any way to know whether that's simply a result of the VOC's damaging the cells in my throat directly? Or if it's an allergic reaction happening in that spot?

I have definitely been curious why memory foam would give me a sore throat specifically, when the offgassing is making equal contact with my skin, sinuses, etc.

the women who 'birthed' the boomers, were also a lot more 'hardy', cleaner air, very little electronics, more manual labour, outdoor activity etc... i bet that generation of mothers gave their infants good gut bacteria that set them up for success.... nowadays our best bet is probably to target a poop transfer surgery.

Pop a pill of PowerPoop! It's prophylactic!

Persistingly pushing performance to perfection!

Less plastics in everything is the big difference, IMO. Even a can of beans is lined with some sort of plastic film.

My father-in-law was a fireman and was in anything from 10-15 fires/month from 1965-1975, most of that time in a rescue company where he would pull people out, without an oxygen mask because they didn't fit. He did it enough that his knees were shot. He smoked as well, and in now in his 80s, along with a big cohort of his buds.

My brother-in-laws on both sides of the family are in fire service, and I've been to several funerals for guys in their 30s and 40s, who probably see 3-5 fires a year, are mostly fitness buffs and don't smoke. All for stuff like bladder cancer, esophageal cancer, etc. I know one of the theories is around fire protection gear causing carcinogens to be absorbed through sweat, and another issue is the toxic stew that is found in car or house fire smoke.

Another factor to consider, newer houses are sealed up with poor ventilation and build quality. Your typical >1985 home is largely assembled with glue and don't ventilate well and tend to have alot of mold. My house is a circa 1920 average quality single family. It ventilates well in the summer, has few materials hazards other than some lead risk, etc.

When I was a kid I knew exactly one child with celiac disease; nowadays I know about several people, so I thought in that line.

But this very year a childhood friend of mine became aware he has it. Nowadays I tend to think we are more attentive to these kinds of things, and older people rationalize symptoms or grow unaware of them, so they are no longer conscious of them.

I had a friend who threw up when she ate cheese. Today we would call her lactose intolerant. At the time she was told she was 'spoiled' and she would eat her mac-and-cheese or go hungry.

Honestly, I suspect they have the same plethora of issues, they just ignore them.

I've had fifteen years of gut & digestive tract issues, which I eventually narrowed down to fructans (garlic & onion being the worst offenders), and some fruits.

This discovery lead to a train of people in my family removing them during shared meals, and various other people in my family (including a couple of boomers) also discovering they had the same issue!

Our olfactory system has no magic ability to detect what is or isn't dangerous. That an unpleasant smell causes headache/nausea is one thing, the long-term health impact should be expected to be independent of this.

It absolutely does have a pretty magic ability to detect danger, that's sort of its purpose. As an example, last I checked, the human nose is the most sensitive device we have to detect spoilt milk.

Taste, smell, touch, all our senses are pretty damn good at parsing danger when functioning normally. Though I would bet with really un-natural substances the reliability goes down.

This is kind of true, but our senses have massive blind spots when it comes to dangerous things we encounter in nature.

Yes, the human nose has evolved sensitivity to sulfide substances produced by bacteria that spoil food. For example, the humans can barely smell 0.001ppm of dimethyl sulfide (from decomposing vegetables) and 1ppm of formaldehyde [0]. Human noses are three orders of magnitude more sensitive to the relatively safe dimethyl sulfide than to the dangerous formaldehyde. Formaldehyde can harm you even when you can't smell it (at 0.1ppm [1]).

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00022470.1969.10...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formaldehyde#Safety

Makes sense, though covered in my “natural” clause as formaldehyde practically doesn’t accumulate in nature as we find it.

VOC?

volatile organic compound

Volatile Organic Compound(s)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound

Different people has different sensitivity to different substances.

Take musk. Musk is an organic substances coming from the glands of a few animals. It's one of the most common base notes in perfumery. Since perfumes became a mass market product, there aren't enough musk deers in the planet by some orders of magnitude to fullfill the demand.

So they created "white" (synthetic) musks. Problem is most persons are anosmic to this one or that one white musk. Also white musks are not exactly biodegradable. Perfumists make cocktails of them to make sure you will feel some of them. A few people (sigh!) are anosmic to every polycyclic and macrocyclic musk.

And this is for substances that their explicit mission is to be smelled.

There are newer alycyclic musks much more biodegradable and most people can feel them. See Romandolide, Helvetolide, Rosamusk, if you're curious.

Would love to know the answer to this. Epigenetics is a thing, so I could easily see later generations becoming more and more sensitive based on previous generations' exposure.

The reasons vary person to person, but methylation is one reason. There are metabolic pathways that remove these chemicals from your body. Some people have pathways that don't work as well as others.

MTHFR is one mutation I know of that can cause this. This is kind of an emerging field, so there's no shortage of quackery, but the underlying metabolic pathway seems clear to me.

Yeah, it is horrifying to think about how much air pollution we inflict upon ourselves. It's very hard to stop even in a two-person household, because so many of the "products" most people in the Western world are used to buying and using since an early age are violators. I am blessed with being quite sensitive to most of them, so it's an endless struggle with partners and cohabitants.

Basically anything bought new has it: furniture, clothes, cars, anything plastic, dyed, glued, particleboard.

"Cleaning" products: sprays, detergents, most "soaps", shampoos, creams, conditioners, have this type of crap in them.

Even most stuff which claims to be "eco-friendly" is bullshit, and has all the same crap in it if you look at the ingredients.

And it feels like online there is a whole army of "rational scientific defenders" ready to jump into action anytime I mention it. It feels like there is a whole playbook for discrediting this type of comment, and calling into question how "scientific" it is, etc.

that's because you call it "this stuff" and bundle everything from new cars to soap into the same category. So you're just sensitive to every industrial material? it's hard to take seriously.

Well, VOCs are in almost all new products on the market...

It IS the same category when it makes you suffer. Be it sneezes, running nose, coughing, swelling throat, burning eyes, sometimes itching skin, feeling unwell in general after being in contact with or near that stuff.

Maybe our bodies have different tresholds for exposure to that stuff, and after oversaturating them for some time, there is no buffer available anymore?

Resulting in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_chemical_sensitivity

I call it the canary system. Some people are more sensitive than others, but we're all being harmed with it.

For my part, I pay attention to what others are sensitive to and avoid it as well.

If someone else has trouble coping with a substance but I'm "fine", that probably means that underneath my constituents are still struggling to deal with it and just not telling me.

Ssome people are allergic to peanuts, doesn't seem like a well grounded theory.

Peanuts are a great example. I am not allergic to peanuts myself, but I avoid eating them.

I don't know why people become allergic to them, but there must be something in some peanuts which sets off their immune system.

That's not how allergies work. People with allergies get an immune reaction to a harmless compound.

The true irony of this statement, and I want to emphasize I am not a doctor, is that you are more likely to cause a peanut allergy by avoiding it!

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/01/10/peanut-allergy-earl...

Similar to germ theory, some exposure is actually good.

From my understanding, some types of exposure promote allergy while other types of exposure prevent it.

How far do you take that theory? People have allergies to many (normally) benign substances. Melons, natural latex, ibuprofen, pollen, etc.

Generally speaking, if it wasn't in my ancestors' environment, I avoid it. Otherwise, approach with caution.

Nature can be dangerous, too, but at least it's likely that someone in the past has dealt with it and lived to reproduce.

With new synthetic substances, you're essentially doing alpha-testing with your irreplaceable hardware/software system...

Pollen in particular is weird because simply being outside should expose you to some level of pollen, compared to foods like melons or peanuts that may or may not be part of your diet. I'm mildly allergic to dust mites and they're literally everywhere.

Right. I'm currently undergoing allergy immunotherapy, so back in October I had a battery of allergy tests.

Turns out I'm allergic to some trees, some grasses, pollen, mold, dust mites, and a bunch of other things. And yet my childhood from a very young age was filled with playing outside in the yard and and in the woods.

Also my family had (indoor-only) cats since before I was born. My parents were allergic to them, and my sister and I are also allergic. (Wanting to get a cat is what prompted me to start the allergy shots.) So I've been exposed to cat dander since I was an infant. And yet: allergic. Some things are just hereditary, I guess.

I'm sure there are some cases where not being exposed to something when young can cause you to develop allergies, but that's definitely not the only cause. Seems like there is definitely a genetic component that can moot any amount of childhood exposure.

This assumes that if your immune system reacts negatively to something, it is guaranteed to be actually harmful to the body.

If our immune systems and bodies were all-knowing and perfect, then sure, that would be a valid assumption, but they're far from it.

Yes, peanut proteins.

Peanut, Egg, and Milk protein (CMPA) allergies are common in babies. My understanding is that the digestive system is not mature enough to process them, so it rejects them. Some of these allergies develop even while breast fed (baby colic). I take that some allergies stick once developed. But you should consider that something that creates an allergy response in a baby may be not harmful at all for an adult. And sometimes, once the allergy is triggered it sticks.

I wonder why they weren't common 30 years ago. Not a single person in my entire family from my generation and before has a single allergy, nor was it ever a big thing in school I attended in various US states in the 90s and early 00s.

It's like between the time I went to college and my own kids started school, they exploded and now all of the sudden a PB&J sandwich isn't allowed in school. That would have been unfathomable to me in my youth.

I attended school in the late 90s early 2000s (in canada).

It was a big deal then, there were kids i knew who were deathly alergic to peanuts.

Severe allergeries seem to be on the rise but i think your timeframe is wrong.

I went to to 8 different schools between K to 12th grades in 6 different states, and I don't recall meeting anyone who was deadly allergic to anything. I'm pretty sure I didn't even learn about epipens until maybe later in high school or possibly college.

The only ailment in kids that I think I had heard of was asthma, for which people had inhalers.

Of course, my data is weak and anecdotal, but based on the fact that a staple American food isn't allowed in schools anymore, I assume something must have changed.

Attending K-12 in the late 80's/early 90's I didn't know anyone with a serious allergy in school. There was never any concern about peanut butter food/snacks, or anything like that. A few kids with inhalers, that was it.

Its untrue, peanuts and milk allergies were very common 30 years ago, probably more than now in percentage. My genetic grandmother can't eat most of processed food without having an allergic reaction. Probably people were a bit ashamed of their non-threatening food allergies (most food allergies just give a lot of gas and small stomachaches).

Also related, Distilbene did not only wreck fecondity, it gave a lot of children food allergies, and i'm pretty sure distilben distribution stopped in the late 70s, so maybe we should just get the numbers and compare, but i'd bet food allergies were more prevalent in the 80s.

Interesting, I might have been in a bubble then. My parents and their generation immigrated to the US from a developing country, much poorer, but in all of our family gatherings, there was never a concern for allergies. And we use basically everything in our cooking.

I specifically remember weddings and whatnot when snacks were given out to everyone that there was no hesitation in offering anyone else's kids food for fear of them having an allergy.

I wonder then what the catalyst was for schools banning nuts and airlines no longer serving peanuts. Assuming people were always allergic in similar or higher proportion with similar severity, was it simply changes in the political winds?

It's because

(1) the internet and social media means you know about far more people with allergies than before,

(2) you are a adult and not a child, so you know more people now

(3) institutions have adopter broad inclusionary policies even if no one with an allergy is present

(4) institutions are being far more careful now (you eating a your granola bar poses no significant risk to someone with a peanut allergy, but it's still banned sitewide).

I think that the immune system "correlates" them with other harmful substances which are sometimes but not always present. The number of possible culprits is long: pesticides, random cleaning products used on the processing equipment, sometimes mold can grow on peanuts if they're stored improperly, the list goes on.

Our immune systems are in many ways similar to police forces, and if they hear "a problem being reported" often enough while peanuts are around, they may just bunch them together with the offender.

The problem is compounded by a dirty baseline environment. In the early stages, the immune system is "primed" with a "baseline" of what should and shouldn't be there, but if the VOCs and such are already there, it just learns that they are OK and doesn't react to them.

Allergies where common 30 years ago, but you are right about the percentage of people that have allergies is raising and getting more severe. You can even find references to allergy going back to Aristotle's time, so not exactly a new thing. I haven't got a link to it, but did take a webinar on allergy some weeks ago.

None know exactly why where are getting more allergic, but since allergy most often is the immune system attacking harmless things some theories is that we have to clean an environment in our homes.

I asked my parents about this, and they said that peanuts weren't common back then - they were expensive and a luxury so as a result we didn't have such widespread visibility of the problem.

Allergy != Intolerance. When you have an allergy, you suffocate, when you have intolerance to something, it'll be unpleasant to be around you and you may spend some time on the toilet. This is an oversimplification, but one is an immune reaction and the other isn't. Inability to digest something to me sounds like neither of those cases.

This is an oversimplification. An allergy will not necessarily cause anaphylaxis (suffocating, etc). I'm allergic to a lot of types of pollen/mold/dander (skin prick test) and also two food items, also identified with a skin prick test, and I've never yet had anaphylaxis. When I eat oatmeal/rye (my food allergies) I get a runny nose, fatigue, and mild GI distress.

Forgot to mention, I also have lactose intolerance. I think I have a bit of gluten intolerance too, but that might be psychosomatic and I haven't yet had a family member help with a blind study on myself. Sometime I intend to.

The main point was that failure to digest something doesn't mean that you are allergic or intolerant. My impression was that this was what the example with babies' bodies "rejecting" some foods that they cannot process implied. Humans can eat stuff they cannot digest (fiber, corn kernels without chewing, anyone?) without adverse effects, stuff will just pass through. Unless you're eating nails or glass, but that's a mechanical damage...

That's pseudo-science. There are lots of things that can kill some people and are harmless to others.

Better safe than sorry, don't you think?

Would you say VOCs are harmless to people who are not sensitive to them?

I see your point, but I think that you're most likely being overly careful when regulating your exposure to substances. As the person responding to your point about allergies stated, individual's bodies respond to (or don't respond to) substances in different ways.

Peanut allergies are an example of this: a person with allergies is having an immune response to the substance, while most humans don't experience this immune response. This doesn't necessarily indicate that peanuts are always inducing a low level "bad" reaction in people without allergies, just that those with allergies have an immune system that isn't properly reacting to a non-threat. Do you also not eat eggs, shellfish, every kind of tree nut, strawberries, or red meat? Because these are all possible allergies.

This isn't to say that VOC's aren't harmless, because I believe they are. But your assertion that sensitivities in one person indicate something about the entire human population is scientifically false and is most likely casting too wide of a net. You've essentially defined a process with high sensitivity (which means you catch all of the possible bad chemicals/substances), but very low specificity (you often identify substances as harmful when they are not). This is fine for ensuring safety but is unnecessarily restrictive.

I think that all those things are "approach with caution" territory.

Immune system can become sensitized not just to harmful substances, but also to ones "correlated" with them, meaning it's likely they've been exposed to e.g. peanuts which had something bad in them and associated it with the peanuts themselves.

Of course, there's also the fact that when a child is growing up in this VOC environment, their immune system never gets a chance to establish a good baseline for what should and shouldn't be in the system, and that is another reason allergies develop.

Life as a whole is balancing risk and reward. My desire to experience life outweighs my desire for safety.

If I could live infinitely long but never experience anything, what's the point? Safety is the largest danger.

I've done many dangerous things, but where is the experience reward for breathing VOCs?

Certainly riding in a new car is not worth it, is it? Or having a "fresh-smelling" house with nice-looking furniture?

Everything listed there is very enjoyable. New car smell has a name because people like it so much.

Sure, but I can find other enjoyable things which are not proven harmful.

Not to mention the insane amount of "biocide" which happens in the process of producing a new car.

I consider animals and plants to be my close relatives (and dependencies, meaning I won't live long without them), so if I can avoid money-voting for stuff which harms them, I choose that.

Dumb answer, but it's simpler to not have to worry about this stuff. How you balance that with the risk is subjective, but it's not true that there is no downside to avoiding VOCs.

I am not commenting on VOCs specifically, just pointing out that the logic is flawed.

We should ban or control the substances for which we have strong suspicion, I think most sane people would agree. But where to put the line is difficult. Some trees have pollen that causes asthma attacks and several deaths every year; should we cut them all?

So we need more nuances than black or white.

Now if you want my opinion, I would agree that reducing volatile substances is good; we still need to be careful about the things we put in their place.

With the existence of lactose intolerance and gluten intolerance, that seems like a difficult policy to live with.

From that article:

> Blinded clinical trials show that people with MCS react as often and as strongly to placebos as they do to chemical stimuli; the existence and severity of symptoms is seemingly related to perception that a chemical stimulus is present.

I don't believe this study for a second based on personal experience. It sounds about as trustworthy as tobacco-is-harmless and fat-not-sugar studies of the past.

This is why people don’t take your claims seriously. If you aren’t even willing to consider an opposing viewpoint, why should anyone consider yours? What’s the point in having a discussion?

Clearly you have some kind of hypersensitivity to indoor environments. I’m not convinced it’s VOCs. They’ve been with us for a long time now, spanning a few generations, and life expectancy is only increasing. Maybe I’m wrong; I’m open to that possibility.

On the hand, the only other people I’ve met with issues similar to yours have allergic histamine reactions to particulates that are benign to everyone else. Like dust and grass. I have a friend that gets a shot every few months for it, and doesn’t have a problem when treated. Have you considered speaking with a doctor?

I don't have allergies, and I am not sensitive to indoor envornments by themselves. I just get very tired and a migraine-like reaction when exposed to synthetic cleaning products and new furniture, as far as recently.

I don't need scientific consensus to prove it to me, I live it myself.

People I am close with do take me seriously, and the problem is fixed when the VOCs are taken away.

VOC's aren't all man-made. You'd need to live in a vacuum to avoid them altogether.

The nice smell after a rain storm? VOC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound#Biol...

What are you saying, that because some VOCs are found in nature, any man-made VOC is OK too, just because it is part of the same chemical compound family?

I think the appropriate conclusion would be your sensitive to something more specific than just the very broad class of VOCs in general.

So... the ones I am not sensitive to, are they not harmful?

I don't know that we know enough to know that. It's certainly true that there are "natural" VOC's that can be harmful, and man-made VOC's that are not known to be harmful. I wouldn't necessarily presume that sensitivity is directly correlated to harm.

Just for the record, VOCs are literally "anything organic that boils at less than 250°C" (in the EU).

Farts are full of VOCs. No, seriously, every time I fart the TVOC sensor in my air purifier goes nuts, as does the one in my air quality meter. It's almost like the thing is shaming me for it :)

I would encourage you to learn more about the different types of VOCs, and at which concentrations they are known to be harmful. You might be having true allergic reactions to some harmless VOCs. You might be having psychosomatic reactions to other VOCs. You might not be having reactions to some harmful VOCs at all. Lumping it all together into "VOCs" is not helpful.

Wait a minute, so you're telling me when I was laughing with my husband about how we should fart in front of the new air purifier and see if the sensor went off and he dismissed me, rolled his eyes and called me juvenile THAT I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG?!?!?

I,m using a more restricted definition of synthetics which we didn,t evolve with.

You aren't receiving pushback from people who are attempting to deny your experience. I don't think anybody here doubts the experiences you have mentioned.

Instead people are questioning your analysis of the root cause. You can be meaningfully and honestly impacted and also be wrong about why you are having trouble. Even in the most extreme case where somebody wants to claim you effectively experiencing the placebo effect, that does not detract from the realness of your issue.

I think many people have trouble really groking this separation. Questioning the root cause can often feel like questioning the problem. Additionally it is easy to become attached to an explanation that may be faulty. Humans are not well-evolved to be perfectly rational and completely detached observers of their own lives. And faulty explanations don't necessarily cause faulty solutions, which can make things even harder to disentangle.

However I think it's important to try to keep in mind that all of these aspects are distinct in important ways despite being related. It is possible to question or even refute these aspects individually without casting aspersions on the other aspects. You can have a real problem, and a working solution, and still be completely wrong about why. That's fine, and actually pretty normal.

Yep antigen shots worked for my grass pollen allergy

The study may be true on average but not in every particular case. The way we do most medical studies today, with relatively small samples and coarse aggregate statistics, isn't well-suited to detecting rare but genuine issues with a high false positive rate.

There are also two major issues with science today.

The first is that a lot of studies are simply careless. They use a "placebo" which has a scent to give the indication that there is something there, but then the "placebo" unintentionally contains VOCs. Or the lab's janitor uses them to clean the lab, things like that.

The second is that a lot of studies are funded by people with agendas. It's all too easy to get an invalid result by accident, much less on purpose.

See also replication crisis.

So then you either have to know and trust the authors of the study or spend the time to go through it with a fine toothed comb and find replications from independent scientists before you can trust it. Which nobody really has the time to do, so the default position becomes to dismiss anything the reader disagrees with.

It's a problem.

> I don't believe this study for a second

You don't get to throw away opposing evidence because it does not agree with the point you're attempting to sell. You don't actually want to have a conversation, you just want to push an agenda.

This reminds me of the people moving out to the middle of no where because they claim to be sensitive to wifi.

While not a physical thing, it can be ""real"": https://youtu.be/O2hO4_UEe-4

> "this stuff"

Is it less hard to take seriously when the proper term is utilized?

Volatile Organic Compounds (a.k.a. VOCs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound

> So you're just sensitive to every industrial material? it's hard to take seriously.

Our bodies are essentially "legacy code" that's been evolving not for a decade or two, but for millions of years.

If you've ever maintained an old software system, you know that old-tried-and-true inputs are probably good, but trying anything previously untested may cause unpredictable issues.

I look at any new substance which my ancestors haven't encountered (and been selected for tolerating) as basically alpha testing, which I'd rather avoid with my irreplaceable hardware-software installation.

In this thread, you've managed to derive axiomatically a theory of toxicity in which peanuts are suspicious because they trigger allergies, which implies our immune systems see something wrong with them. I feel like a grain of salt (if our systems can tolerate it) would do us well on this thread.

Is it hard to take pollen allergies from dozens of different plants seriously?

How about dust and smoke? How can someone be allergic to both! The temerity.

It’s less about chemistry of the materials, more about the sensitivity of the squishy, arbitrary human body.

Pollen I don't avoid, because it's not a new substance.

"Dust" allergies often have to do with the substances which are on the dust, which is covered above.

Smoke is certainly not good for you.

This squishy arbitrary human body is the only one I've got for today, so I avoid whatever I think may harm it, even if there is no dots on the i's and crosses on the t's with regards to scientific proof.

If you look at the history of teflon, plastics, cigarettes, VOCs, synthetic food ingredients, you'll see that this strategy would have served a human well in the past, and it's the best one I can think of to follow for the foreseeable future.

One problem with this kind of reasoning is that it's the same thing that the people with the 5G allergies say. It's tricky because VOCs probably are very bad for us, so there's a kernel of truth in it, but you don't want to balance your entire house on a single kernel, if that makes sense.

How about judging each case on its merits rather than shoving them all in the conspiracy box to feel better?

I agree that's how we should do it, and think we are both making the same critique.

So I have an allergy to Aloe. And it got blind tested one night when I slept on a friend's floor and woke up with a rash 100% unaware he used his Aloe plant right where I slept.

I also have whatever the hell the MSG allergy is, though obviously it isn't to pure MSG because they can't reproduce it with pure MSG (from which they conclude it doesn't exist), but if someone wants to throw money at figuring out its root cause from some sort of breakdown product or adulterant that travels with commercially produced MSG, I'm happy to be the guinea pig. The last time it hit, at a Chinese restaurant in SF, the left side of my body was nearly paralyzed. It is bizarre whatever it actually is. And the number of you-know-whats I give about randos taking it seriously or not is precisely zero.

A former co-worker would projectile vomit if exposed to avocado. I saw that get evaluated blind as well.

If you’re curious about the MSG sensitivity I recommend trying other foods that are high in MSG and looking for similar sensitivities to foods like tomatoes, snack foods, and meat seasoning mixes, and condiments. If you don’t have sensitivities to those, it may be something else that’s causing the issue, like ginger, soy sauce, oyster sauce, etc.

Actually, in case of MSG, it's easier to try it directly, in chemically pure form.

I'm pretty sure it's not reactant grade MSG. But I wonder about breakdown products and adulterants that travel with kitchen-grade MSG.

> The last time it hit, at a Chinese restaurant in SF,

Not to not take it seriously, but isn’t there a lot more stuff in American Chinese food other than MSG? Like of the 1000s of chemical substances that would be in a plate of Chinese food, why of all places would that be where you would isolate an MSG allergy?

> or adulterant that travels with commercially produced MSG

Then that wouldn’t be an MSG allergy. Oats are gluten free but celiacs have difficulty with them, not because of the oats but because of contamination.. we wouldn’t say they have an oat allergy though.

I have serious problems with many of the same chemicals as GP. Well I understand different ones are harmful or not in theory, I only know what I react to. It's almost uniformly products to which artificial fragrances are added intentionally, or exhaust that's known to be harmful such as diesel and gasoline. I only have issues with certain natural fragrances (essential oils) with extended exposure or large amounts. Most likely it's members of several large categories that I react to. Could be VOCs, phthalates, teflon relatives, and synthetic fragrance compounds.

Like gluten intolerance, one of the difficult things about reacting negatively to common consumer products is the number of people who refuse to believe it's a real problem.

From personal experience, once you become sensitized, you become sensitive to literally anything synthetic.

It's like my brother says when there's a food or candy that doesn't taste the same as when we were kids: "they took the cancer out of it." Items that are no longer on the market had to remove so much cancer from their ingredients that it wasn't the same anymore, so they take it off the market.

They say "regulations are written in blood," which makes you wonder what "new car smell" was composed of 50 years ago.

I think it's actually the opposite. They put the cancer in it by swapping out expensive ingredients like sugar and fat for high fructose corn syrup and palm kernel oil. Evey time you see the "same great taste" or "new formula" on a box it means they've re-engineered it to cut costs by substituting ingredients, usually for some engineered compound that's cheaper or more shelf stable.

Hershey's chocolate is now just rancid swill that just tastes of sugar with a hint of vomit.

Hershey's chocolate was like that on day 1, about 120 years ago, because they wanted to use milk without having to keep the supply refrigerated. Lipolysis of the milk fat produces butyric acid, which does taste a bit like vomit or parmesan cheese. People got addicted to the taste, so today the flavor is intentional. Some companies, targeting the American market, even add butyric acid to mimic the Hershey's taste.

That's interesting. I don't recall it being quite so bad 30 years ago.

Of all the things to point out in commercial food production you chose basically the two most benign things.

Swapping refined sugar for HFCS 55 (the most common type) is basically an even trade sans some extra water content in the syrup and palm kernel oil is just saturated fat but sourced from a plant instead of animals.

I don’t think anyone is gonna argue that a high sugar and saturated fat diet is healthy but no worse than the same things sourced from other places. In an alternative universe palm oil and corn syrup would have been the standard and people would complain about the switch to lard and white sugar.

a) Refined sugar and HFCS both cause fatty liver about equally.

b) HFCS is sourced from corn, which means pesticide residue.

c) Palm oil also leads to fatty liver.

They may be an "even trade", but certainly harmful to one's health.

b) White sugar is sourced from sugar cane which is also grown with pesticides. In both cases you have to trust the respective refining processes to clean your food.

I absolutely agree with you that sugar and saturated fat in anything other than moderation is harmful to your health but that, in this case, the source of those things doesn't really matter.

In terms of vegetables, much of the difference is selective breeding for varieties that look pretty in the store and can survive transport easily instead of for taste. No cancer involved.

The cancer is in the pesticide residue.

The pesticide residue wasn't what made it taste good, which was the context of the parents comment

Thanks

The scary part is that you become desensitized to VOCs the more you're exposed and people willingly increase their exposure by using air fresheners, scented candles, fabric softeners, and incense burners. It gets to the point where they can't even smell moderate amounts.

My partner has severe allergies and will break out in hives when exposed to many fragrances so we've cut them out of everything. We avoid most cleaning products and stick to water, salt, baking soda, vinegar, and peroxide for most household cleaning.

My MIL is very desensitized to fragrances and my partner has asked her on multiple occasions not to "freshen up" the house before we visit. My MIL swears up and down that she doesn't but the moment you walk in the door it's like a punch in the face. My partner unfortunately will break out in hives and immediately becomes congested.

Shout out to vinegar! The huge jugs of "cleaning vinegar" changed my life a couple years ago. I still use diluted bleach for the bathroom every once in a while, but vinegar is sufficient for almost everything day-to-day. And it's so much cheaper than most "cleansers".

Peroxide is a surprisingly good stain and odor remover. I prefer it to vinegar because it doesn't have a pungent odor that masks the odor you're trying to get rid of.

But yes vinegar is awesome. It's fantastic at water stains like nothing else.

Acetic acid also works great as fabric softener, and it works against limescale in the washing machine. Anecdotally it also keeps colors vibrant.

Having your relatives and friends finally take you seriously is such a relief when you're dealing with MCS.

It's crazy how dismissive people are. My partner had a comprehensive allergy test done, the kind where they draw a grid on your back and apply different substances in each square.

You're supposed to leave and come back a few days later but my partner had a reaction in every square before she left the doctor. They asked if the interns could come take a look because they'd never seen such a complete reaction.

Not sure if it's what you meant, but I had a similar story where I reacted to everything, even the control. The allergist took that to mean "you're really allergic to everything," but I went looking for a second opinion who was able to get both the positive and negative controls to work. Turns out I'm not allergic to everything, the first allergist just didn't recognize benign dermatographia and was a bit too quick to ignore my positive reaction to the negative control. In all, it saved me a good chunk of change and sensitization risks that would have come from having unneeded components in my allergy shots.

I don't know the details of your case or if any of this applies, but if by chance you were in the same boat wrt the negative control it might be worth circling back for a confirmation test at some point.

I'm exaggerating a little, my partner has extensive allergies but not absolute. I jokingly say my partner is allergic to life but in reality it's just life on earth.

I had this test done. Your partner needs antigen shots they really help, ask their allergist for this therapy.

I'm not soliciting for advice, my partner has been seeking medical treatment for allergies for at least 30 years.

well you never mentioned antigen shots, so thought I'd share a n=1 therapeutic that worked for me. Allergies suck, hope your partner finds relief.

Fun fact, I'm actually mildly allergic to salt. Docs didn't believe me and just tried to say it was GERD or similar. Finally found one that did some more tests and yep.

I also can't be around any strong perfumes or I'll break out in hives. It sucks when someone on a plane comes on like they just took a shower in the stuff.

I received similar skepticism from people for coconut but after a few times of my lips turning purple they started to believe me. I seemed to have aged out of it though as more recent accidental exposures haven't resulted in a reaction.

I'm not about to tempt fate and willing subject myself to it.

Wait, what? I'm pretty sure you can't be allergic to sodium chloride. Salt is literally part of your body. You'd die if you didn't ingest any salt.

Do you mean you're allergic to some common additive in table salt, or specifically to elevated salt concentrations? The former sounds like something you could call an allergy (but not to salt itself); the latter I probably wouldn't call an allergy so much as higher sensitivity to significantly hypotonic food or drinks. An allergy is usually defined as an excessive, damaging immune reaction to a foreign substance that is itself harmless at that concentration. Salt isn't a foreign substance.

I get the feeling a lot of people are lumping tons of things into the category of "allergies" where the underlying biological processes are very different. That doesn't mean the reactions aren't real, but it makes it very difficult to reason to reason about them. When everything's an allergy, the word allergy stops having any useful meaning.

Most "plain old salt" available through commercial sources does contain several synthetic additives as "flow enhancers".

Indeed, but then it wouldn't be a salt allergy so much as an allergy to those additives (and one that you could easily fix by cooking with proper pure NaCl).

Easier said than done.

Sure, but many don't even know it's usually there, even when the ingredient list just reads "salt".

> My partner unfortunately will break out in hives and immediately becomes congested.

normalize_relation(OP.MIL, OP.partner) == partner.mother

Right?

So, your partner's mom uses products that she knows will cause an allergic reaction to her kid.

Kid asks not to use said products for fear of allergic reaction.

Kid enters mom's abode.

Kid has immediate allergic reaction.

So I have to ask-- what is your MIL's reaction to clearly causing her kid to predictably suffer every time you visit?

I also have to ask-- why do you two keep visiting?

Eh, old people can be weird and stubborn. (Or people in general.) Some don't really believe in something and might even be having early stage dementia (i.e. memory loss).

My own mother had a dismissive attitude towards dietary intolerances and even basic hygiene sometimes.

Some are just assholes. My aunt told a vegetarian once that she'd get some color back once she started eating meat again.

I'm keeping the closest watch that I can on this age and being a default assehole gig that I have heard all my life and am guilty of using myself to blank out some of my parents behaviour that was beyond salvation. I'm 50 now and looking for the SMaaS app I need the Shoot Me aaS when I default to asshole cos of age app is desperately needed in society.

That reminds me, a friend and I made a pact when we were teens. Hopefully he doesn't remember.

In my experience with working with many elderly patients, a lot of them are self-conscious of having "old person smell" so attempt to mask that with perfume/cologne. It's also harder for them to bathe and reach all the nooks and crannies so sometimes hygiene deteriorates.

One of the strongest smells in a nursing home isn't unchanged diapers it is that staph infection festering under a neglected old lady's underbreast area. Very infrequently checked due to modesty issues and caregivers trying not to offend and respect her decency but it does have to be monitored and checked routinely because that skin area stays moist and chafes against the folds and I've seen too many elderly women in severe pain from their bra straps chaffing the skin off here and getting infected.

Men of hackernews, check your elderly mothers underbreast area and make sure her caregivers are routinely keeping it clean and dry!!

This comment brought to you by a very sweet, very neglected old lady who we took out of a pretty bad situation in a care home and I will never forget that smell and the shame and plea for help in her eyes as I assessed what exactly was the source of her various ailments. And she was nonverbal so couldn't complain nobody was doing their damn jobs.

In her defense, she has toned it down considerably. She thinks however that the amount she still uses is so trace that it's undetectable, possibly because she's fried her sense of smell. She also has anxiety issues about not adhering to social expectations, like she can't arrive empty handed or will spend all day cleaning and then apologize for a "filthy" home that's cleaner than a laboratory clean room. So it's a struggle for her to hold back.

My partner is quite literally allergic to everything so it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation a lot of times.

> home that's cleaner than a laboratory clean room

> My partner is quite literally allergic to everything

... and now research is showing those two statements may be cause and effect to some degree, ironically.

I asked my mom to switch to unscented fabric softener and it took MONTHS for her clothes to stop smelling like being punched in the face with a bouquet. It's amazing how desensitized people are, and how long it takes those fragrances to dissipate.

> I asked my mom to switch to unscented fabric softener and it took MONTHS for her clothes to stop smelling like being punched in the face with a bouquet.

Yes! It's amazing how the smell persists subsequent washes.

The molecules are quite resilient compared to anything we consider "biodegradeable", which means they also persist when in our bodies.

This is me basically, minus MIL with crazy fragrances. Every time I walk past a fragrance shop,I wonder how people survive in there...

Bicarbonate soda is an amazing product: we've been using it instead of washing-up liquid for our daughter's cutlery and crockery. Also to clean the bath before she goes in.

5 years ago,we bought a sofa, which came with a massive stench because of VOCs and fire retardants it gets soaked into.. After we complained, they sent in a guy,who pretended he can't smell shit and suggested going to the doctor for allergies.. to my knowledge, California is one of very few places, where furniture foam doesn't need to be soaked in harmful chemicals.

I pour a baking soda slurry on my hair in showers instead of shampoo, sometimes exfoliate my face a bit right after. Rinse it out with some diluted white or apple cider vinegar. Most shampoos had me developing horrible neck and scalp pimples and gave me dry skin.

Now if you want to really kick up the cleaning potential you put on gloves and bake the baking soda turning it into Sodium Carbonate which is an adequate replacement for lye in many household uses from cleaning to making pretzels.

There are many kinds of VOCs, some harmful and others benign. The human nose is sensitive to certain substances and insensitive to others. For example, the human nose can barely smell 1ppm of formaldehyde [1] or 0.000002ppm of damascenone (the fragrance made by roses and added to many products) [2]. That's a difference in concentration of 500,000. Put another way, an overpowering rose smell shows a tiny and harmless concentration. While a light formaldehyde smell indicates a harmful concentration. So you cannot trust your nose to tell you if VOC levels are harmful or not.

I used to be like your partner. A whiff of perfume would trigger nasal congestion, itchy eyes, and irritable mood. It got worse over 5 years. It became unbearable, interfering with my work and personal life. I consulted with an allergy doctor. They told me it was incurable and probably won't get better, just avoid perfume.

I started doing my own research. I found a study result [0] showing that perfume sensitivity is psycho-somatic. Then I learned stress-reduction techniques and used them to cure myself. Specifically, whenever I smelled perfume, I would practice slow breathing, go for a short walk, or get a drink of water. Gradually, I stopped feeling stress after smelling perfume. After about one month, I used lightly-perfumed (normal) hand soap at my friend's home and felt no discomfort afterward. My life improved a lot.

Allergy is a very specific physical process involving the immune system. Doctors have reliable methods to measure this process. Perfume sensitivity is something different. People develop emotional habits of reacting with fear when smelling perfume. When the body enters that triggered emotional state, it releases stress hormones. The stress hormones cause the symptoms of perfume sensitivity.

Your partner can cure their-self, as I cured myself four years ago. After they do it, please reply here so I can point others to this thread.

[0] http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(06)01696-4/abst...

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00022470.1969.10...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242146083_GRAS_Flav...

The studies you cite do not list who funded them, but one of the links is ... a website which sells sneakers! One of the worst VOC offenders!

Also, that's a nice story, but I already practice stress reduction techniques on a daily basis for other stressors. I also regularly assess myself for stress level so that I know to apply them.

When my partner bought a couch that off-gassed from the particleboard for months, I was not stressed by it. I did, however, develop a severe headache, disorientation, and migraine-like symptoms.

There's also the correlation of various VOCs with long-term health risks. Do you think that is just stress as well?

Stress is probably higher risk. Notice your triggers and integrate stress reduction at that present time. It's sort of reprogramming your self. Not into NLP though.

Well, having a gruesome headache and unable to think straight or function is certainly a stressor.

As I mentioned, I practice stress reduction techniques on a daily basis. I have studied and practiced them for years, from older traditions and today's teachers. I even teach them to others. People often comment on my calm and peaceful state and demeanor.

Stress is not the culprit here. The culprit is chemical poisoning.

Many sofas produce toxic formaldehyde.

> There's also the correlation of various VOCs with long-term health risks. Do you think that is just stress as well?

Some VOCs are toxic. Perfumes are not. You can look up their safety data sheets.

Are you familiar with skin prick tests? A grid of half inch squares are drawn over the test area, usually your arm. Each square receives a different allergen via pin prick. After a few minutes or sometimes days, the allergist accesses the degree to which you had a reaction in each square. The reactions vary from nothing to blistering. The reactions are isolated to the site of the pin prick. You do not know what allergen was applied to each grid square. It's only after the fact that you learn what you've reacted to.

The skin prick test done over my partner's entire back using dozens of allergens to form a comprehensive list of allergies. There was not a 100% reaction to all allergens and there was no way for my partner to know which allergen was applied in each grid.

You're going to tell me that my partner's selective reactions to over 100 different skin pricks were all psycho-somatic? I actually find your remarks dismissive and rather offensive.

Did the allergy doctor do a skin prick test with perfumes?

Did I write anything that downplays your partner's problems? Perhaps you think that psycho-somatic problems aren't common, or are somehow the fault of the people suffering from them? Psycho-somatic symptoms are real. I experienced them myself for many years. I do not dismiss your partner's symptoms.

Human bodies are complicated and diverse. Finding solutions to health problems requires an open mind and effort to learn and try various potential solutions. Please try not to react defensively to this stranger's words. My intention is to help you and your partner.

I am quite certain that your partner's perfume sensitivity and skin allergies are different biological processes. Allergies are a very specific process involving histamines and leading to inflammation. Nobody has demonstrated that process happening because of perfume in the air.

It's possible that your partner's skin allergies flare up when the brain releases stress hormones. Stress affects the immune system in complicated ways. Stress can trigger hives [0]. That doesn't make them perfume allergies.

Consider this process:

Smells perfume -> brain enters fear emotion -> brain releases stress hormones -> immune system increases sensitivity -> infection alert goes off in areas of skin (hives)

If this is the case, then you can prevent the hives by preventing the brain from entering the fear emotion state.

[0] https://medlineplus.gov/hives.html

> Did I write anything that downplays your partner's problems?

Yes, here are some examples:

> Perfume sensitivity is something different. People develop emotional habits of reacting with fear when smelling perfume.

> I am quite certain that your partner's perfume sensitivity and skin allergies are different biological processes. Allergies are a very specific process involving histamines and leading to inflammation. Nobody has demonstrated that process happening because of perfume in the air.

You don't know anything about my partner's allergies and yet you're certain in your diagnosis.

Here are some facts:

* Contact dermatitis is the second most common allergic reaction.

* Fragrance chemicals are the leading cause for contact allergies.

* Airborne accute contact dermatitis has been studied extensively.

I'm not sure how you've come to the conclusions you have but you're outright dismissing decades of scientific research and concluding that my partner's allergies are psycho-somatic.

You're in league with new age medicine like healing crystals and tinctures.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cf8f/f7d8b5cb3f8c279b2d877a...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00128071-200304110...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0536....

1. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cf8f/f7d8b5cb3f8c279b2d877a...

The first article you link is a review of Allergic Contact Dermatitis (ACD). This is for substances that stick to skin cells and then trigger an allergic reaction. I searched through that article for reports of allergy to airborne fragrance and found only one:

> In 1 driver and 4 passengers, airborne ACD to such scents was diagnosed in Miami, FL [72].

It's from a short report from a hospital [0]. Five separate patients reported ACD related to driving or riding in separate Uber cars. The patients had positive patch tests for a fragrance (balsam of Peru). They did not analyze the substances in the driver's fragrance diffuser or the fragrances of the other cars. There are many possible explanations for the symptoms. Driving for Uber is a stressful job. And riding in Uber can be stressful, too, especially when the car has a bad smell that requires a powerful fragrance to cover up. So an equally plausible explanation of the five peoples' dermatitis is stress-induced dermatitis.

All other reports in that article of airborne ACD are for industrial substances affecting people working in factories and labs which use the substances. A worker in an addiction treatment facility became allergic to airborne heroin and morphine. Somebody became allergic to airborne sawdust.

2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00128071-200304110...

The second article is titled "Fragrance Contact Allergy". You can read it at [1]. It studies fragrance substances that people apply to their skin. It contains this statement, with no references or further information:

> Air-borne exposure to perfumes may elicit an allergic reaction in very sensitive individuals, but this is an extremely rare phenomenon.

3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0536....

The third article you listed is titled "Fragrance contact allergy: a 4‐year retrospective study". You can read it at [2]. The article does not contain the word 'air' or 'airborne'. It studies fragrance substances that are applied to the skin. It does not talk about allergic reaction to airborne fragrances.

I may be wrong. It's certainly possible that somebody somewhere has been allergic to airborne fragrances. But I found no credible evidence of that when I reviewed the scientific literature 4 years ago. And these three articles you linked also do not provide any evidence of it. If you find something concrete, or I missed something in the articles, please let me know.

[0] https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.1111/cod.12804

[1] https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.2165/00128071-20030411...

[2] https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0536.2010....

> Three-quarters of the toxic chemicals detected in a test of 140 products came from fragrance, reported a 2018 BCPP study of personal care and cleaning brands. The chemicals identified were linked to chronic health issues, including cancer.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/fragrance-pe...

> According to the Environmental Working Group, the average fragrant contains about 14 secret chemicals that aren’t listed on the label, many of which are linked to hormone disruption and allergic reactions, as well as about 80 percent of them not being tested for human safety in personal care products.

https://www.nontoxicrevolution.org/blog/wtf-fragrance

> Of the thousands of chemicals used in fragrances, most have not been tested for toxicity, alone or in combination. Many of these unlisted ingredients are irritants and can trigger allergies, migraines, and asthma symptoms. iii A survey of asthmatics found that perfume and/or colognes triggered attacks in nearly three out of four individuals. iv There is also evidence suggesting that exposure to perfume can exacerbate asthma, and perhaps even contribute to its development in children.

https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/dirty-dozen-parfum-fr...

> In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences tested commonly used fragrances for neurotoxicity; however, the results have still yet to be released. The good news is that many other tests have been done. In fact, in 1991 the EPA tested conventional, synthetic perfumes and found a long list of toxic chemical ingredients, including acetone, benzaldehyde, benzyl acetate, benzyl alcohol, camphor, ethanol, ethyl acetate, limonene, linalool, methylene chloride as well as phthalates, stearates, and parabens.

https://alituranaturals.com/the-top-10-toxic-chemicals-in-pe...

> “The average fragrance product tested contained 14 secret chemicals not listed on the label,” reports EWG, which analyzed the Campaign’s data. “Among them are chemicals associated with hormone disruption and allergic reactions, and many substances that have not been assessed for safety in personal care products.” EWG adds that some of the undisclosed ingredients are chemicals “with troubling hazardous properties or with a propensity to accumulate in human tissues.” Examples include diethyl phthalate, a chemical found in 97 percent of Americans and linked to sperm damage in human epidemiological studies, and musk ketone, which concentrates in human fat tissue and breast milk.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/toxic-perfumes-an...

> The good news is that immediate, irreversible damage to your health caused by one-time use of perfume or cologne — so-called “perfume poisoning” — is rare. But exposure to topical fragrances can trigger allergies, skin sensitivities, and cause harm over time.

https://www.healthline.com/health/perfume-poisoning

> BCPP’s report disclosed the results of chemical testing of 140 popular U.S. personal care and cleaning products. The testing revealed hundreds of toxic chemicals in these products, the majority of which were associated with the fragrance in the product.

https://www.womensvoices.org/2018/09/26/new-data-reveals-one...

Which of those articles claim allergic reactions from airborne fragrances?

Surveys are not reliable.

This is something my mother does on a grand scale, and we all probably do on smaller scales. (Obviously plenty of allergies are real, I'm not claiming it's all made up.) For 20 years she's attributed various health problems to allergies. There tend to be 2-3 allergies that she believes she has at any one time, each one lasting for about 5 years. Last I checked, she was "gluten sensitive", that was the main one. Another person I know claims to be allergic to "about 20 to 30 things, but all on a very mild level that combines and accumulates over time". Just the sort of thing that you couldn't, you know, test for. A more determined person would probably hit on one thing and stick with it for a long time.

I think "rationality" is not any kind of preventative against getting caught up in this. It's a matter of being in a community, and everyone in the community saying "yeah I discovered I had this problem, it's actually way more common than doctors realize and it had these symptoms, and fixing it improved my life so much." So then you start to think about whether you have had anything that resembles those symptoms, and your brain wheels start to go on the possibility that all your life issues could be solved if you just eliminated whatever it is. Pretty soon you do have the symptoms, you see them every time you encounter this thing. Why didn't you notice it before? You must have been desensitized... and so on.

To be clear, I'm not making light of the issue, and I'm definitely not willing to say that this is what is happening to anyone in this thread in particular, but by my observation it's an extremely common problem, one I've fallen into myself before. I literally do not let myself listen to anecdata about allergies, because I know I'll fall for it again. This is all sort of reminiscent of England's famous "catching" psychological issues, or the betwitched children of Salem.

> Pretty soon you do have the symptoms, you see them every time you encounter this thing.

Your comment seems to imply that psycho-somatic symptoms are not real symptoms and people who suffer from them are behaving irrationally. If so, you are incorrect.

Psycho-somatic symptoms are real measurable physical problems in the body that are triggered by the brain. They are not imagined problems. For example, my perfume sensitivity triggered real nasal congestion. You could hook up a nasal flow meter and record data showing that my nostrils were blocked. For people with chronic lower back pain, you could connect a sensor to the pain nerves and measure the pain signals going from the lower back muscles into the spinal column.

Suffering from a psycho-somatic disorder does not imply that the person is rational or irrational. Psycho-somatic problems arise from everyday life situations. For example, my own perfume sensitivity developed over a year of high pressure at the office. My desk was near the women's restroom. Several times an hour, people wearing perfume would walk by my desk to use the restroom, and then walk by again a few minutes later. I became distracted when I smelled their perfume. I would respond to the distraction by desperately forcing myself to concentrate. When concentrating was difficult, I felt more stress. Gradually, my brain developed an automatic response: smell perfume -> feel anxiety and stress. Unfortunately, this was a self-reinforcing habit. After I recognized the root cause, I was able to un-learn the emotional habit and cure the psycho-somatic disorder.

Your tone implies that people develop psycho-somatic disorders after "falling for" some false idea. That is incorrect. Some would consider it extremely condescending and would take offense. When a person suffers from excruciating lower back pain, they are not "falling for" the idea that they have a back injury. They are just suffering. They try to understand why they are suffering. "I have a bad back" is a reasonable explanation. The knowledge of the most common cause of lower back pain is not yet widespread: that lower back pain is usually caused by subconscious tensing of muscles. Please re-examine your bias about psycho-somatic disorders. They are real symptoms suffered by rational people.

I assure you that your mother is suffering real symptoms. They are very likely not psycho-somatic. I commend her relentless search for root cause and cure. You could help her: Take her to consult with experts, help her objectively record her symptoms, help her systematically test different hypotheses and interventions, find a fun fitness class and attend it with her, research healthy recipes and cook them together, and make sure she takes enough vitamin D3. My own mother developed cancer and there was little I could do to help her.

I'll just leave this here for anyone who wants to consider the idea that reactions to perfume may not always be psycho-somatic:

https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/dirty-dozen-parfum-fr...

https://www.ewg.org/research/not-so-sexy

https://www.mamavation.com/featured/toxic-perfume-chemicals....

https://alituranaturals.com/the-top-10-toxic-chemicals-in-pe...

https://www.forceofnatureclean.com/truth-about-toxic-fragran...

Just upthread you complained about someone's links to journal papers because

> The studies you cite do not list who funded them, but one of the links is ... a website which sells sneakers! One of the worst VOC offenders!

I'd ask you to consider that perhaps your sources of information, all apparently non-scientific (and many also having financial interests in "all natural" products) may not be the best counter-point to mainstream scientific research.

To be fair, I think the David Suzuki foundation is pretty well respected.

Here are some quotes:

Synthetic musks used in fragrances are of particular concern from an ecological perspective. Several of musk compounds are persistent in the environment and build up (bioaccumulate) in the fatty tissue of aquatic organisms.

diethyl phthalate, or DEP, is widely used in cosmetic fragrances to make the scent linger. Phthalates are choice ingredients in cosmetics because they are cheap and versatile. However, the European Commission on Endocrine Disruption has listed DEP as a Category 1 priority substance, based on evidence that it interferes with hormone function. Phthalates have been linked to early puberty in girls, reduced sperm count in men, and reproductive defects in the developing male fetus (when the mother is exposed during pregnancy).

That sounds pretty science-y to me, admittedly a layperson.

> Your comment seems to imply that psycho-somatic symptoms are not real symptoms and people who suffer from them are behaving irrationally.

No, I was intending to do exactly the opposite. Sorry that that was unclear. My only point was that the cure is entirely a mental one, not that the suffering is fake. I suspect that you can develop symptoms by being around other people who have the symptoms. That doesn't mean your experiences aren't legitimate. As I said in the comment, I myself have had this experience. In my case it started with imagining things about my past experiences, but quickly turned into a real ordeal for me.

> I assure you that your mother is suffering real symptoms. They are very likely not psycho-somatic.

I agree, and we've tried to help her. She unfortunately has a pretty strong skepticism of traditional medicine and has an extremely unhealthy lifestyle that could more than explain most of her symptoms, but has chosen to micro-focus on the things people on her Facebook feed tell her are her problems. So she says, for example, that she has pain in her gut and gets headaches whenever she eats gluten. This is something she'd never complained of before, and a test for celiac disease turned up nothing. But still she insists. My only explanation is not that she's pretending to suffer, but rather that she's created the gluten intolerance herself. That it's a mental problem. Next time I visit, she'll probably be back to eating bread again, this time totally convinced something else is going on.

You are right. However, imagine a world in which you sleep with a log-fire burning...

I have very serious problems with fragrance chemicals and some VOCs also. It slowly emerged over time in my twenties, well at the same time I was also experiencing what I now know is undiagnosed celiac disease.

I've gone through times where almost anything made out of plastic and most indoor furniture made me feel sick, but these days it's mainly just artificial fragrances. Shampoo, conditioner, air freshener, carpet cleaners, garbage bags, dish soap, incense, laundry soap, pesticides, dryer sheets, and so on. I have to use all of these in special unscented versions and try to get any roommates to do so as well. Some are difficult to avoid in public, other people's clothes and hair, fumes coming from laundry vents outdoors, or areas where large amounts of these products are stored such as groceries and hardware stores. The distancing and masks from covid have helped a bit, plus I'm staying home more which is a safe place.

This is a problem that's been somewhat peripheral to my other health problems, but has been very disruptive for me. in terms of interpersonal relationships, maybe even worse than type 1 diabetes or celiac because it can make it uncomfortable to get near other people physically, either for a hug or to be in their house or car. Having to convince girlfriends to change hair products has been a major source of stress, too. There are times when I've been forced to be around people who use typical fragrances products on a visit, or at a hotel, and that's difficult.

I've tried to look into what health problems could be related to this. There is a syndrome that used to be called MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) and is now called TILT (Toxicant Induced Loss of Tolerance). Mainly I have found people with Multiple Sclerosis and an immune disorder called MAST cell activation. I have celiac and type 1 diabetes, which are very closely related to MS, so it makes sense. This is the sort of thing that's very difficult to work on with doctors, and it seems likely the best treatment currently available is like an allergy - avoid the triggers.

> "Cleaning" products: sprays, detergents, most "soaps", shampoos, creams, conditioners, have this type of crap in them.

Yeah, that's awful stuff. Your partners and cohabitants should be grateful that you're somewhat of a canary in a coalmine for them:

> Regular use of cleaning sprays has an impact on lung health comparable with smoking a pack of cigarettes every day, according to a new study.

https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201706-131...

Do you know www.ewg.org/skin deep Do they do a good job? How do you take care of this for yourself?

I don't use anything besides Bronner's, and I use that sparingly. I haven't applied soap to any parts of myself except my hands for several years. My skin is in better shape than it ever has been, and I hear similar results from others who follow this path. I didn't come up with it myself, someone else shared their experience with me. It takes a week or two for the oil production to balance out. Our skin oils serve as protective layer, and also as the perfect "soap" for washing with water. When you remove them with soap, the skin freaks out and starts compensating.

Ok thanks! I've seen that product and was just wondering what it was.

I know, I don't get it. People's laundry steam is pumped out of their basements and when I walk around the city in the wintertime you get an overwhelming scent of unpleasant laundry fragrance every now and then. Some friends of mine had their carpet replaced a month or two ago and there was incredible offgassing. I got an absolutely terrible headache accompanied with nausea after 2 hours but they all seemed to be sitting there inhaling it just fine. I couldn't believe it. I'm just saying "how can you guys handle this?"

Dishsoaps too, I find the Dawn dish soap scent absolutely repulsing, mostly because of poor associations with 3 month old sponges, freezing cold houses, and mildewy sinks from college. I don't know how anyone stomachs the stuff. The smells are so "artificial" in the sense that they are one note, they don't feel organic. They lack the nuance of something that contains 50 terpenes might have.

Sometimes walking down the cleaning products aisle in some stores feels like running the gauntlet. (is it now the cancer gauntlet?)

Glad to see another I can relate to.

I don't shop (in person) often but when I do visit the Walmart, next town over, the chemicals of all the new products literally bring tears to and irritate my eyes. I have to stop and rest and try to find places to breathe that don't feel toxic. No one else could ever related.

Prop 65 went off the deep end a long time ago. When you call any and everything a carcinogen then people stop paying attention. I'm willing to take the risks to drink coffee for example. I know french fries are bad for me, but cancer isn't my first concern there.

Can't they just grade the carcinogenic risk? Maybe color-code it into different levels?

Seems it would make more sense to either ban the chemicals completely or do nothing at all. Most people have essentially learned to ignore the P65 warning and I have noticed that not all businesses are compliant with it anyway.

> not all businesses are compliant with it anyway

Pretty risky, just waiting for the wrong lawyer to notice.

It would increase cost of compliance -- or mostly everyone would just stick to the most extreme level, to cover their asses.

Many things marked with the Prop 65 warning do not actually contain anything carcinogenic (or rather, since everything is carcinogenic to some degree, they contain no more than trace amounts.) Legally, if a business has a Prop 65 warning, they're safe; if they don't, they're not.

The only teeth Prop 65 has against excessive warnings is that it makes consumers like me nervous, so it's better to not have it. If it were a little more sane -- like being based on actual exposure from reasonably expected usage -- then I think I'd like it, even if the list of chemicals is still a bit overzealous.

The system is too heavily tilted in favor of exposing people to nasty crap, and I appreciate having something that pushes against it. It's a hard thing to do well, and legislating via ballot initiative is a blunt instrument. So the best we generally end up with is stuff like Prop 65, which does some good, some harm.

> It would increase cost of compliance

What's the mechanism that the proposition puts in place? What makes an article be marked by the warning? Does the vendor have to report on the compounds their product contains? Or is there a state-conducted examination?

Exactly. Life is bad for you and leads to death. New car smell is just another minute of pleasure that someone felt compelled to discredit by research and documentation.

Maybe I don't realize the threat level.

Chance of dying in a car crash, 1 in 77. https://www.cars.com/articles/are-the-odds-ever-in-your-favo...

Chance of dying from cancer, 1 in 5. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-basics/lifetime-probabi...

That's not really a fair comparison because you can only accumulate car crash risk when you're commuting, but you're accumulating cancer risk for every moment you're alive.

OK, but when I walk to the nursery every morning, we can take the quick route down the big road with traffic jams, or I can go 5-10 minutes out of our way on roads with no traffic and through a park.

Similarly, every time I'm out walking I try and not walk on the large roads with lots of traffic, it all adds up.

Per my french fry comment, I'm still more worried about my heart.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...

> car crash risk when you're commuting

Pedestrians are killed by cars, quite often. They are 1 out of every 6 vehicle fatalities. There's also per-trip associated risk which is separate from per-mile risk.

Walking is also a form of commuting.

If you live long enough, everyone will get cancer. Lots of people abuse their hearts enough that they die from that first but some disease get more and more prominent as you age. These are the reasons that we don't recommend testing for colon cancer at age 15 for most people.

You can remove your risk of dying in a car crash simply by staying at home, away from roads.

You can't remove your risk of cancer.

If you were enclosed in a windowless box with sufficient food, water, and air to live then it would be a race to see which would kill you first: boredom or cancer.

Eventually we all have to die of something. Evolution does a great job optimizing for protecting us against ailments that kill us before breeding age, but a pretty crap job of keeping us safe from things that kill us in old age. Cancer is a major cause of death as we age because it gets more likely the older you get. You can certainly take steps to avoid making yourself extraordinarily vulnerable (don't hang out around tons of radiation, wear sunblock, don't smoke, etc) but enjoying the smell of a new car seems unlikely to be the factor that suddenly means you will die of cancer.

I once heard that almost everything that gets into you slightly increases your risk of cancer (water is the exception), but there are different levels of risk. Some compounds will practically guarantee that you get tumors (like radiation, also benzene is really bad), but others are really negligible (like coffee or junk food, especially if you consume it rarely).

So the important part is how much these compounds increase your risk of cancer. If a single day's exposure to a new car increases your risk of cancer enough to be noticeable than there's an issue. Otherwise just don't expose yourself to the smell often and you should be fine.

The main problem with Prop 65 is that it was done by ballot proposition -- through California's initiative process. That is, the proposed law was voted up or down by the people AS IS. As opposed to being created through the normal legislative process that would have allowed for sensible changes (as well as probable neutering by opponents). The initiative process is a form of direct democracy intended to bypass/override the legislature. As such, it is difficult to tweak Prop 65 legislatively for needed fixes that would make it more effective.

This is one example of why most things that are proposed should not actually be done through the initiative process, IMHO. As a Californian, my default bias on ALL ballot propositions has become NO until proven well-written.

That said, I'd rather have Prop 65 as imperfect as it is than nothing. It occasionally gives me actionable information.

There is a spot somewhere between abstinence and gluttony where you can live well and keep your risks under control. I think I'd rather live a little and take my chances - as long as its my choice. I'm with you generally, its good to have notice, but not all science is correct/settled and we need thresholds.

I believe this is the "Argument to Moderation" logical fallacy [0].

> Argument to moderation is the fallacy that the truth is a compromise between two opposing positions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

I'm saying that I can't eat french fries everyday, but once in say 15 days isn't so bad. That isn't true of Benzene. Prop 65 would warn you to abstain from many things, many things that need more science.

Let me tell you about Swiss direct democracy. If an initiative comes up, parliament can amend the law and tell the people, hey look, we already improved the law, you can reject the initiative, or make a rejectable counter-proposal, or even both. It's sometimes complicated and it doesn't always produce something I would call nice but more often than not the outcome is better than acceptable.

A few years ago I found occasion to rent a car. The clerk noted I was lucky - it had only 400 miles. I thought that was great until I remembered what it meant. The car smelled strongly like glues, and unfortunately the windows were designed in a way that I couldn't get air blowing on my face.

I was doing a run about an hour away to Los Alamos. While driving, I started feeling tense in the face. My arms were stiffening and my mouth going into a circular shape. I felt strange like I was going to pass out. I was so concerned that if I went home I might be calling an ambulance. Luckily there was a fire station . I couldn't figure out how to ring their doorbell and collapsed in the front.

The EMTs there came out, stuck me in an ambulance and took me to the ER, where the doctors couldn't find anything wrong besides a low potassium level. I'm still wondering what happened exactly.

I have some sort of sensitivity to all sorts of fragrances, especially synthetic, probably related to my immune/autoimmune diseases. It's extremely uncomfortable for me to be near air freshener, dryer sheets, laundry detergent, cologne, perfume, shampoo, hairspray, and other scented products. The fragrance industry has been hard at work expanding fragrance into new products as well, like garbage bags. Prior to the ER incident above I had been weakened by digestive problems (apparently the aftermath of celiac/precursor of type 1 diabetes) and weighed 8% under a healthy minimum weight, so I can't surmise it was 100% the car fumes.

Hi. Your symptoms (minus the collapse) sound very similar to a close friend of mine.

Digestive problems continued until almost all foods were eliminated. A few things seemed to work over a period of a few months with a Dr's supervision. First, treatment for MTHFR. This was basically taking some methylated B vitamin available on Amazon, they're not very expensive. Next, great improvements were found with traditional chinese medicine. My friend found a practitioner from China trained in the 80s that lives in our area, rather than a western person. They prescribed a number of supplements to aid in digestion issues. The final component is electrolyte water. That seems to be the best way for my friend to stay hydrated.

Since doing this, while still intolerant of certain perfumes and such, my friend is living a normal life now.

I ended up paring down my diet to almost nothing but chicken and honey for a while, then slowly adding things back. I had the most problems with grains. Since I've been diagnosed with celiac, which is in my family, I still have to stay strictly gluten-free. To my knowledge, it's not reversible. definitely could be related to nutrient malabsorption, which is common with celiac.

Following the hospitalization, I got liquid electrolytes and added them to water, along with potassium citrate. That seem to help a lot. When I was hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis a year or two later, the ICU had a lot of problems getting my electrolytes back into balance.

Sounds like a stroke? That is scary

They would have been able to detect a stroke or a heart attack. I've had a few incidents like this, where I've passed out, at various times in different states of health. Once at Walmart after a convention, once in the morning after throwing up some blood, and this time. I've had a lot of health work since then but have yet to find an explanation for these episodes.

Ever since I was a kid I hated the smell of new cars. It boggles my mind how anyone could like that noxious solvent smell.

Yup, the smell always gave me nasty headaches.

Are you sensitive in a similar way to other fragrances, like some strong perfumes or candles?

Nope, in fact I used to work in a manufacturing plant routinely handling drums of concentrated fragrance for use in products and never any issues.

Some people really like the smell of gasoline or jet fuel or rubbing alcohol, or acetone, which is the order in which I would rank how much I like them from mind-boggling to okay-that-smell-is-kind-of-nice.

I like gasoline but weirdly avgas is gross for me.

Burned two stroke oil!

I'm a glow fuel degustateur myself! 85/15 methanol to nitromethane is the sweet spot for the RC planes I fly

Memories of my Vespa in the 80s!

Makes you think two strokes are long obsolete, but I actually ride a two-stroke in the year 2021. An enduro bike - KTM 300 XCW 2017 model. Occasionally with proper blue smoke coming out when giving it proper gas!

Ah is that what it is about avgas I don’t like? More burned oil?

It's amazing that they still allow lead in that.

It’s actually required to have lead. It’s hilariously called “low lead”.

The LL avgas situation is odd because while we have quite a number of additives to reduce knocking (ugh MTBE) valve erosion has been one of the listed reasons for not using it.

Yet, most aircraft engines have strict servicing guidelines and mandating replacement valves/seats with a more resistant design could have been done 40 years ago as part of engine overhaul/rebuild guidelines. Then the usage would have slowly declined. Yes its expensive, but so is GA aircraft maintenance.

*MTBE was another of those chemicals where the replacement was quite likely just as bad if not worse than the original. Similar to the refrigerant bans where we went from a chemical that broke down in the atmosphere fairly quickly (and caused ozone holes doing it) to one that lingers basically for eternity and causes global warming.

AFAIK that's only for general aviation (aka. people flying their cessnas), rather than jetliners.

I did as a kid but it went away after a few years

I feel like i have a normal palette and preferences for smells, but for some reason diesel exhaust (like from a school bus) has always been in my top 5. Makes me wonder how common this kind of thing is and how much random variation there is among people.

I've heard that certain mineral deficiencies in an extended family member of mine caused them to love the smell of gasoline, and to crave and eat dirt.

School bus diesel is associative for me; it makes me think of field trips and band stuff. I can see how "new car smell" would be associative for getting a new car, regardless of the appeal of the smell itself

+1 for diesel exhaust. It gives me weird flashbacks of being on like a Greyhound bus or Amtrak train when I was little and with my family which are somehow comforting.

I bet a lot of people worked on cars with family and have a similar association.

Fascinating. Of all the 'sharp' smells in my environments over the years, diesel exhaust has always been one of the absolute harshest to me. Feels like it's actively damaging my lungs perceptibly in real time. It's the primary reason I keep my car's climate control on internal circulation almost constantly. I flinch whenever I detect the slightest trace.

Maybe I got exposed to a little too much of it as a kid.

I have that reaction to the exhaust that airplanes introduce to the cabin when reversing out of the gate before takeoff. It boggles my mind why all outside air isn't shut off when reversing. I get an instant headache and have difficulty breathing, and I'm generally not sensitive to much of anything.

Yuck, I hate diesel exhaust but that slight unburnt fuel smell from a 2 stroke small engine is what I'm all about.

2-stroke exhaust and new tires... Maybe it's the association with memorable activities like visiting a motorcycle dealership with my dad as a kid, or a mowed lawn and warm summer rain? Meanwhile diesel exhaust makes me think of those cold, cold winter days, waiting for the car to warm up on an ice-cold vinyl seat...

I hate diesel exhaust. New car smell makes me want to puke (and did, on numerous occasions, as a kid) so bad that I have to take breaks and open windows. The absolute worst is burnt heavy fuel like mazut, and other two-stroke engines that burn oil. It smells like cigarettes to me, but worse.

On the other hand, gasoline is kind of nice to smell. Go figure, chemicals react weirdly with our sense of smell, I don't think it's wise to rely on it for synthetic compounds (cue bitter almond smell).

Edit: And it is commonly accepted that odors are wired to memories, so living on a boat when I was young and having family members that smoke are probably linked to these sensations.

I thought it was the smoother ride on newer cars (or when I was really little associated it with green cars), but probably was the smell all along.

Same! From the other comments it appears "not very common". Or maybe just selection bias! I find it interesting noticing the different kinds of "diesel smells" - new cars vs. older, tractors, semis, etc. For the record I also enjoy the kerosene-type fuel smell of jet engines.

I absolutely loved the smell of my RX-8’s rotary engine dumping fuel into the catalytic converter on a cold day to warm it up faster. It also burned a bit of oil while running.

I don't like the exhaust but I like the smell of unburnt gasoline. Certainly not good for you and I have been lucky enough not to smell it frequently for years now.

I am definitely an aficionado of distilled petroleum products although I wouldn't recommend sniffing gasoline.

part of owning a busso engined alfa romeo is the 'alfa smell' - the blowback of gasoline in the cabin from an 80s' design engine brought into the two thousands kicking and screaming

and I love it

My favorite speculation along those lines is that people are addicted to motorcycling because they are addicted to gas fumes/exhaust (and I'm riding myself).

If you grew up in the first half of the last century, chances are you'd recognise the smell of chlorinated solvents --- and they're even described as "sweet" by a lot of people. Due to their widespread use, many associated it with the smell of "clean". Unfortunately, they're also most if not all carcinogenic.

Same, for some reason my uncle's car constantly smelled like that even after years of use. Not sure what causes it, whether it was intentional, but would make me nauseous!

You can buy products with that scent.

For example: https://www.chemicalguys.com/new-car-smell-air-freshener/new...

Same. I also get headache and nausea from it. I'm totally fine in old cars.

Smell is tightly coupled with emotion and memory. I think that leads to things that smell bad being registered positively because of what that smell is associated with. A "new car smell" is a very big, emotional moment for people in the US; especially within the lower/middle-class, where new car purchases are uncommon and infrequent.

You see this with food quite often, where those who grew up with certain foods/meals have a positive reaction to the scent of those foods while those who haven't can be very put-off by them.

Yes, the same reason is why some people hate the smell of cigarettes and others love it.

A bit off-topic, but I hate, hate, HATE the smell of airports and airplane cabins. I don't know if it's jet fuel or what, but I am certain we will one day discover that the fumes cause all sorts of maladies.

I feel vaguely nauseous for the entire day after getting off a plane, and don't feel myself again until a good night's sleep.

I have thought the same thing for a while. When you're at the airport it smells like fuel. Everyone's talking about the radiation, but I'm wondering if pilots and stewardesses aren't exposed to much worse through the cabin air.

Cabin air comes from the "bleed air", which is air from the compressor stage of the engine. Very rarely this air is noticeably contaminated due to engine issues, but I think it's valid to wonder if it's contaminated in a sub-perceptible way more often than that.

there are substantial unanswered questions about cabin air quality, both from long term chronic exposure as well as the acute occurrences known as “fume events.”

not surprisingly, airlines, manufacturers, and the FAA are all working together to suppress a thorough understanding.

the LA Times did a good investigatory piece at the end of last year: https://www.latimes.com/projects/toxic-chemicals-planes-covi...

Cabin air is renewed at a high rate form the outside. It will contain fumes when the airplane is on the ground, because airport air contains fumes.

The vast majority of the time the airplane is at cruising altitude, though. That air is as clean as you are going to get on planet earth.

*Except during fume events. Which are basically not tracked or measured well.

I got stuck on the tarmac while they tried to sort out a fuel problem and we were all huffing jet fumes for half an hour. I thought I was going to puke by the end. I really should have asked for a refund on that flight. I blame the loss of brain cells.

When they start a jet engine, the fuel before it ignites would just blow out the exhaust. They catch it in a reservoir and pump it back into the engine to burn it off.

Well, that pump was glitching out, in some way they thought they could fix without a wrench. After about five minutes the fumes started getting sucked into the cabin, and every five minutes after they would tell us they were still working on it. What a shitshow.

I think airplane cabin smell is in part old coffee.

https://viewfromthewing.com/flight-attendant-puts-coffee-gro...

Flight attendants commonly use coffee grounds to mask the other, worse smells.

This is not at all what this article is about.

Not sure what airport smell refers to but I actually like the sweet cabin smell. I think it’s equal part mix of residues from years of sweat, detergents, anti-corrosion chemicals and lemon-soaked paper napkins that were all carried along.

> I don't know if it's jet fuel or what, but I am certain we will one day discover that the fumes cause all sorts of maladies.

A lot of it is oil and jet fuel. This is a known hazard, even to the flight crew.

In the industry these are referred to as "fume events" or "contaminated air quality events" (CAQE).

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47740523

The truth is that cars are subjected to a clean room test for VOCs. The automakers can get VOCs to an undetectable level, but purposefully keep them just under the allowed threshold to create new car smell. Adjusting the amount of VOCs was often done by tweaking the formula for headliner adhesive. I know this sounds like a conspiracy, but people have a strong preference for new car smell. You can see that headliners have their own category for how much offgassing is allowed:

https://www.issa.com/wp-content/uploads/VOC_Limits_Summary_1...

It is trivial to make a headliner that doesn’t offgas. With the stroke of a pen, the government could get rid of new car smell across the industry.

I suppose it's the same as car door design.

Car doors could absolutely be designed to be shut in near silence, but people actually value the car door slamming noise as sign of quality/robustness.

Most people would probably assume their car door is not properly closed if it was made to be more silent.

I think we agree it's stupid.

The amount of accidents because of fingers caught in slammed car doors is ridiculous...

The sound of the door is more about the rhythm than the actual sound as per se - obviously this is difficult to convey via text, but a bad door is chaotic whereas the distinctive sound of an expensive car door shutting is effectively a sign that it was designed to sound exactly like xyz.

The same chemical formaldehyde is responsible for the off-gassing from cheap furniture. That smell of chipboard (also called particleboard) that all the new cheap furniture is made of.

The funny thing is that the furniture really isn't that cheap. I built a couple 3-drawer desks for a couple grand kids (48 x 16 inch top) out of solid wood with 1/4 inch plywood around the drawer unit, and only spent $130 on materials (this was at the beginning of the school year). Most flat-pack desks you see are starting around $350 or higher, for garbage board.

Something you bought for $350 in a flatpack box would easily be > $1000 in real wood and weigh one decimal point place to the right more.

That is something that really surprised me, how light this "real wood" desk was (made from Poplar wood), compared to another similar desk that the wife bought a few months earlier (before the covid at-home back-to-school rush caused a desk shortage).

From my experience, MDF and particleboard furniture usually weighs more due to the higher density of the wood and glue vs. traditional wood furniture.

Nah, wooden stuff usually has thicker walls/everything, usually weighting significantly more. I guess we compare some old wooden furniture with similarly designed ikea particle board one.

If its 1:1 then yes particle board should weight a bit more.

Well, let's do this right.

Make plywood with the middle being balsa, and the surface being lignum vitae.

My recollections of helping people move disagree with you.

I've only had one piece of real wood furniture that was ever close. That was made out of rock maple, which turns out to be a very accurate name.

I totally agree with you.

The irony is that a lot of people throw away good furniture made from real wood to buy IKEA particle board. As a result of which I can acquire good solid furniture from charity shops and online classifieds for close to nothing.

How much were your tools and how long have you trained and learned? And the sweat equity...I'm a woodworker too and it's incredibly faster to buy anything that to build it oneself.

I grew up with my Dad doing woodworking, so I picked up a lot from there. For tooling, I don't have a lot -- My Dad's old table saw when he got a new one, a compound miter saw, drill, hand held router, and recently acquired a pocket-hole jig.

For this particular project we were under pressure, so I picked up the wood from a big-box store a couple nights before the grand-kid started remote kindergarten. The next day took about 3 hours to cut the boards (1 hour), drill pocket holes (1 hour), and assemble the unit (1 hour) (minus drawers). Since I hadn't done drawers before, it took probably another 4 hours to bang out 3 drawers (each a different size). But that all was all "fun time", I had already put in my 8 hours of work, and doing shop work is a good distraction and this gave me a worth-while project. The wife ended up doing the stain and finishing (about an hour or so applying it, and a day or so to dry).

I ended up doing another one, where I took more time to do multiple coats of Danish oil (steel-wool treatment on the last couple coats), so I have a bit more time in that one.

If you are interested, I documented the second desk and put it up on reddit https://new.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/iprn2n/made_a_desk_for...

This design was originally supposed to have plywood on the inside of the seating portion, so that's why the pocket holes are visible. Turned out it was strong enough without it, so if I do another one I'll add additional 1x2 boards on the inside framing in that section, and taper the legs to make it look better.

Not the person you're asking, but also a woodworker. If you just want a basic table, you can put one together crazy fast with the right tools.

Not counting milling time, because if this wasn't my job, I wouldn't have a jointer and planer, I've put together a basic bench in an afternoon, which is fundamentally the same construction as a joined table. It would take longer for sure without a router to cut the mortises and a table saw to cut the tenons, but probably still only a day. If you put a gun to my head and made me pick only one of those, I'd keep the router.

I built a staked table for my partner entirely by hand (including milling the top) last April, and had that pretty well put together in a week. I didn't have a way to turn the tenons, so that part was a very slow and iterative process. That I did twice, because I kind of botched it the first time and had my rake and splay pretty inconsistent. Fortunately, I left the legs long.

If you want even faster (and can hide the holes as part of the design) then pocket holes can get the framing together really fast. They have good tensile strength, and decent bending strength in one direction but not the other. So your design has to account for that, however for putting together a basic desk (see the plans in my Reddit thread I linked in the other comment), or the carcass for a dresser unit, they work wonderfully (even if it is "cheating" a bit).

Being patient and buying used is entirely the way to go for furniture. I'm typing up this comment sitting at a nearly perfect condition solid oak desk my girlfriend found at an estate sale and paid $100 for. In a similar story, we found our vintage solid wood pineapple bed for $35 on craigslist. There's no way you could buy, let alone make, either of these pieces for 10x the price.

In a past life I owned a full size metal tanker desk I bought $40, stripped down to bare metal and I loved that desk until I had to give it up when I moved countries.

People don't like buying used, but furniture doesn't wake up one morning refusing to work because a dependency is no longer available.

Similarly, newly built or renovated houses will have some "new house" smell, which is also VOCs. I have been told there is a cultural difference between China and the U.S., where Chinese people will let a house be empty for a few weeks to get rid of the smell before moving in (since the chemicals are believed to be bad for your health), while in the U.S. people don't seem to be concerned by them.

Somebody built a house from natural materials. He said that the biggest difference when he moved in was that it didn't feel new - there was none of that plastic / solvant smell.

I love fake new car smell scent. They are all so different. Pine scent or lemon fresh is basically always the same. New car is always novel. I also love that it’s emulating a scent that’s from off gassing that we’ve known for years is probably terrible for you.

> I also love that it’s emulating a scent that’s from off gassing that we’ve known for years is probably terrible for you.

Is an artificial air freshener much better from an air quality perspective though?

Dunno, I just like the idea that it's a smell designed to emulate a potentially harmful manufacturing byproduct that people just happen to like. It would be like making cigarette car smell or something.

So much hate for California's prop 95 in the comments, so few people noticing that the article referred to benzene and formaldehyde as meeting the thresholds. It doesn't matter what chemicals are included in prop 95, you can't deny that benzene is not a serious carcinogen.

The only part that I'm not super clear on is the dosing information--the article used dosing information in micrograms/day, whereas OSHA gives occupational limits in terms of safe atmospheric concentrations for an 8 hour work day. The question becomes: are the RFDs used consistent with standard health authorities, or are they a super-conservative California threshold.

Most people live too long to begin with - I'm okay relishing the smells and scents of modern society and not worrying too much about it. Yes, everything is killing us and we're all slowly dying - why not enjoy the ride?

What about "new laptop smell"?

probably not on the same level as a new vehicle, but the plastic wrapping/film that protects the laptop has to adhere to the surface somehow

I think that the proper hierarchy is as follows: new Magic card smell > new GPU smell >= new laptop smell > old book smell

I was going to mention the smell of opening a booster pack of trading cards! It was probably the same smell as opening a new video game and taking out the instruction booklet (back when they still printed those).

I've been around laptops which seem to be a health hazard. It makes sense they could expose users to harmful chemicals, since they're essentially a bunch of plastic and metals that get hot and have air blown over them into the room. Various flame retardants have been used in the past which have been phased out over health concerns, but manufacturers did this at different rates and many older machines manufacturered with various noxious chemicals are still in use. Who knows about what they use now (the last time I looked into this was c. 2013). TV sets have a similar history, as do space heaters and electric blankets.

As part of various health problems, I have some sort of high sensitivity to fragrances and cleaning chemicals. I had a roommate with a Dell that would make the room smell like ozone and plastic. I looked into it and Dell used various chemicals on those models that they later pledged to discontinue. I couldn't be in the same room as his laptop for more than 5 minutes.

I wonder if there is a higher rate of cancer among people who work around new cars, i.e. car sales people.

It’s good it’s up for the many to read, but this is not surprising to anyone who has remotely worked on chemical systems.

I’ve only done Computer simulation of polymers. I haven’t even taken a single chemistry class past freshman year. And yet there’s no way anyone is going to convince me that smell is OK.

That smell is the slow degassing of all the chemicals used in the production of the car. It will include foaming agents, plasticizers, solvents, curing agents, dyes, paints, etc.

When I but a plastic baby bottle (we try to use glass, but for some things plastic works best) I always put it through several dishwasher cycles. I’ll never pour a warm liquid into it. And I always do a smell test to make sure there’s no unatural smell (rotted milk vomit I’m “ok” with. “Can’t place it” freaks me out)

I always air out the car if I buy a new one (even used! God knows what’s in air fresheners and detailing products) by running the fan at 75% if I can’t have the window open.

AH! Glad I'm only able to afford used cars... oh wait...

Hey, many people can't afford new cars, but that doesn't stop them from getting a loan. (Not saying you should.)

I had to get a loan to buy an used car. Economy here is like that...

Steve Jobs leased a new car every 6 months for decades, wonder if it harmed his health/was linked to his cancer at all: https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/but-wait-theres-more/a1704...

I've always thought this was very obvious. I mean it is clear something is in the air if you can smell it.. and if you are in a new car and it smells, it must be glues, oils, etc.

last new car i bought i left it sit outside with all the doors open to let it 'air out' until it did not smell.

Wow, hour per day driving on average. The spurious co2 emissions really boggle the mind.

Buy yourself an air quality monitor and experience the wonder of how fast your household air becomes dangerously crappy with the windows closed. The formaldehyde will be with us always apparently...

Like WiFi causes cancer in California or like Benzene causes cancer? To me it seems like it's the former, not the latter or we'd have a metric crap ton of people dying.

Having just picked up a very heavily new-car-smelling rental car in which to transport my firstborn from hospital sometime in the next two weeks, this was not a reassuring read. Here's hoping 20 minutes of exposure as a newborn doesn't have any lasting effects. All the same, I guess I'll blast the blowers on maximum with all doors open for a few minutes before we hit the road, and maybe drive with windows cracked.

The study uses decades old data. Since the late 90s cars have very little smell, they actually use a perfume to imitate it.

Having spent too much time in the car industry I've noticed each brand has it's own variant of "New Car Smell". A Hyundai doesn't smell like a Honda, nor does a Subaru smell like a Nissan.

I know it's probably just due to differences in the manufacturing process but it's funny that we group them all together.

Sure, but how bad can it really be? It has existed for like 60 years and those people are still living to be 80.

I'm more surprised the average American only commutes 1 hr (total?) each day to work. Considering most cities during rush hour seem like they take 30 minutes to go 5 miles, and most Americans cannot afford to live near prosperous jobs.

Most Americans do not work in city center and can avoid driving the super congested trips into downtown. And most job growth in the US over the past years has been eds and meds, which are more dispersed and local.

Most Americans still spend a ton of time in their car though, thanks to sprawl, lack of public transit and urban design geared towards cars.

Even in engineering/tech, most people are probably commuting from suburban houses/apartments to suburban office parks. And while that can still involve congested traffic, most people would consider an hour each way a pretty long commute.

And now there is traffic everywhere and it’s impossible to do any sort of planning for having good public transit! Isn’t it awesome?

An observation of reality is not an endorsement of it.

That being said, a fair amount of transit cities are also multipolar and with generally long commutes; Paris and Tokyo come to mind.

> Most Americans do not work in city center and can avoid driving the super congested trips into downtown

They often can't avoid very congested trips to the neighboring suburb where their job is located. Even if many jobs aren't located downtown, they are located in suburban industrial or office clusters that severely lack in public transit, and are subject to severe traffic congestion.

Furthermore, the effect of this increasing dispersal of jobs has been to increase average commute times, not decrease them [1].

Anecdotally, over my career, I've experienced this sort of long suburb-to-suburb commute in states as varied as Michigan, Texas, Washington and California.

1. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_Jo...

True story, I learned I must be allergic/sensitive to "new car smell" the hard way. I threw up in my friend's parents new car. Like all over the back of their like <1 month old car.

It has it advantages because used cars are cheaper.

I have suspected this. When I spray my 22 yo car with anti-rust oil in the body it smells exactly like a new car for a while. No suprise it is chemicals that smell in a new car ... I kinda thought it was the leather.

It is the leather too, which is cured with truly horrible chemicals. Think about why your seats don't just rot like any normal animal skin would. That's the formaldehyde and hexavalent chromium.

By now I have the heuristic that every strong artificial odour I smell is somehow toxic and I have created the muscle memory to step away and get fresh air without even thinking about it.

Isn't the appropriate procedure here to add a sticker and call it a day:

> This product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer

If we're talking about VOC's here, then in-cabin air filters should have carbon in them so it can adsorb all those bad off-gassing.

But clearly they don't, because you can still smell it...

Part of that will be because the fan doesn't run before you get into the vehicle... And part of it is because activated carbon absorbs only some of the smell-producing chemicals, and human noses are rather sensitive to even tiny amounts of stuff in the air.

Do all new cars come equipped with activated carbon filters as standard?

Definitely not. Cabin air-filters are usually just tiny versions of the filters you have in your HVAC unit.

That's why I like my 1980's modified turbo car. Surely the smell of oil and fuel fumes seeping out the open wastegate are healthier

( /s )

Convertible car, let in the fresh smog.

What about "Old Car Smell'?

That’s more like B.O. and weed, so it will depend on the unique preferences of the car’s previous owner :)

The smell of oil dripping on exhaust manifold that makes people who don't know the difference between flash point and autoignition temperature clutch their pearls.

I thought this is something added artificially exactly because people associate it with brand new?

Yet another reason to never buy new.

Someone has to buy new.

There are more than enough rich people who don't need to care and people who should know better for that to be a problem.

Sure, but it won't be me...

That's why I left my windows open in the garage when I got my current car.

What about new trainer smell? Same?

Isn’t it mostly just glue?

And yet almost everyone's smelt it and we're all still here.

Maybe if we hadn't damaged our brain cells we wouldn't be using Javascript though.

> research has found that Californian car commuters can be exposed to above-acceptable levels of unhealthy chemicals during their daily work trips

Whew! Good thing I'm not a Californian.

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