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Comment by weird-eye-issue | Hacker News Reader

Air fresheners should just be banned. Fix the source of the odors, don't expose people to more chemicals.

A Few years ago I started getting migraines. A whiff of perfume or equivalent can in seconds give a massive headache that lasts for a week.

I have more tolerance since I’ve found and addressed the dozen other triggers. But a random whiff can cost me a week of work.

> Fix the source of the odors

How do you do that in a restroom?

Ventilation?

You still need an air freshener with ventilation.

I would much rather be exposed to the smells of natural bodily function than that of overly strong chemicals with unknown affects.

You would prefer that, many others dont.

Vast majority of people dont face any unknown effects.

Bathrooms don't smell bad inherently. If there is good ventilation then any bad smells will go away within a few minutes because toilets are quite effective. If your bathroom always smells bad it could be a plumbing issue

> If there is good ventilation then any bad smells will go away within a few minutes because toilets are quite effective

This is why you need an air freshener in public toilets.

Are you trolling? Air fresheners don't work 24/7. The automated ones only spray at intervals so it is still going to smell bad for a little while.

Which is still better in a restroom where the ventilation is poor.

Fix the ventilation don't pump more chemicals into a poorly ventilated space!

Smell of "air freshener" (incidentally, a blatant oxymoron) mixed with smell of excrement is in my personal top 5 of most horrible smells. It does nothing to hide the original smell, which is the job for ventilation, and once you have that you are really OK ditching the freshener.

An extractor fan works wonders.

Artificial scents contain all sorts of carcinogens.

> Vast majority of people dont face any unknown effects.

Can this be known?

Need? Really? What kind of bubble are you living in...

Have you ever been in a public toilet?

Yes, tons. Here in Thailand I've never seen air purifiers in public bathrooms and they smell just fine

We are talking about air fresheners not air purifiers.

Given the context of our whole conversation surely you knew what I meant

Ventilation, air purifier, regular cleaning

First step is to make sure there is standing water in the floor drain traps. Nobody wet mops bathrooms regularly anymore so the dry floor drain trap allows sewer gas into the room.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Self cleaning toilets work pretty well for this. Odor doesn't just sit in the air if the room is ventilated at all. Usually it's a result of micro-organisms on surfaces covered in biological material and water. Most toilet odors are a result of a film of feces remaining on the bowl and seat after flushing. This is why, if you clean a toilet after using it, the odor will dissipate in less than a minute.

Regular cleaning, de-humidification, filling drain traps with water, and self cleaning toilets is more than enough to keep a restroom odor free.

That all sounds good on paper but are you going to pay the cost of all that maintenance or you will just use a air freshner which is cheap.

Air freshener would be great if it worked. But it doesn't. The stuff I mentioned is the minimum except the self cleaning toilets. Even then, just leaving a toilet brush and some cleaner isn't a bad idea. I pay all those costs at home and it ain't breaking the bank I tell you.

There’s a product in the US called “Febreeze” (I have no idea what it means). The product initially failed: basically in anesthetized your nose (as most such products do: the choices are mast the smell with something stronger or shut down the noses). The problem was people didn’t think it worked. So they added a cloying scent that overrode the smell suppression and had a hit product.

This is like making shaving cream froth up.

This is not accurate.

> The active ingredient in several Febreze products is hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin (HPβCD). The molecule traps and binds volatilized hydrocarbons within its structural ring, retaining malodorous molecules, which reduces their volatility and thus the perception of their scent. [0]

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

TIL

The wiki article for Febreze is very odd. At least a third of the edits (in terms of characters) were done by single-purpose IP addresses, see https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Febr...

Moreover, the claim you cite references a now defunct website operated by P&G from 2005, archived version (it automatically downloads a perl script on my PC...): https://web.archive.org/web/20060515060609/http://www.scienc...

It seems that the P&G article promotes Febreze as a fabric refresher. It does not tell anything about the air fresheners from the same brand which are the topic of this thread.

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