[code_duck]

It would be better if most scent diffusers used essential oils, but unfortunately, most are made with VOCs and synthetic fragrance compounds that are known or suspected to cause many health problems, like Glade plugins. Febreze and Lysol are the same but with more VOCs.

I have severe sensitivity to fragrance and cannot tolerate synthetic fragrances, incense, or essential oils. Simply being near people who use artificial deodorant, shampoo, laundry detergent, dryer sheets or any other mainstream product that leaves them covered in synthetic fragrance is very uncomfortable. Essential oils are less problematic.

With essential oils, many of the chemicals present (such as linalool and d-limonene) break down as they oxidize after diffusion, and the oxidation products have different health effects than the original chemical, such as allergy sensitization and irritation.

My mother-in-law visited for two months, and left one of the rooms in my house saturated with Young Living essential oils from a diffuser. Six months later, I still can't go in there.

[evincarofautumn]

Same—I can’t tolerate most artificial fragrances, as they make my sinuses block up and irritate my eyes & skin. Sadly they’re everywhere—between perfumes, deodorants, lotions, laundry detergents, fabric softeners, air fresheners, odour removers, shampoos, body washes, hand soaps, household cleaners, &c., a lot of people and their homes are just covered in them.

I’ve been trying to figure out the specific compounds that give me trouble and why, but there are many, and for a lot of these products, it seems like the ingredients are rarely published in full—or they use obscured chemical names—I guess because companies have some right to maintain their “secret sauce”.

I’m not chemophobic in the slightest, but I have to wonder if this wild mix of VOCs is affecting people in ways that they just don’t notice because they don’t have any allergy or irritation—such as endocrine disruption. And it will be hard to pinpoint if they do cause health problems because there are so many different compounds and they’re so common and assumed safe.

[goldenkey]

Well it's already known that even natural extracts like lavender oil are estrogen amplifiers. And the thermal receipt paper used for years, contained BPA, also an endocrine disruptor. There are tons of chemicals that we use willy nilly without any knowledge on their real and complex outcomes on life. I'd mostly prefer natural but its somewhat specious because having artificial additives means usually the whole mixture will have 10 or 15 chemicals instead of the 103485 in a plant extract. But I'd trust mother nature's 100000000000 years and human civilizations' many years of trials over an Ames test.

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

[code_duck]

Great! It's very rare to meet other people with this issue.

Manufacturers are allowed, as I'm sure you know, to list all scent component ingredients glommed together as 'fragrance'. This is supposedly because they're proprietary - they wouldn't someone to make an exact knock-off of a new perfume too easily, right? It also has the effect of making the health aspects of the formulations very difficult to analyze. It's a lot like a properietary black box in computing... EWG judges 'fragrance' as its own separate ingredient, giving it a (bad) rating of 8/10.

I have noticed 5-6 different main scent 'flavors' on all the disgusting consumer products out there, which probably correspond to specific chemicals. There's the one like fake grapes, the one that's spicy and powdery, the one I call old lady underwear, the fake fruit, the 'manly' scents, and more.

Johnson Wax (SC Johnson?) actually lists the full fragrance ingredients to products like Windex in their site - I was amazed.

I agree that these products highly likely cause widespread harm of different types, including to people who do not perceive a problem.

[Arete31415]

Try running an ozone generator in there. It will break down the compounds much more quickly. The ozone itself breaks down pretty quickly, but don't run it when people or pets are in the house.