So what is with “fresh scent” we are obsessed with?

If you turn on a TV today, you will see that they advertise many air fresheners that are available to us. Some that you spray from an aerosol can, these have been around the longest I suspect although new nozzles are better at atomizing and dispersing the contents. Lately I have noticed a trend that offers many, many more ways to surround ourselves with “fresh scents”. I will not mention names but one in particular seems to be pumping more advertising dollars into a campaign of “fresh scent” against us.

So there are scented candles, of the ones that have an actual flame there are 13 different scents, some of those are two scents in one candle. Those scents range from french vanilla to mountain fresh, I for one do not need a candle that smells like the coffee creamer I use. As for mountain fresh I hardly think you can replicate the smell of mountain freshness in a candle. I have been in the mountains after a rain and it does not smell like the odor coming from one of those candles. There is another one called “ocean blue”, I do not even think that is an odor as much as it is a color, having been in the United States Navy for 10 years I can speak from experience that this candle DOES NOT smell like the ocean. These candles do not smell like the ocean off the coast of Florida, it does not smell like the ocean off the coast of Chile, it does not smell like the ocean as you come out of the Suez canal, it does not smell like the ocean anywhere I have ever been.

Now are also a couple of other kinds of candles as well, scented oil candles and flameless candles. In the scented oils candles we have another 10 scents, from angels whisper to luscious pear. Luscious pear my ass, we had a pear tree when I was a kid and neither the pears or the blossoms on the tree put forth smell like this scented oil candle. There is also a flameless candle, who knows what that is, that comes in six scents, from Hawaiian breeze to orchid oasis. There are also scents that are created by “plug ins”, either gel based or oil based. Between the two of them there are 14 scents from white tea lily to sweet pea and lilac. I love sweet peas and we had a gigantic lilac bush in our yard when I was a kid and I think the scent they were smelling when they named these two was marijuana, or potentially bull shit I am not sure which. There are even plug in models that have little fans in them to help spread the smell, opps, I meant “fresh scent” all over the house and I saw one recently that had two fans, count them two fans.

So we also see this new trend that just does the work for us, yes we must just be too lazy to actually get the can of smell good and spray it around. The first of these I noticed were able to be set in several different modes, it would shoot a bit of “fresh scent” at any one of three or four different time settings. So we got this gadget that sprays on us every few minutes, ridiculous. Lately I saw an advertisement for a new version of that gadget, the thing has a motion sensor in it. Now I am not sure if it is an active sensor, like RF for a radar return or ultrasonic which would look for a sonar return but I suspect that is a passive infrared since that technology would be the least expensive and use the least amount of battery power. What is wrong with us, a motion activated air freshener. What if you are not in need of a blast of “fresh scent” when you walk by, what if you have a tray of snacks, do you want them sprayed? I thought they must be making a fortune on selling the refills, not since 1901 when the American inventor King Camp Gillette invented the disposable razor has a manufacturer so taken advantage of our desire to have things be as easy as possible.

I will not go into all the varieties of regular spray cans of smell good but you see the available options. So when did we becomes so obsessed with the way things smell, normally? If my house stinks it is incumbent upon me to actually clean the house, not spray “fresh scent” all over it. Covering up the normal smell of things gives us a false understanding of what the world smells like. What is wrong with the way fish smells when we cook it, what is wrong with the way our pets smell, what is it we keep around that is so foul we think we need to mask it with “fresh scent”? If you do not like the way your pets smell, get rid of them, if your dinner smells so bad while cooking it you need to spray, you might reconsider what you are having for dinner. Most things in life smell, get over it and stop wasting your money on a momentary blast of something someone who was smoking doped calls a “fresh scent”

How much smell'em do you spray or burn in your home?