Smells like clean? Fear it.

A rant about laundry, marketing, and synthetic fragrances.

To all the East Coasters and especially the New Yorkers in my LIVING SMALL community, I’m hoping you can stay inside while we are blanketed with smoke—it’s wild times out there. It’s also a lot to process.

Photo by Tina Bosse on Unsplash

I flipped open the lid to the soap dispenser on one of my building’s shared laundry machines, and I couldn’t help but groan: The fabric softener dispenser was filled with scent beads. 

I looked around. The paper towels that are supposed to remain in the laundry room for spills had once again been “borrowed.” So, I grabbed a t-shirt out of my dirty laundry and used it to try to scoop the offending product out before proceeding. A neighbor looking on gazed at me with an expression that suggested she thought whatever I was doing was crazy.

If you are unfamiliar with scent beads, they are pellets of perfume that you can add to your laundry for a scent “boost.” I detest them.  

I dislike scent beads on a personal level because I am snobbish about perfumes and every scent booster I’ve ever met is not something I’d want to smell like all day long. But I took the time to scrape every godforsaken pellet out of the machine that day because my son has sensitive skin and heavily perfumed detergents and lotions exacerbate his eczema (and I knew there was probably already a significant amount of the product lingering in the lines and drum of the machine). Beyond my son’s sensitivity, these things are totally toxic: To my eyes it’s like sprinkling a little hormone disruptor into your wash. 

You’re probably thinking that sounds extreme (maybe it is), but these products almost certainly contain phthalates, and everything I have read about phthalates has made me avoid them the way I avoid secondhand smoke. (If you haven’t yet gone down this particular rabbit hole of worry, here’s an article that sums up some of the issues with phthalates, which are often used in fragranced products to help the scent linger longer. You often can’t tell if phthalates are in a product because companies avoid disclosing them by citing proprietary claims and simply listing “fragrance” on their labels.) I’m also guessing that whatever they inject the scent into is one of those “dissolvable” plastics that are polluting our water with nano plastics (which are another topic for another newsletter someday!).

Scent beads are the bad stuff I fret about in personal and home care concentrated down into cheerfully colored pellets—ick.

Scent boosters also drive me crazy because they are peak late stage capitalism. Scent beads and their liquid counterparts do not clean the clothes in any way: Their only purpose is to add perfume. These scented pellets are among the many products that prey on our insecurities about smelling bad. They also target our unconscious associations with scent that are shaped from birth…