September 7, 2025 • 13 mins
It’s not just you: Household product scents are getting stronger.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's not just you. Household products scents are getting stronger
by Madison Derbyshire read by Catherine Vassilopolos. It was a
day like any other until I ran out of soap.
My value sized bottle of down Dish soap had seen
me through three years of scrubbing cereal bowls and teaspoons.
(00:20):
I didn't know they were the last years i'd know
true dish soap contentment. I went to the store to
buy another triennal supply, only to find the bottles now
carried a yellow sticker new clean scent. Surely, dawn A
soap has always smelled clean. The new stuff worked, it sudsed,
but the smell was cloying and much more powerful. It
(00:43):
hit me between the eyeballs like a champagne headache, and
clung to my hands for hours. After I washed my
favorite Mets souvenir cup. Naturally, I panicked turning online for answers.
I found the common section of Target's website full of
other grieving consumers. Don's account fielding complaints revealed the brand
had changed the fragrance in its original formula a few
(01:06):
months earlier, in February twenty twenty four, customers on Reddit
came not to lament the loss of an effective staple.
Don still cleaned Well, still boasted fifty percent less scrubbing
than the competition, but simply to mourn the change. In
some cases, the change meant customers, some of whom had
been loyal for decades, could no longer wash their dishes
(01:27):
without breaking out in rashes, feeling nauseated, or getting migraines,
they wrote. In replies to customer complaints about the new scent,
Don's customer care team wrote, as you can imagine, we
weren't going for a porta potty scent. This from the
dish soap so famously gentle and non irritating that it
was used to clean baby ducks in the wake of
(01:48):
the Exxon Valdez oil spill. What we all wanted to
know was why I asked, begged Procter and Gamble, which
makes Don, for perspective on how they think about fragrance
and what goes into a decision to update a product.
The company declined to comment. In replies to customers online
after introducing the new clean scent, Don's team wrote, we
(02:10):
made this change after getting positive feedback during extensive consumer testing.
The human sense of smell developed to help us survive,
to sniff out predators and poison, as well as to
find a mate, food, shelter, and water. Smell is the
reason we can taste food beyond the four basic tastes
of salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. Without smell, bacon would
(02:34):
only taste salty. Yet, of all our senses, it is
the one we take most for granted. Almost forty percent
of people would rather lose their sense of smell than
their hair, according to a study by Rachel Hurtz, a
neuroscientist at Brown University. It's a function of modern life
that some of the most distinct scent associations we have
(02:55):
are with chemicals, basic household and personal brands such as
cleaning spris, detergents, and soaps. They have the ability to
bring emotionally rich memories to the surface with just a
whiff the laundry detergent our parents bought, the shampoo we
used at the community pool the summer of our first kiss.
Garniefhrichtis scent has the ability to evoke really deep memories
(03:18):
that are tied to place and time, says sand Deep
Robert Dutta, a doctor and professor of neurobiology at Harvard
Medical School who runs a lab that researches olfaction. We
are still trying to understand it. One evolutionary hypothesis for
this is that smell was the first sense we developed
after emerging from the primordial ooze. The prefrontal cortex, where
(03:41):
memories and emotions are processed, grew from that same olfactory
brain tissue. It remains connected to our sense of smell
by a super highway, and that's why scents are so
emotionally evocative so quickly, Dutta says, because this is the
part of our brain responsible for orientation, scent memory are
rooted in places. These kinds of memories are often described
(04:04):
as transportative. If I smell old spice deodorant, it doesn't
matter what I'm doing. Suddenly I'm fifteen years old in
the hallways of my high school and I have a crush.
When we smell something new, we immediately form an emotional
connection with it, Hurtz says. Once that association is learned,
it's very, very hard to undo. She says, fixed scent
(04:26):
associations are vital to a brand's identity and a huge
driver of how consumers feel about the products they buy.
It's neuroscience. Data says people want to take advantage of
the ability to elicit positively valenced feelings for whatever the
setting is, and brands pay top dollar for that science.
Our purpose is to create a scent and at the
(04:47):
same time generate happiness in consumers, says Javier Renard, the
global head of fine fragrance at Jivaudan, the largest manufacture
of fragrances and flavors in the world. Perfumers are in
the business of engineering emotions and that business is booming.
The finely tuned human olfactory system is theoretically capable of
(05:09):
detecting around forty billion different odorants, though the exact limit
is unknown. We have between ten million and twenty million
neurons that process scent, and they can detect all the
same invisible chemical compounds that dogs can, though they can
smell them at much lower concentrations. Human noses are capable
of detecting even the slightest changes in a fragrance, which
(05:32):
is how we know something smells off but can't say
why while we are constantly surrounded by smell. The human
brain is also adept at rapidly muting fragrances. The phenomenon
known as olfactory blindness is the reason we can't smell
our own perfume or the scent of our home until
we come back from a multi week vacation. Most people
(05:53):
are hardly aware of all fragrances in their lives, Renard says,
until they change. Renard says, Jivaudan tries to talk companies
out of reformulations that will affect a product's fragrance because
customers hate it, the brands get letters, he says. America, however,
is a country obsessed with newness, unlike the UK or
(06:14):
continental Europe, where a change to a dominant household product
would risk sparking revolution. It's a part of American culture,
this celebration of novelty, progress and reinvention, says Frank Jerman,
professor of marketing at the Mendoza College of Business at
the University of Notre Dame. American companies can also incentivize
(06:34):
change for change's sake. If you don't innovate or come
up with new things to do, do, companies still need
your department. You have to come up with new things
to justify your existence. German says this is the danger
of getting attached to sense created by corporations. They can
change at any time without warning. In the natural world,
(06:56):
a peach will always smell like a peach. But because
we associate positive things like clean clothes, clean bodies, and
clean homes with certain scents, researchers are noticing that the
amount of fragrance we expect in products is rising, especially
in the US. Research by Procter and Gamble in twenty
twenty one found that eighty nine percent of laundry products,
(07:18):
seventy nine percent of surface cleaners, and ninety nine percent
of dishwashing products sold in the US were fragranced. Fragrance
companies are booming, from laundry to luxury candles, hotel lobbies
to restaurants. Fragrance is being pumped into homes and public
spaces at greater rates than before, one of the reasons
(07:39):
Jivaudant's share price is up more than forty percent since
twenty twenty three. Americans like their fragrances stronger. Bernard at
Jivodance says they like it when you can notice it,
but it also creates the risk of a fragrance arms race.
As our scent environments become denser. In order to stand out,
you need higher concentrations of fragrants, and that's unfortunate. Data
(08:02):
says brands also react to customer demands for more olfactory
evidence of their effectiveness by adding more fragrance. In twenty twenty,
Tide changed its original scent in response to customer demands
for a longer lasting scent. Gain also increased the amount
of scent in its detergent pods. Yet fragrance fatigue means
(08:23):
that no matter the strength, while some customers will be
turned off or get headaches, still more will grow blind
to it and crave more. America's small mecha for noxious scents,
Bath and Bodyworks, launched its own line of fragrance laundry
detergents and laundry scent boosters in September, responding to customer
demand for an everlasting clean clothes smell. But even their
(08:46):
customer scent preferences diverge. While some reported smelling the detergent
on their clothing for a month, others said it faded
the minute it came out of the dryer and begged
for more. And the way something smells also depends on
the concentration of fragrance. When the amount of scent in
a product increases, it fundamentally changes how it smells. For
(09:06):
some customers, the new tide no longer smelled the way
their brains told them clean laundry should, and they were frustrated.
Everyone's sense of smell is unique, as is their sensitivity
to the amount of fragrance in their world. It's the
reason Yankee Candle grew to a two billion dollar business,
even as some people can't even walk into the store.
(09:26):
The danger of sense at too high concentrations is they
become unpleasant, Datta says. At some levels, smells can also
activate the nearby trigeminal nerve, which signals irritation. That's part
of why people get headaches when fragrances are too strong.
There is not an easy solution neurologically. Don's x account
(09:47):
direct customers who hate its new scent to try the
brand's free and clear products devoid of artificial fragrance and dies,
a market segment that's growing as more customers flee intensifying perfume.
Even if the cleaning formula is the same, customers tend
to perceive unscented products as less effective. Hurt says they
(10:07):
attached the idea of clean to the smell of their detergent.
She says, Suddenly their dishes don't smell clean anymore. Scent
researchers and perfumers are fond of talking about young love
and grandmothers. If you ask anyone what their first boyfriend
was wearing as a fragrance, it will take them one
tenth of a second to answer, says Bernard at Jivoudaint.
(10:29):
But most of us will struggle to call to mind
the smells of the people we have loved since Emotional
attachments to scince forged and childhood are uniquely strong. At
Perfumer School in the south of France, Renard encountered a
chemical compound called myral Dean. As a child, he spent
significant time with his grandparents in northern France, and they
(10:51):
often visited their neighbor. Bernard hadn't thought about the house
and years, but all of a sudden, I was five
years old again in my grandparents neighbor's house. Myraldne, often
used in liquid detergents, has a citrusy floral smell, like
orange blossom or lilac. The neighbor's house smelled of clean laundry.
(11:11):
I cried because the emotion was so strong, he says.
My grandparents had just passed away. There was nothing I
could do. I was melting. Smell is emotionally complex because
while the underlying emotional connection is sticky, the association evolves.
The emotion you feel when you smell that scent is
actually the meaning of it to you now, not at
(11:33):
the time when you first learned the association, says hurts.
When I smell old spice, I still feel the thrill
of that crush, because an unrequited crush lasts forever. If
Old Spice Boy had broken my tender heart, I might
feel differently. Like many Americans, I inherited my household brand preferences.
I used Dawn because my parents did. While I was little.
(11:55):
My dad used to weave bubbles the size of basketballs
out of dawn dish soap for me and my sister
in our backyard. We'd run after them, shrieking with joy,
popping bubbles until we were soaked with SuDS. But when
I smell don I feel nostalgic, not joyful. I'm an
adult longing for endless summer evenings, the whole family together
when there was nothing more serious to think about than
(12:18):
what to have for dessert. That is what I miss
so much now, when no one blows bubbles just to
make me smile. Smelling Don was a doorway to this memory,
and when the fragrance suddenly changed, it felt like someone
had locked it. I wrestled with how to move forward
with new Dawn. Was I supposed to switch to missus
Myers inconceivable? I briefly considered that I was overreacting, then
(12:43):
did the only rational thing I could think of and
walked to seven different stores trying to find a legacy
bottle hidden on the back of a shelf. Eventually, I
bought a dust coated hardware store out of its ancient
mini bottles of the original Dawn for a three hundred
percent markup. I know I'm not alone in this pursuit.
On eBay, bottles of the original down a retail for
(13:05):
almost five times the sticker price of the new clean
scent Don. I have delayed my pain, but it is inevitable.
When asked around at multiple bird sanctuaries, the ones that
clean the baby ducks for thoughts on the new formula,
some people expressed general frustration at the amount of artificial
sense in our world. Others noted that Don has always
(13:26):
had a lot of fragrance. They all still use it
to save the birds. It's possible. I realized that Don
has always been strong. I was just used to it,
and maybe I will get used to the new stuff too.
It really does SuDS so well.
It's not just you. Household products scents are getting stronger
by Madison Derbyshire read by Catherine Vassilopolos. It was a
day like any other until I ran out of soap.
My value sized bottle of down Dish soap had seen
me through three years of scrubbing cereal bowls and teaspoons.
(00:20):
I didn't know they were the last years i'd know
true dish soap contentment. I went to the store to
buy another triennal supply, only to find the bottles now
carried a yellow sticker new clean scent. Surely, dawn A
soap has always smelled clean. The new stuff worked, it sudsed,
but the smell was cloying and much more powerful. It
(00:43):
hit me between the eyeballs like a champagne headache, and
clung to my hands for hours. After I washed my
favorite Mets souvenir cup. Naturally, I panicked turning online for answers.
I found the common section of Target's website full of
other grieving consumers. Don's account fielding complaints revealed the brand
had changed the fragrance in its original formula a few
(01:06):
months earlier, in February twenty twenty four, customers on Reddit
came not to lament the loss of an effective staple.
Don still cleaned Well, still boasted fifty percent less scrubbing
than the competition, but simply to mourn the change. In
some cases, the change meant customers, some of whom had
been loyal for decades, could no longer wash their dishes
(01:27):
without breaking out in rashes, feeling nauseated, or getting migraines,
they wrote. In replies to customer complaints about the new scent,
Don's customer care team wrote, as you can imagine, we
weren't going for a porta potty scent. This from the
dish soap so famously gentle and non irritating that it
was used to clean baby ducks in the wake of
(01:48):
the Exxon Valdez oil spill. What we all wanted to
know was why I asked, begged Procter and Gamble, which
makes Don, for perspective on how they think about fragrance
and what goes into a decision to update a product.
The company declined to comment. In replies to customers online
after introducing the new clean scent, Don's team wrote, we
(02:10):
made this change after getting positive feedback during extensive consumer testing.
The human sense of smell developed to help us survive,
to sniff out predators and poison, as well as to
find a mate, food, shelter, and water. Smell is the
reason we can taste food beyond the four basic tastes
of salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. Without smell, bacon would
(02:34):
only taste salty. Yet, of all our senses, it is
the one we take most for granted. Almost forty percent
of people would rather lose their sense of smell than
their hair, according to a study by Rachel Hurtz, a
neuroscientist at Brown University. It's a function of modern life
that some of the most distinct scent associations we have
(02:55):
are with chemicals, basic household and personal brands such as
cleaning spris, detergents, and soaps. They have the ability to
bring emotionally rich memories to the surface with just a
whiff the laundry detergent our parents bought, the shampoo we
used at the community pool the summer of our first kiss.
Garniefhrichtis scent has the ability to evoke really deep memories
(03:18):
that are tied to place and time, says sand Deep
Robert Dutta, a doctor and professor of neurobiology at Harvard
Medical School who runs a lab that researches olfaction. We
are still trying to understand it. One evolutionary hypothesis for
this is that smell was the first sense we developed
after emerging from the primordial ooze. The prefrontal cortex, where
(03:41):
memories and emotions are processed, grew from that same olfactory
brain tissue. It remains connected to our sense of smell
by a super highway, and that's why scents are so
emotionally evocative so quickly, Dutta says, because this is the
part of our brain responsible for orientation, scent memory are
rooted in places. These kinds of memories are often described
(04:04):
as transportative. If I smell old spice deodorant, it doesn't
matter what I'm doing. Suddenly I'm fifteen years old in
the hallways of my high school and I have a crush.
When we smell something new, we immediately form an emotional
connection with it, Hurtz says. Once that association is learned,
it's very, very hard to undo. She says, fixed scent
(04:26):
associations are vital to a brand's identity and a huge
driver of how consumers feel about the products they buy.
It's neuroscience. Data says people want to take advantage of
the ability to elicit positively valenced feelings for whatever the
setting is, and brands pay top dollar for that science.
Our purpose is to create a scent and at the
(04:47):
same time generate happiness in consumers, says Javier Renard, the
global head of fine fragrance at Jivaudan, the largest manufacture
of fragrances and flavors in the world. Perfumers are in
the business of engineering emotions and that business is booming.
The finely tuned human olfactory system is theoretically capable of
(05:09):
detecting around forty billion different odorants, though the exact limit
is unknown. We have between ten million and twenty million
neurons that process scent, and they can detect all the
same invisible chemical compounds that dogs can, though they can
smell them at much lower concentrations. Human noses are capable
of detecting even the slightest changes in a fragrance, which
(05:32):
is how we know something smells off but can't say
why while we are constantly surrounded by smell. The human
brain is also adept at rapidly muting fragrances. The phenomenon
known as olfactory blindness is the reason we can't smell
our own perfume or the scent of our home until
we come back from a multi week vacation. Most people
(05:53):
are hardly aware of all fragrances in their lives, Renard says,
until they change. Renard says, Jivaudan tries to talk companies
out of reformulations that will affect a product's fragrance because
customers hate it, the brands get letters, he says. America, however,
is a country obsessed with newness, unlike the UK or
(06:14):
continental Europe, where a change to a dominant household product
would risk sparking revolution. It's a part of American culture,
this celebration of novelty, progress and reinvention, says Frank Jerman,
professor of marketing at the Mendoza College of Business at
the University of Notre Dame. American companies can also incentivize
(06:34):
change for change's sake. If you don't innovate or come
up with new things to do, do, companies still need
your department. You have to come up with new things
to justify your existence. German says this is the danger
of getting attached to sense created by corporations. They can
change at any time without warning. In the natural world,
(06:56):
a peach will always smell like a peach. But because
we associate positive things like clean clothes, clean bodies, and
clean homes with certain scents, researchers are noticing that the
amount of fragrance we expect in products is rising, especially
in the US. Research by Procter and Gamble in twenty
twenty one found that eighty nine percent of laundry products,
(07:18):
seventy nine percent of surface cleaners, and ninety nine percent
of dishwashing products sold in the US were fragranced. Fragrance
companies are booming, from laundry to luxury candles, hotel lobbies
to restaurants. Fragrance is being pumped into homes and public
spaces at greater rates than before, one of the reasons
(07:39):
Jivaudant's share price is up more than forty percent since
twenty twenty three. Americans like their fragrances stronger. Bernard at
Jivodance says they like it when you can notice it,
but it also creates the risk of a fragrance arms race.
As our scent environments become denser. In order to stand out,
you need higher concentrations of fragrants, and that's unfortunate. Data
(08:02):
says brands also react to customer demands for more olfactory
evidence of their effectiveness by adding more fragrance. In twenty twenty,
Tide changed its original scent in response to customer demands
for a longer lasting scent. Gain also increased the amount
of scent in its detergent pods. Yet fragrance fatigue means
(08:23):
that no matter the strength, while some customers will be
turned off or get headaches, still more will grow blind
to it and crave more. America's small mecha for noxious scents,
Bath and Bodyworks, launched its own line of fragrance laundry
detergents and laundry scent boosters in September, responding to customer
demand for an everlasting clean clothes smell. But even their
(08:46):
customer scent preferences diverge. While some reported smelling the detergent
on their clothing for a month, others said it faded
the minute it came out of the dryer and begged
for more. And the way something smells also depends on
the concentration of fragrance. When the amount of scent in
a product increases, it fundamentally changes how it smells. For
(09:06):
some customers, the new tide no longer smelled the way
their brains told them clean laundry should, and they were frustrated.
Everyone's sense of smell is unique, as is their sensitivity
to the amount of fragrance in their world. It's the
reason Yankee Candle grew to a two billion dollar business,
even as some people can't even walk into the store.
(09:26):
The danger of sense at too high concentrations is they
become unpleasant, Datta says. At some levels, smells can also
activate the nearby trigeminal nerve, which signals irritation. That's part
of why people get headaches when fragrances are too strong.
There is not an easy solution neurologically. Don's x account
(09:47):
direct customers who hate its new scent to try the
brand's free and clear products devoid of artificial fragrance and dies,
a market segment that's growing as more customers flee intensifying perfume.
Even if the cleaning formula is the same, customers tend
to perceive unscented products as less effective. Hurt says they
(10:07):
attached the idea of clean to the smell of their detergent.
She says, Suddenly their dishes don't smell clean anymore. Scent
researchers and perfumers are fond of talking about young love
and grandmothers. If you ask anyone what their first boyfriend
was wearing as a fragrance, it will take them one
tenth of a second to answer, says Bernard at Jivoudaint.
(10:29):
But most of us will struggle to call to mind
the smells of the people we have loved since Emotional
attachments to scince forged and childhood are uniquely strong. At
Perfumer School in the south of France, Renard encountered a
chemical compound called myral Dean. As a child, he spent
significant time with his grandparents in northern France, and they
(10:51):
often visited their neighbor. Bernard hadn't thought about the house
and years, but all of a sudden, I was five
years old again in my grandparents neighbor's house. Myraldne, often
used in liquid detergents, has a citrusy floral smell, like
orange blossom or lilac. The neighbor's house smelled of clean laundry.
(11:11):
I cried because the emotion was so strong, he says.
My grandparents had just passed away. There was nothing I
could do. I was melting. Smell is emotionally complex because
while the underlying emotional connection is sticky, the association evolves.
The emotion you feel when you smell that scent is
actually the meaning of it to you now, not at
(11:33):
the time when you first learned the association, says hurts.
When I smell old spice, I still feel the thrill
of that crush, because an unrequited crush lasts forever. If
Old Spice Boy had broken my tender heart, I might
feel differently. Like many Americans, I inherited my household brand preferences.
I used Dawn because my parents did. While I was little.
(11:55):
My dad used to weave bubbles the size of basketballs
out of dawn dish soap for me and my sister
in our backyard. We'd run after them, shrieking with joy,
popping bubbles until we were soaked with SuDS. But when
I smell don I feel nostalgic, not joyful. I'm an
adult longing for endless summer evenings, the whole family together
when there was nothing more serious to think about than
(12:18):
what to have for dessert. That is what I miss
so much now, when no one blows bubbles just to
make me smile. Smelling Don was a doorway to this memory,
and when the fragrance suddenly changed, it felt like someone
had locked it. I wrestled with how to move forward
with new Dawn. Was I supposed to switch to missus
Myers inconceivable? I briefly considered that I was overreacting, then
(12:43):
did the only rational thing I could think of and
walked to seven different stores trying to find a legacy
bottle hidden on the back of a shelf. Eventually, I
bought a dust coated hardware store out of its ancient
mini bottles of the original Dawn for a three hundred
percent markup. I know I'm not alone in this pursuit.
On eBay, bottles of the original down a retail for
(13:05):
almost five times the sticker price of the new clean
scent Don. I have delayed my pain, but it is inevitable.
When asked around at multiple bird sanctuaries, the ones that
clean the baby ducks for thoughts on the new formula,
some people expressed general frustration at the amount of artificial
sense in our world. Others noted that Don has always
(13:26):
had a lot of fragrance. They all still use it
to save the birds. It's possible. I realized that Don
has always been strong. I was just used to it,
and maybe I will get used to the new stuff too.
It really does SuDS so well.
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