In a recent post, I reported scientific research indicating that each of us may have a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic microparticles in our brain. If that result applies generally, it suggests how massively we humans, as a species, may be poisoning ourselves.
Our current self-poisoning may be just as consequential, and far more widespread, than ancient Rome’s poisoning of its own elite (but not its ordinary people) with lead leached from lead water pipes. (Our English word for “plumbing” comes from the Latin word “plumbum” for lead, with its Periodic Table symbol “Pb.” Only Roman Emperors, senators and other elite drew their drinking water though lead pipes; ordinary Romans got their drinking water from safer concrete or stone acquaducts and fountains.)
This essay explores a related topic and related risk. The risk is more speculative than that presented by micro- and nano-particles of plastics and PFAS, which have been found throughout our environment and in the flesh, blood and brains of many individuals and food animals. But I suspect that future research will show that pervasive artificial scents impose the same order of risk on unwitting and unwilling people.
So I’m writing this essay to alert individuals to the potential risk, and to goad researchers, public and private to investigate it. Private researchers may wish to stay ahead of the tidal wave of litigation that will invariably follow a credible study of self-poisoning.
Today’s topic is the artificial perfumes and scents that appear on and in manufactured products almost everywhere. Three things about these artificial scents ought to ring loud warning bells. First and foremost, they are entirely artificial. They do not appear in Nature, although some may have natural analogues or be chemically derived from natural substances.
In the old days, scents in many perfumes were derived from “natural” if disgusting ingredients. A common base ingredient was ambergris, a substance derived from whale poo.
Today nearly all artificial scents are derived derived from petrochemicals. As a 2023 paper in the National Library of Medicine reports:
“[B]ecause fragrances and formula constituents of [personal care and household products] are volatile organic compounds (VOCs), vulnerable populations are exposed daily to variable indoor concentrations of these chemicals. Fragrance molecules may trigger various acute and chronic pathological conditions because of repetitive human exposure to indoor environments at home and workplaces. The negative impact of fragrance chemicals on human health includes cutaneous, respiratory, and systemic effects (e.g., headaches, asthma attacks, breathing difficulties, cardiovascular and neurological problems) and distress in workplaces. Pathologies related to synthetic perfumes are associated with allergic reactions (e.g., cutaneous and pulmonary hypersensitivity) and potentially with the perturbation of the endocrine-immune-neural axis.”
The second scary thing about artificial scents is that they appear to be deliberately designed for maximum remanence, at least in indoor environments. They seem to cling persistently to clothes, furniture and even clothes drawers (see below).
IMHO, their manufacturers design them this way to provide long-lasting nasal “trademarks,” which stay with their products, such as clothing, for days, weeks, months or even years. These artificial scents appear to last far longer than traditional, nature-based perfumes, which by and large used to dissipate to undetectability in a few days.
The third scary thing about these scents is their ubiquity. They appear not just in perfumes and sometimes on retail clothing, but also in everything from toilet-bowl cleaners, through air sprays and dishwashing soap (both automatic and hand dishwashing), to hand soaps, face soaps, laundry soaps, shampoos, sunscreens, and hair “conditioners.” It’s almost impossible to live in American consumer culture today without encountering them, try as you might. And as a 1985 report by the National Academy of Sciences reportedly found, 95 percent of chemicals used in synthetic fragrances are derived from petroleum.
These increasingly ubiquitous, long-lasting artificial scents are so obnoxious to some (including me) that they have provoked a commercial counter-trend. Practically every supermarket, and many commercial brands, offer “FREE and CLEAR” versions of their scented products, without the unwanted and unnecessary scents. Those scent-free products are apparently enjoying wide and increasing acceptance among a populace conditioned by advertising to crave and covet everything new, different and distinctive, however untested and dangerous.
Here I think I might be the canary in the coal mine. Close to 80, I’m not dead yet, and I apparently have and have had a particularly sensitive sense of smell. Decades ago, I had a big reaction to the packets of strong, pervasive scents that Vogue magazine used to include in advertising material in many issues. Some 35 years ago, I had to ask my companion to put away such a copy of Vogue on an airplane, after the pervasive scent from merely opening the magazine pervaded the breathing space around me.
These days, it’s increasingly hard to get away from pervasive artificial scents, chemically designed as they are for long remanence. I’ve found them in our homes and cars, often traceable to places where I or my wife have been, including on public transportation, in public restaurants, in public gyms, and from other people riding in our own cars. Sometimes the scents seem particularly strong on people our own age (pushing eighty), perhaps because ladies our age use more and stronger scents to compensate for a decreasing sensitivity of smell with age.
The incidence of “bringing unwanted scents home” on clothes has risen dramatically over the last several years. The steady increase seems to reflect increasing use of stronger and more remanent artificial scents in commercial and consumer products.
I’ve even found scents that remain on my underwear and their dresser drawers after washing my underwear together with other clothes tainted with scent, using a mild, unscented laundry detergent. The only way I could extirpate the remanent smell from my dresser draws was to treat the drawers with strong ozone from a consumer ozone generator, used per instructions in a safely closed closet, in a room with open windows. It took two hours of ozoning to get rid of the scents.
I believe, and other (possibly self-interested) comments suggest (here and here) that this sort of subtle poisoning, so unnatural and so unnaturally remanent, has deleterious effects on the human body and psyche. It may even produce endocrine disruption of the type now proven for certain plastic microparticles and PFAS.
While more research would be required to make this point, it is possible that this nearly universal poisoning of our population might be in part responsible for the extraordinary incidence of anger, fear, rage and discontent that pervades our society and on our mass media every day.
I was trained first as a scientist, only later as a lawyer and law professor. So I present these views as hypotheses, not proven truth.
I invite readers to comment on their similar or divergent experiences, and to report any real, scientific-medical-biological research of which they are aware, whether consistent or inconsistent with these hypotheses. If we are slowly and increasingly poisoning ourselves and our society with unwanted, unnecessary and practically ubiquitous high-remanence artificial scents—as we even now are doing with ubiquitous, unnatural plastics in our homes, dress, bedclothes and food chains—at least we ought to know.
![Colorful sketch of a wildebeest by Starhawk, a side view of a happy, dynamic gnu dancing on one hind leg. A classic heraldric pose of a beast in rampant position. Image bears a hand-written title, "Happy Dance,". The lettering is joyful. Image created by Starhawk of Daily Kos. Uploaded 03-07-2021. Presented as a gift to all members of the Good News Roundup team. Tags Good News Roundups Gnus Gnusies Newsies gnhap](https://cdn.prod.dailykos.com/images/924811/story_image/GnuHappyDance.jpg?1615144457 "Colorful sketch of a wildebeest by Starhawk, a side view of a happy, dynamic gnu dancing on one hind leg. A classic heraldric pose of a beast in rampant position. Image bears a hand-written title, "Happy Dance,". The lettering is joyful. Image created by Starhawk of Daily Kos. Uploaded 03-07-2021. Presented as a gift to all members of the Good News Roundup team. Tags Good News Roundups Gnus Gnusies Newsies gnhap")
