Why are so many cleaning products lemon scented?
Why are so many cleaning products lemon scented?
Is it a universally agreed-upon "fresh" smell? Cultural? Or is lemon fragrance just cheap to manufacture and use in products? Something else?
I don't hate it, but I also don't care for it, either. Now I'm curious why so many cleaning products use that smell.
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Lemon and orange are the easiest scents to achieve from a chemistry standpoint. It probably complements the base smell of a product easier.
Fun fact A professor once told us that a molecule's chirality can make a diffeence. For example Limonene can either smell like pine or oranges depending on what way the molecule is mirrored.
For example Limonene can either smell like pine or oranges depending on what way the molecule is mirrored.
And would you look at that, pine is another extremely common cleaning scent
Citric acid can be used as a cleaner and fruit used to be an important ingredient for cleaning agents.
They switched from fruits to fungus because it's cheaper, and added the smell consumers were used.
So even generations later, it'll smell like citrus because that's what everyone is still used to
That makes sense. I guess more people than me are also sick of lemon since the orange scents are always out of stock.
It depends, a lot of the time, most cleaning products have that shitty "lemon" smell that fucking sucks, where it's obviously only masking a more unpleasant smell even if the unpleasant smell is just the actual cleaning product. That usually means it's even worse when there really is a foul odor present, cause then it smells like shit and lemon.
Limonene can either smell like pine or oranges depending on what way the molecule is mirrored.
Damn, that's interesting. My first thought on hearing that was wondering if pine scented cleaning products are a thing because it's cheaper to synthesize limonene in both chiralities and then separate after the fact than it is to just synthesize the orange-smelling version.
It doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny, but it would be pretty damn cool if that fact explained both OP's question, as well as explained pine-scented cleaning products!
This stuff is truly fascinating as well as mystifying.
Is this why green sweets are usually lime flavoured when they should all be apple flavoured?