The scary part is that you become desensitized to VOCs the more you're exposed and people willingly increase their exposure by using air fresheners, scented candles, fabric softeners, and incense burners. It gets to the point where they can't even smell moderate amounts.
My partner has severe allergies and will break out in hives when exposed to many fragrances so we've cut them out of everything. We avoid most cleaning products and stick to water, salt, baking soda, vinegar, and peroxide for most household cleaning.
My MIL is very desensitized to fragrances and my partner has asked her on multiple occasions not to "freshen up" the house before we visit. My MIL swears up and down that she doesn't but the moment you walk in the door it's like a punch in the face. My partner unfortunately will break out in hives and immediately becomes congested.
In her defense, she has toned it down considerably. She thinks however that the amount she still uses is so trace that it's undetectable, possibly because she's fried her sense of smell. She also has anxiety issues about not adhering to social expectations, like she can't arrive empty handed or will spend all day cleaning and then apologize for a "filthy" home that's cleaner than a laboratory clean room. So it's a struggle for her to hold back.
My partner is quite literally allergic to everything so it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation a lot of times.
> home that's cleaner than a laboratory clean room
> My partner is quite literally allergic to everything
... and now research is showing those two statements may be cause and effect to some degree, ironically.
I asked my mom to switch to unscented fabric softener and it took MONTHS for her clothes to stop smelling like being punched in the face with a bouquet. It's amazing how desensitized people are, and how long it takes those fragrances to dissipate.
> I asked my mom to switch to unscented fabric softener and it took MONTHS for her clothes to stop smelling like being punched in the face with a bouquet.
Yes! It's amazing how the smell persists subsequent washes.
Eh, old people can be weird and stubborn. (Or people in general.) Some don't really believe in something and might even be having early stage dementia (i.e. memory loss).
My own mother had a dismissive attitude towards dietary intolerances and even basic hygiene sometimes.
In my experience with working with many elderly patients, a lot of them are self-conscious of having "old person smell" so attempt to mask that with perfume/cologne. It's also harder for them to bathe and reach all the nooks and crannies so sometimes hygiene deteriorates.
One of the strongest smells in a nursing home isn't unchanged diapers it is that staph infection festering under a neglected old lady's underbreast area. Very infrequently checked due to modesty issues and caregivers trying not to offend and respect her decency but it does have to be monitored and checked routinely because that skin area stays moist and chafes against the folds and I've seen too many elderly women in severe pain from their bra straps chaffing the skin off here and getting infected.
Men of hackernews, check your elderly mothers underbreast area and make sure her caregivers are routinely keeping it clean and dry!!
This comment brought to you by a very sweet, very neglected old lady who we took out of a pretty bad situation in a care home and I will never forget that smell and the shame and plea for help in her eyes as I assessed what exactly was the source of her various ailments. And she was nonverbal so couldn't complain nobody was doing their damn jobs.
I'm keeping the closest watch that I can on this age and being a default assehole gig that I have heard all my life and am guilty of using myself to blank out some of my parents behaviour that was beyond salvation. I'm 50 now and looking for the SMaaS app I need the Shoot Me aaS when I default to asshole cos of age app is desperately needed in society.
This is me basically, minus MIL with crazy fragrances. Every time I walk past a fragrance shop,I wonder how people survive in there...
Bicarbonate soda is an amazing product: we've been using it instead of washing-up liquid for our daughter's cutlery and crockery. Also to clean the bath before she goes in.
5 years ago,we bought a sofa, which came with a massive stench because of VOCs and fire retardants it gets soaked into.. After we complained, they sent in a guy,who pretended he can't smell shit and suggested going to the doctor for allergies.. to my knowledge, California is one of very few places, where furniture foam doesn't need to be soaked in harmful chemicals.
I pour a baking soda slurry on my hair in showers instead of shampoo, sometimes exfoliate my face a bit right after. Rinse it out with some diluted white or apple cider vinegar. Most shampoos had me developing horrible neck and scalp pimples and gave me dry skin.
Now if you want to really kick up the cleaning potential you put on gloves and bake the baking soda turning it into Sodium Carbonate which is an adequate replacement for lye in many household uses from cleaning to making pretzels.
There are many kinds of VOCs, some harmful and others benign. The human nose is sensitive to certain substances and insensitive to others. For example, the human nose can barely smell 1ppm of formaldehyde [1] or 0.000002ppm of damascenone (the fragrance made by roses and added to many products) [2]. That's a difference in concentration of 500,000. Put another way, an overpowering rose smell shows a tiny and harmless concentration. While a light formaldehyde smell indicates a harmful concentration. So you cannot trust your nose to tell you if VOC levels are harmful or not.
I used to be like your partner. A whiff of perfume would trigger nasal congestion, itchy eyes, and irritable mood. It got worse over 5 years. It became unbearable, interfering with my work and personal life. I consulted with an allergy doctor. They told me it was incurable and probably won't get better, just avoid perfume.
I started doing my own research. I found a study result [0] showing that perfume sensitivity is psycho-somatic. Then I learned stress-reduction techniques and used them to cure myself. Specifically, whenever I smelled perfume, I would practice slow breathing, go for a short walk, or get a drink of water. Gradually, I stopped feeling stress after smelling perfume. After about one month, I used lightly-perfumed (normal) hand soap at my friend's home and felt no discomfort afterward. My life improved a lot.
Allergy is a very specific physical process involving the immune system. Doctors have reliable methods to measure this process. Perfume sensitivity is something different. People develop emotional habits of reacting with fear when smelling perfume. When the body enters that triggered emotional state, it releases stress hormones. The stress hormones cause the symptoms of perfume sensitivity.
Your partner can cure their-self, as I cured myself four years ago. After they do it, please reply here so I can point others to this thread.
This is something my mother does on a grand scale, and we all probably do on smaller scales. (Obviously plenty of allergies are real, I'm not claiming it's all made up.) For 20 years she's attributed various health problems to allergies. There tend to be 2-3 allergies that she believes she has at any one time, each one lasting for about 5 years. Last I checked, she was "gluten sensitive", that was the main one. Another person I know claims to be allergic to "about 20 to 30 things, but all on a very mild level that combines and accumulates over time". Just the sort of thing that you couldn't, you know, test for. A more determined person would probably hit on one thing and stick with it for a long time.
I think "rationality" is not any kind of preventative against getting caught up in this. It's a matter of being in a community, and everyone in the community saying "yeah I discovered I had this problem, it's actually way more common than doctors realize and it had these symptoms, and fixing it improved my life so much." So then you start to think about whether you have had anything that resembles those symptoms, and your brain wheels start to go on the possibility that all your life issues could be solved if you just eliminated whatever it is. Pretty soon you do have the symptoms, you see them every time you encounter this thing. Why didn't you notice it before? You must have been desensitized... and so on.
To be clear, I'm not making light of the issue, and I'm definitely not willing to say that this is what is happening to anyone in this thread in particular, but by my observation it's an extremely common problem, one I've fallen into myself before. I literally do not let myself listen to anecdata about allergies, because I know I'll fall for it again. This is all sort of reminiscent of England's famous "catching" psychological issues, or the betwitched children of Salem.
> Pretty soon you do have the symptoms, you see them every time you encounter this thing.
Your comment seems to imply that psycho-somatic symptoms are not real symptoms and people who suffer from them are behaving irrationally. If so, you are incorrect.
Psycho-somatic symptoms are real measurable physical problems in the body that are triggered by the brain. They are not imagined problems. For example, my perfume sensitivity triggered real nasal congestion. You could hook up a nasal flow meter and record data showing that my nostrils were blocked. For people with chronic lower back pain, you could connect a sensor to the pain nerves and measure the pain signals going from the lower back muscles into the spinal column.
Suffering from a psycho-somatic disorder does not imply that the person is rational or irrational. Psycho-somatic problems arise from everyday life situations. For example, my own perfume sensitivity developed over a year of high pressure at the office. My desk was near the women's restroom. Several times an hour, people wearing perfume would walk by my desk to use the restroom, and then walk by again a few minutes later. I became distracted when I smelled their perfume. I would respond to the distraction by desperately forcing myself to concentrate. When concentrating was difficult, I felt more stress. Gradually, my brain developed an automatic response: smell perfume -> feel anxiety and stress. Unfortunately, this was a self-reinforcing habit. After I recognized the root cause, I was able to un-learn the emotional habit and cure the psycho-somatic disorder.
Your tone implies that people develop psycho-somatic disorders after "falling for" some false idea. That is incorrect. Some would consider it extremely condescending and would take offense. When a person suffers from excruciating lower back pain, they are not "falling for" the idea that they have a back injury. They are just suffering. They try to understand why they are suffering. "I have a bad back" is a reasonable explanation. The knowledge of the most common cause of lower back pain is not yet widespread: that lower back pain is usually caused by subconscious tensing of muscles. Please re-examine your bias about psycho-somatic disorders. They are real symptoms suffered by rational people.
I assure you that your mother is suffering real symptoms. They are very likely not psycho-somatic. I commend her relentless search for root cause and cure. You could help her: Take her to consult with experts, help her objectively record her symptoms, help her systematically test different hypotheses and interventions, find a fun fitness class and attend it with her, research healthy recipes and cook them together, and make sure she takes enough vitamin D3. My own mother developed cancer and there was little I could do to help her.
> Your comment seems to imply that psycho-somatic symptoms are not real symptoms and people who suffer from them are behaving irrationally.
No, I was intending to do exactly the opposite. Sorry that that was unclear. My only point was that the cure is entirely a mental one, not that the suffering is fake. I suspect that you can develop symptoms by being around other people who have the symptoms. That doesn't mean your experiences aren't legitimate. As I said in the comment, I myself have had this experience. In my case it started with imagining things about my past experiences, but quickly turned into a real ordeal for me.
> I assure you that your mother is suffering real symptoms. They are very likely not psycho-somatic.
I agree, and we've tried to help her. She unfortunately has a pretty strong skepticism of traditional medicine and has an extremely unhealthy lifestyle that could more than explain most of her symptoms, but has chosen to micro-focus on the things people on her Facebook feed tell her are her problems. So she says, for example, that she has pain in her gut and gets headaches whenever she eats gluten. This is something she'd never complained of before, and a test for celiac disease turned up nothing. But still she insists. My only explanation is not that she's pretending to suffer, but rather that she's created the gluten intolerance herself. That it's a mental problem. Next time I visit, she'll probably be back to eating bread again, this time totally convinced something else is going on.
Just upthread you complained about someone's links to journal papers because
> The studies you cite do not list who funded them, but one of the links is ... a website which sells sneakers! One of the worst VOC offenders!
I'd ask you to consider that perhaps your sources of information, all apparently non-scientific (and many also having financial interests in "all natural" products) may not be the best counter-point to mainstream scientific research.
To be fair, I think the David Suzuki foundation is pretty well respected.
Here are some quotes:
Synthetic musks used in fragrances are of particular concern from an ecological perspective. Several of musk compounds are persistent in the environment and build up (bioaccumulate) in the fatty tissue of aquatic organisms.
diethyl phthalate, or DEP, is widely used in cosmetic fragrances to make the scent linger. Phthalates are choice ingredients in cosmetics because they are cheap and versatile. However, the European Commission on Endocrine Disruption has listed DEP as a Category 1 priority substance, based on evidence that it interferes with hormone function.
Phthalates have been linked to early puberty in girls, reduced sperm count in men, and reproductive defects in the developing male fetus (when the mother is exposed during pregnancy).
That sounds pretty science-y to me, admittedly a layperson.
The studies you cite do not list who funded them, but one of the links is ... a website which sells sneakers! One of the worst VOC offenders!
Also, that's a nice story, but I already practice stress reduction techniques on a daily basis for other stressors. I also regularly assess myself for stress level so that I know to apply them.
When my partner bought a couch that off-gassed from the particleboard for months, I was not stressed by it. I did, however, develop a severe headache, disorientation, and migraine-like symptoms.
There's also the correlation of various VOCs with long-term health risks. Do you think that is just stress as well?
Stress is probably higher risk. Notice your triggers and integrate stress reduction at that present time. It's sort of reprogramming your self. Not into NLP though.
Well, having a gruesome headache and unable to think straight or function is certainly a stressor.
As I mentioned, I practice stress reduction techniques on a daily basis. I have studied and practiced them for years, from older traditions and today's teachers. I even teach them to others. People often comment on my calm and peaceful state and demeanor.
Stress is not the culprit here. The culprit is chemical poisoning.
Are you familiar with skin prick tests? A grid of half inch squares are drawn over the test area, usually your arm. Each square receives a different allergen via pin prick. After a few minutes or sometimes days, the allergist accesses the degree to which you had a reaction in each square. The reactions vary from nothing to blistering. The reactions are isolated to the site of the pin prick. You do not know what allergen was applied to each grid square. It's only after the fact that you learn what you've reacted to.
The skin prick test done over my partner's entire back using dozens of allergens to form a comprehensive list of allergies. There was not a 100% reaction to all allergens and there was no way for my partner to know which allergen was applied in each grid.
You're going to tell me that my partner's selective reactions to over 100 different skin pricks were all psycho-somatic? I actually find your remarks dismissive and rather offensive.
Did the allergy doctor do a skin prick test with perfumes?
Did I write anything that downplays your partner's problems? Perhaps you think that psycho-somatic problems aren't common, or are somehow the fault of the people suffering from them? Psycho-somatic symptoms are real. I experienced them myself for many years. I do not dismiss your partner's symptoms.
Human bodies are complicated and diverse. Finding solutions to health problems requires an open mind and effort to learn and try various potential solutions. Please try not to react defensively to this stranger's words. My intention is to help you and your partner.
I am quite certain that your partner's perfume sensitivity and skin allergies are different biological processes. Allergies are a very specific process involving histamines and leading to inflammation. Nobody has demonstrated that process happening because of perfume in the air.
It's possible that your partner's skin allergies flare up when the brain releases stress hormones. Stress affects the immune system in complicated ways. Stress can trigger hives [0]. That doesn't make them perfume allergies.
Consider this process:
Smells perfume -> brain enters fear emotion -> brain releases stress hormones -> immune system increases sensitivity -> infection alert goes off in areas of skin (hives)
If this is the case, then you can prevent the hives by preventing the brain from entering the fear emotion state.
> Did I write anything that downplays your partner's problems?
Yes, here are some examples:
> Perfume sensitivity is something different. People develop emotional habits of reacting with fear when smelling perfume.
> I am quite certain that your partner's perfume sensitivity and skin allergies are different biological processes. Allergies are a very specific process involving histamines and leading to inflammation. Nobody has demonstrated that process happening because of perfume in the air.
You don't know anything about my partner's allergies and yet you're certain in your diagnosis.
Here are some facts:
* Contact dermatitis is the second most common allergic reaction.
* Fragrance chemicals are the leading cause for contact allergies.
* Airborne accute contact dermatitis has been studied extensively.
I'm not sure how you've come to the conclusions you have but you're outright dismissing decades of scientific research and concluding that my partner's allergies are psycho-somatic.
You're in league with new age medicine like healing crystals and tinctures.
The first article you link is a review of Allergic Contact Dermatitis (ACD). This is for substances that stick to skin cells and then trigger an allergic reaction. I searched through that article for reports of allergy to airborne fragrance and found only one:
> In 1 driver and 4 passengers, airborne ACD to such scents was diagnosed in Miami, FL [72].
It's from a short report from a hospital [0]. Five separate patients reported ACD related to driving or riding in separate Uber cars. The patients had positive patch tests for a fragrance (balsam of Peru). They did not analyze the substances in the driver's fragrance diffuser or the fragrances of the other cars. There are many possible explanations for the symptoms. Driving for Uber is a stressful job. And riding in Uber can be stressful, too, especially when the car has a bad smell that requires a powerful fragrance to cover up. So an equally plausible explanation of the five peoples' dermatitis is stress-induced dermatitis.
All other reports in that article of airborne ACD are for industrial substances affecting people working in factories and labs which use the substances. A worker in an addiction treatment facility became allergic to airborne heroin and morphine. Somebody became allergic to airborne sawdust.
The second article is titled "Fragrance Contact Allergy". You can read it at [1]. It studies fragrance substances that people apply to their skin. It contains this statement, with no references or further information:
> Air-borne exposure to perfumes may elicit an allergic reaction in very sensitive individuals, but this is an extremely rare phenomenon.
The third article you listed is titled "Fragrance contact allergy: a 4‐year retrospective study". You can read it at [2]. The article does not contain the word 'air' or 'airborne'. It studies fragrance substances that are applied to the skin. It does not talk about allergic reaction to airborne fragrances.
I may be wrong. It's certainly possible that somebody somewhere has been allergic to airborne fragrances. But I found no credible evidence of that when I reviewed the scientific literature 4 years ago. And these three articles you linked also do not provide any evidence of it. If you find something concrete, or I missed something in the articles, please let me know.
> Three-quarters of the toxic chemicals detected in a test of 140 products came from fragrance, reported a 2018 BCPP study of personal care and cleaning brands. The chemicals identified were linked to chronic health issues, including cancer.
> According to the Environmental Working Group, the average fragrant contains about 14 secret chemicals that aren’t listed on the label, many of which are linked to hormone disruption and allergic reactions, as well as about 80 percent of them not being tested for human safety in personal care products.
> Of the thousands of chemicals used in fragrances, most have not been tested for toxicity, alone or in combination. Many of these unlisted ingredients are irritants and can trigger allergies, migraines, and asthma symptoms. iii A survey of asthmatics found that perfume and/or colognes triggered attacks in nearly three out of four individuals. iv There is also evidence suggesting that exposure to perfume can exacerbate asthma, and perhaps even contribute to its development in children.
> In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences tested commonly used fragrances for neurotoxicity; however, the results have still yet to be released. The good news is that many other tests have been done. In fact, in 1991 the EPA tested conventional, synthetic perfumes and found a long list of toxic chemical ingredients, including acetone, benzaldehyde, benzyl acetate, benzyl alcohol, camphor, ethanol, ethyl acetate, limonene, linalool, methylene chloride as well as phthalates, stearates, and parabens.
> “The average fragrance product tested contained 14 secret chemicals not listed on the label,” reports EWG, which analyzed the Campaign’s data. “Among them are chemicals associated with hormone disruption and allergic reactions, and many substances that have not been assessed for safety in personal care products.” EWG adds that some of the undisclosed ingredients are chemicals “with troubling hazardous properties or with a propensity to accumulate in human tissues.” Examples include diethyl phthalate, a chemical found in 97 percent of Americans and linked to sperm damage in human epidemiological studies, and musk ketone, which concentrates in human fat tissue and breast milk.
> The good news is that immediate, irreversible damage to your health caused by one-time use of perfume or cologne — so-called “perfume poisoning” — is rare. But exposure to topical fragrances can trigger allergies, skin sensitivities, and cause harm over time.
> BCPP’s report disclosed the results of chemical testing of 140 popular U.S. personal care and cleaning products. The testing revealed hundreds of toxic chemicals in these products, the majority of which were associated with the fragrance in the product.
Shout out to vinegar! The huge jugs of "cleaning vinegar" changed my life a couple years ago. I still use diluted bleach for the bathroom every once in a while, but vinegar is sufficient for almost everything day-to-day. And it's so much cheaper than most "cleansers".
Peroxide is a surprisingly good stain and odor remover. I prefer it to vinegar because it doesn't have a pungent odor that masks the odor you're trying to get rid of.
But yes vinegar is awesome. It's fantastic at water stains like nothing else.
It's crazy how dismissive people are. My partner had a comprehensive allergy test done, the kind where they draw a grid on your back and apply different substances in each square.
You're supposed to leave and come back a few days later but my partner had a reaction in every square before she left the doctor. They asked if the interns could come take a look because they'd never seen such a complete reaction.
Not sure if it's what you meant, but I had a similar story where I reacted to everything, even the control. The allergist took that to mean "you're really allergic to everything," but I went looking for a second opinion who was able to get both the positive and negative controls to work. Turns out I'm not allergic to everything, the first allergist just didn't recognize benign dermatographia and was a bit too quick to ignore my positive reaction to the negative control. In all, it saved me a good chunk of change and sensitization risks that would have come from having unneeded components in my allergy shots.
I don't know the details of your case or if any of this applies, but if by chance you were in the same boat wrt the negative control it might be worth circling back for a confirmation test at some point.
I'm exaggerating a little, my partner has extensive allergies but not absolute. I jokingly say my partner is allergic to life but in reality it's just life on earth.
Fun fact, I'm actually mildly allergic to salt. Docs didn't believe me and just tried to say it was GERD or similar. Finally found one that did some more tests and yep.
I also can't be around any strong perfumes or I'll break out in hives. It sucks when someone on a plane comes on like they just took a shower in the stuff.
Wait, what? I'm pretty sure you can't be allergic to sodium chloride. Salt is literally part of your body. You'd die if you didn't ingest any salt.
Do you mean you're allergic to some common additive in table salt, or specifically to elevated salt concentrations? The former sounds like something you could call an allergy (but not to salt itself); the latter I probably wouldn't call an allergy so much as higher sensitivity to significantly hypotonic food or drinks. An allergy is usually defined as an excessive, damaging immune reaction to a foreign substance that is itself harmless at that concentration. Salt isn't a foreign substance.
I get the feeling a lot of people are lumping tons of things into the category of "allergies" where the underlying biological processes are very different. That doesn't mean the reactions aren't real, but it makes it very difficult to reason to reason about them. When everything's an allergy, the word allergy stops having any useful meaning.
Indeed, but then it wouldn't be a salt allergy so much as an allergy to those additives (and one that you could easily fix by cooking with proper pure NaCl).
I received similar skepticism from people for coconut but after a few times of my lips turning purple they started to believe me. I seemed to have aged out of it though as more recent accidental exposures haven't resulted in a reaction.
I'm not about to tempt fate and willing subject myself to it.
My partner has severe allergies and will break out in hives when exposed to many fragrances so we've cut them out of everything. We avoid most cleaning products and stick to water, salt, baking soda, vinegar, and peroxide for most household cleaning.
My MIL is very desensitized to fragrances and my partner has asked her on multiple occasions not to "freshen up" the house before we visit. My MIL swears up and down that she doesn't but the moment you walk in the door it's like a punch in the face. My partner unfortunately will break out in hives and immediately becomes congested.