FRIDAY FUNNY: The Top 10 Worst Smells

indoor air quality, odors, blueairCooking up a storm is a popular pastime as families and friends gather together during the Christmas and New Year festive season, yet research in late December revealed pungent smells from the kitchen are a big turn off for very many people, more so than flatulence and toilet smells. The research by Blueair, an indoor air purification company, spotlights the top 10 bad odors people most wanted to avoid. Surprisingly, the worst olfactory offenders were not inherently bad odors like rotten eggs. They were:

  1. Cooking and baking smells
  2. Strong fragrances, such as s perfumes
  3. Cleaning product odors
  4. Oven burnt food
  5. Smelly pets, especially cats and dogs
  6. Flatulence and other odors from the toilet
  7. Body odor
  8. Chemical smells from paint, fillers, and glues
  9. Tobacco and cigar smoke
  10. Mold and damp

Bengt Rittri, Blueair founder and owner, said: “Good ventilation goes a long way to removing odors, but that’s not always possible when the weather worsens and outside temperatures drop. Research in the USA and Europe shows indoor air can be up to 100 times more polluted than the air outside, especially in facilites that have been built ‘tight’ to conserve energy.”

A revealing finding of the Blueair research was the near total lack of awareness among those surveyed that chemicals such as volatile organic compounds found in interior furnishings, cleaning products, and personal care creams and liquids are irritants with levels often hundreds of times higher indoors than outside. Over 78% of all respondents said they were unaware of the fact.

Rittri added that a good way to speedily remove bad smells from any room within a few minutes is to use an air purifier appliance, which removes practically all pollen, pet dander, mold spores, smoke particles, dust, and other airborne pollutants to create a less offensive environment.