Fragrance.

My mom always told me that people who have nothing to hide, hide nothing. That one simple truth can be applied to so many things in life, including the products we buy. Did you know that the term ‘fragrance’ on a label can actually be used to hide over 3,000 different chemicals? Fragrance sounds like such an innocent thing right? Wrong. We’ll take a further look at some of these chemicals and their health concerns.

To name a few, fragrance can include chemicals like styrene, BHA, pthalates, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, and 1,4-dioxane. Some of these chemicals (like formaldehyde) are known to cause cancer. Not might, or could… Known. Besides various types of cancers, chemicals under the term fragrance can cause reproductive toxicity, non-reproductive organ toxicity, respiratory issues, birth defects, hormone disruption and so many other unwanted negative health effects. There is so much that can be said about hormone disruption alone so that will be the topic for next month. Spoiler alert: hormone disrupters can mimic your body’s natural hormone processes and essentially hijack the messages your hormones are supposed to send.

Fragrance (which can also be called parfum, perfume, aroma or essential oil blend) is found in so many every day use products like cleaning sprays, make up, shampoo and conditioner, tampons, lotions, candles and sadly even baby lotion, wash, diapers and wipes. Every single product that contains the word fragrance isn’t going to give you cancer, but because of the lack of transparency there’s no way to know or rank products by toxicity of ingredients.

Ever wonder how something can be lemon scented but not contain anything remotely close to lemon in the ingredients? The FDA allows companies to use these chemicals to make products artificially smell a certain way (or hide unpleasant smells of other chemicals) and does not require each chemical to be disclosed because they are “proprietary blends”.

This is simply not okay. You will hear this from many clean-living enthusiasts but it’s true what they say - we vote with our dollars. When we stop buying products with fragrance, companies have to adapt. We are demanding transparency and cleaner products when we go with the “fragrance-free” option.