It’s Not Just You: Household Product Scents Are Getting Stronger

It’s a function of modern life that some of the most distinct scent associations we have are with chemicals: basic household and personal brands such as cleaning sprays, detergents and soaps. They have the ability to bring emotionally rich memories to the surface with just a whiff.

“Scent has the ability to evoke really deep memories that are tied to place and time,” says Sandeep Robert Datta, a doctor and professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School who runs a lab that researches olfaction. “We are still trying to understand it.”

When we smell something new, we immediately form an emotional connection with it, Herz says: “Once that association is learned, it’s very, very hard to undo it.” Fixed scent associations are vital to a brand’s identity, and a huge driver of how consumers feel about the products they buy. It’s neuroscience. “People want to take advantage of the ability to elicit positively valenced feelings for whatever the setting is,” Datta says.

And brands pay top dollar for that science. “Our purpose is to create a scent, and at the same time, generate happiness in consumers,” says Xavier Renard, the global head of fine fragrance at Givaudan, the largest manufacturer of fragrances and flavors in the world. Perfumers are in the business of engineering emotions — and that business is booming.

America, however, is a country obsessed with newness, unlike the UK or continental Europe, where a change to a dominant household product would risk sparking revolution. “It’s a part of American culture, this celebration of novelty, progress and reinvention,” says Frank Germann, professor of marketing at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.

But because we associate positive things — like clean clothes, clean bodies and clean homes — with certain scents, researchers are noticing that the amount of fragrance we expect in products is rising, especially in the US. Research by Procter & Gamble in 2021 found that 89% of laundry products, 79% of surface cleaners and 99% of dishwashing products sold in the US were fragranced.

Fragrance companies are booming. From laundry to luxury candles, hotel lobbies to restaurants, fragrance is being pumped into homes and public spaces at greater rates than before.

But this also creates the risk of an arms race: “As our scent environments become denser, in order to stand out you need higher concentrations of fragrance, and that’s unfortunate,” Datta says. Brands also react to customer demands for more “olfactory evidence” of their effectiveness by adding more fragrance. In 2020, Tide changed its original scent in response to customer demands “for a longer-lasting scent”; Gain also increased the amount of scent in its detergent pods. Yet “fragrance fatigue” means that no matter the strength, while some customers will be turned off or get headaches, still more will grow blind to it and crave more.

Household brands are doubling down on innovation to boost sales during a challenging time for consumer spending, says Diana Gomes, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Scent is a significant part of that. “Fragrance innovation is a way to differentiate existing and new products — and adding longer-lasting scents helps boost consumer feeling that a product is more effective, driving repeat purchases,” she says.

show less