By Jill Sverdlove

After moving into a newly rented house in Ft. Collins, Colorado, Alison Webster (not her real name) felt ill. “Within three days, I was waking up with symptoms I never had before,” she explains. “My face swelled up like a balloon, my hands were puffy. I couldn’t see straight or even walk in a straight line.” A graduate student at the time, the formerly healthy 32-year-old said she knew the symptoms were related to the house. “They went away when I was at school and came back a few hours after I got home.”

Alison and her husband rented the place furnished, which included four potent room deodorizers. “We suspected it was the deodorizers,” she says, noting how the strong odor remained, even after they threw them away.

“We thought removing furniture and even washing the walls might help, but it didn’t. The smell and my symptoms wouldn’t go away,” Alison says. She couldn’t imagine how a simple, scented item could make her so sick.

What’s that smell?

You can’t watch TV today without catching commercials peddling fragranced products. In theory that’s not such a bad thing. After all, cultures throughout history perfumed their homes and persons, if only out of necessity given the state of their hygiene and sanitation systems. Think of the potpourris, sachets, and nosegays so much in favor not all that long ago. Perhaps we all have an innate desire to smell like a breath of spring, and what harm could there be in that?

Well, none until you industrialize the process. Before the early 20th century, the fragrances in high demand were derived directly from plants or animals, but after World War II, companies turned to petrochemicals as the source of manufactured scents and expanded the uses of fragrances exponentially. Natural fragrance preparations still exist, of course, but synthetic scents have taken over the marketplace, with sales topping $18 billion annually.

With our spritzed, sprayed, and slathered-on 21st century barely underway, virtually every conventional cleaning and body care product on the market contains chemically manufactured fragrances.

Obvious products include perfumes, deodorants, soaps, shampoos, laundry detergents, candles, and cleaning products. The not-so-obvious range from shirts to sports drinks. And new products keep coming. Japanese filmgoers get a nose full of fragrance while watching movies, as special machines pump out scents synchronized to certain scenes. And several companies recently announced plans to chemically scent the packaging for products: Cookie boxes, fruit containers, and drink caps will soon emit synthetic scents. And last year, more than one thousand new air fresheners appeared on US stores shelves. This phenomenon means more exposure for everyone. Unfortunately, most of the companies behind these marketing schemes never consider the dangers lurking in their fragranced products, and we consumers have little choice about whether or not we’ll be exposed to them—short of never venturing into a supermarket or department store again.

Mystery ingredients

Alison was curious about which chemicals in the air fresheners had made her so sick. “I went to Target and looked at the packaging,” she explains. “But no ingredients were listed.”

Only after searching the Internet did she learn that products containing synthetic fragrances are not regulated by any government agency. Fragrance formulas are considered “trade secrets,” a designation that gives companies the legal right not to disclose product ingredients, even to the FDA.