Moderator removed post
What the wife’s scented plugin did to the floating shelf
Removed: Rule 6working at bath and body works, we had many bottoms of plastic jars ruined by wallflowers because some would leak and melt down the plastic
That place gives me a headache. Can't imagine working there.
I get a really bad rash every time I use their products, which someone inevitably buys for me every Christmas. I appreciate the sentiment, but I also feel like you're telling me I stink. This year it was my brother, so there's a good chance he is telling me I stink.
I hope this helps, but I only ever buy nice smelling things for people who already smell good. They obviously have a vested interest in smelling nice and this smell reminded me of them so I get it.
Maybe they think you smell great and want to help you build on your library of good smells
Or maybe they don't think anything about you at ALL so they just go with something generic and usable by pretty much anyone... Like smelly good stuffs . Just their way of saying "i care for you, but not that much. Not enough to find out what specifically you're into."
God the candle, socks, lotion combo is unreal. Which is hilarious because the things I like and collect are way cheaper so if they knew me they could save so much money
I wish people would get me socks. I love fresh socks but im always too cheap to buy new ones until my current socks have holes in them. Instead people always get me whatever random alcohol they think I'd like. Which is particularly funny to me, since I haven't actually drank alcohol in a few years. Just don't enjoy it, yet every year I add something new to the liquor cabinet.
Lol, it's not that you collect it, it just accumulates on it's own and you never dispose of it. I am always gifted wine. I regift the wine though rather than letting it gather since I don't drink it either.
Often time I have trouble buying for people who don't seem to have any interests at all. They don't have any hobbies other than watching TV. Or they have already bought everything they need for their hobbies and they really don't really need anything that isn't a high price item.
I know people turn their nose at gift cards sometimes but a restaurant gift card or a grocery store gift card is honestly way more useful for people like this than the generic stuff
I also call all the various scented accoutrements available at the store "smelly good stuffs"! I've never heard anyone else say that in my vicinity in my life. I feel so seen right now... You really are a "random heroine"! Lol
I need people to generalise me this way for gifts. No more chocolate, more shampoo+conditioner+soap gift bags. That shit is SO expensive.
I've heard that soaps and stuff are just a default gift you get people you don't know the interests of super well, since almost anyone can appreciate the practicality of nice soap. So I think the insulting part is less your scent and more the fact that your own brother doesn't know you well enough to get you something you might actually like.
haha stinky
Everybody says that my brother stinks, like a piece of yellow cheese.
But hey, I say that he's OK, as long as there's a breeze!
You stink
🅿️🫵🏽
Some do it bc the packaging is nice! Im sure you don’t smell :)
You're overthinking it. If you actually stank you'd get a bar of soap or really low tier bodywash to really hammer home the point.
I honestly can't even go inside those places. I don't have any known allergies to scented products, but the smell is so overwhelming that I legitimately can't breathe. Someone took me into one once and I had to leave almost immediately because of that. There's one in a mall I went to and I had to walk the long way around it because it just STANK so strongly.
I actually like some of Lush’s products but I absolutely never go into the store because of how obnoxiously pushy they are with sales. Like you aren’t allowed to look around and think because they don’t give you an inch of space.
I am very sensitive to perfume scents, so I generally move 2-3 meters to the side when I pass one of those stores, it gets worse when they insist of putting one on each side of the pathway.
They always smell like something exploded in there
Almost as bad as lush.
I delivered packages over the holidays at UPS and the only times my package car smelled good (and not the general smell of cardboard) was when I had a lush package on one of my shelves.
Just one package.
I couldn't even imagine unloading a trailer of those packages or working in their warehouse to ship things out.
I can’t even walk past lush. It’s nauseating.
I can’t understand how people can spend any time in there. It’s like it doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere.
You get used to it to be honest.
I didn't work for lush, but I did work in another fragrance industry for a while.
For the first month of working there I'd get constant headaches and felt sick because of the smell, but after a while it stopped bothering me and I didn't really smell it anymore.
Lush doesn’t make me sick though. I think because it’s all natural or some crap 🧐😅
Yeah, it’s those perfume-y smells that get me. Lush is nice. Department store perfume section? Avoid. Whole Foods soap section? A place of wonder. Oddly, L’occitane is fine to walk into but a roll of the dice on whether the products give me a headache.
I had once a trial shift at Lush, had to wash my hands every 5 minutes because glitter was everywhere and at the end of the two hour shift got migraine. Felt so revealed when they told me I didn’t get the job.
Sounds like you’re sensitive to… a lot in Lush, which is understandable. I worked there. Went nose blind pretty fast. Never had a migraine. Worked there 2 years. Absolutely loved it.
Bath and body works, however, made me feel exactly the way Lush made YOU feel. I think the natural scents are overwhelming but still so much better than whatever they use at bath and body works, they make me wanna vomit after being in there for 2 seconds and I’m not even that sensitive to scents. Idk what they use there but it’s gotta be poisonous.
Yeah, I am a bit sensitive to strong smells, and also have migraines often, so definitely not a good combo for working in Lush - I should have guessed what could happen, but I needed a job at that point so I applied anyway.
Ever been into a Lush? You can smell that place 4 stores away.
I’m gonna say that shit is probably not good for your lungs
Wife set one down on our wood table about a week after we purchased the table, it stripped the seal coat and completely removed the stain, bleached the wood : / That liquid will strip paint too.
i had one leak on a wooden dresser and ruined it. did the same thing you mentioned. there's a random spot on it about the size of a hand where the seal and stain were removed. it was a dresser that belonged to my late grandma. i had already kinda fucked up the top drawer anyway so it wasn't in pristine condition but still :(
have asthma and allergies, can confidently say all those indoor scent sprays, candles, and wall plugins were invented by Satan himself
Many odorants are irritants to eyes and lungs.
I had one of the car visor ones leak onto the leather seats of my car and leave a permanent mark.
I guess that's not one of the perks of being a wallflower.
Wonder what it does to your lungs
Used to work at Bath and Body Works. Their wallflowers stripped the wood floors when they spilled and would take nail polish off instantly.
One time my washer was unbalanced, but I wasn't home because I put the laundry in before work. It shook so hard the detergent fell off the shelf and the cap broke. Leaked a brand new bottle, the biggest one, on my hardwood floors from 1930. A river about three feet wide, all the way through the laundry room, dining room, and living room, about 40 feet long. Stripped all the way to bare wood. Had a couple companies come out and say they would never be able to match the finish, the whole thing had to be redone. And to think, before I wiped it up, I was just upset that I was out the cost of the brand new detergent.
As someone who has just renovated their hardwood floors from 1930, reading this was almost physically painful.
Sheesh that is wild. Got any pics?? such a mess lol
If I do they are developed film pictures buried in the attic. I didn't have any kind of digital back then.
Apparently everyone who worked there noticed this haha. Second comment saying this
I think it's funny that both of the comments just called them 'wallflowers' like everyone knows what Bath and Body Works decided to call their plug in air fresheners
Well, if you look at the picture you’ll see that it’s actually a flower, plugged into the wall. It may only be its descriptive name
I'd call it a plug in air freshener with some flowers glued on it
Your description made me picture something like this which i would call 'a bad idea'
Thanks I was confused as to why wallflowers would have oil in them.
Yes, I had one spill on my kitchen table and strip the finish. I was so mad. For some reason kept using them and just figured it was my fault. Had one in my bathroom plugged in below something like OP posted and realized whatever was aerosolizing from it bubbled and stripped the tarnish. I stopped using them after that.
Christ. Well, glad people aerosolize that in their homes. Definitely good to breathe, I’m sure.
Most scented candles and air fresheners are actually cancerous.
People may claim that levels of carcinogens and other toxic chemicals may be fairly low in each product, but people have to realize that they are being bombarded by carcinogens and endocrine disruptors from a wide variety of products that are likely used daily.
don’t see candles mentioned in that article
I mean technically burning anything releases particulates that can contribute to cancer. But calling candles cancerous is a real stretch.
Life is cancerous by that logic.
I mean, it basically is. People are like oh these air fresheners in your home are bad for you! But like. Okay? I live in a city. The outside air isn’t much better. If I’m gonna potentially get cancer either way, I’d rather get it from something that smells good than the smell of skunk, exhaust from the idling cars in the parking lot or cigarette smoke from the neighbors smoking on their balcony. 🙄 like 80% of shit you buy will have the California cancer warning on it. We’re all doomed regardless so why worry about minuscule things that bring joy
I agree.
Hell cooking food over charcoal is “cancerous”
Wtf is a wallflower?
Product from bath and body works that plugs into a wall and vaporizes scented oils. Basically their version of a glade plug in.
Wall plug-ins, I presume. Dunno why you're being downvoted.
So there’s acetone in them?
An ethynol based preservative that is able to mix with the oil/alcohol based fragrance—so, similar
Well that HAS to be healthy 😉
I’ve seen a guitar finish destroyed by one of those things. I’d rather not have that stuff get in my lungs.
You know when people ask, ‘What’s something that we’re going to look back on in 50 years as the new cigarettes?’
I strongly believe these kinds of air fresheners will definitely be on that list.
User deleted comment
3mo
There's a limit to how much offgassing an object can do. It doesn't have infinite gases stored in it. Leave it in an open area for a week before using it, and ventilate your room occasionally after that, and you should be fine.
The offgassing comes from flame retardants breaking down.
And they will break down for years after being manufactured.
As someone else said, no, many things can offgas for years, depending on the situation
Wait, I’m wasting money on cigarettes when I can smoke air fresheners?
Do you even vape lilacs and summer breeze bro.
The science already says that regarding their VOC release imo enclosed areas.
It's the organic stuff in it, it's not harmful for the reason that it damages plastic etc, but it is potentially carcinogenic.
It’s ok, you’re not a guitar
This is my favourite response to the "You know coke melts nails right?"
Good thing I'm not nails.
It does???
Wait until you find out what can dissolve in stomach acid
Well yeah but stomach acid hurts when it comes up (heartburn) but coke doesn’t so I guess I didn’t realize how acidic it is
Fun fact, sour Warhead candies have a pH of 1.6 which is comparable to acidic rust removers. Since the taste of sour is really just detection of acidity, some sour candies have a shockingly low pH which is why your mouth feels weird if you have too many. Literally acid burns
You can dissolve oxycontin in coke to break the time release mechanism
Talk about a throwback. I was in college when they made the new time release ones (old time release ones you just had to wipe the coating off and crush it) and nobody could figure out what to make of those suckers.
What I wouldn't give to be a 20-something in 2005
Coke contains phosphoric acid, pH of 2.8. You can also use it to clean the corrosion off your car battery terminals.
If you have an ostomy or other gut re-route or stricture, you can use it to dissolve a stuck food bolus.
(Doc Hollywood was correct)
Never got how people accept things like this or febreeze it’s so nasty
Isn’t febreeze just scent and fabric softener?
Fabreeze active ingredient is cyclodextrin. It is an incredibly small chemical that sticks to everything. It will bind to the stuff you're able to smell and then also whatever it touches like the wall or floor or ceiling. It's kinda like microscopic super glue. You can use it to bind LSD or other drugs to blotter paper.
yep its the Aldehydes / Phenols / Ethanols, they will damage / dissolve plastic.
They're known carcinogens too so I wouldn't use them. Buy some flowers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9163252/
https://www.healthline.com/health/perfume-poisoning#toxic-ingredients
The mental health counseling place I go to has these things plugged in every room (some 2 in a room...) because the building smells.
I dont know which is worse the smell of a moldy building or cancer?
Cancer. Cancer is worse.
Well now you're breathing mold disguised as vanilla springbreeze
Breathing mold is never healthy, but it can be extremely bad for your health as well.
That's the neat part, the air thingy doesn't prevent you from breathing the mold, just covers the scent, so you get cancer and have mold in your lungs!
Two for one!
and they're out there in the millions sucking some amps off the electricity grid. we make such great use of our resources!
It's a good thing they're getting both then right?
You’re still breathing in the mold you just breathe it in with a side of carcinogens
Smelly shit won't prevent you from inhaling mold either. Sounds like the worst of both worlds.
Ah but Mouldy building also causes cancer, so if you’re gonna die of cancer, at least it’ll smell better
Source? I mean, I've only been working for a company where we investigate, sample and analyze indoor air samples for mold for...16 years now and I've never heard of mold being a carcinogen but if you have a source I'd be open to following up on it.
That's only if you're not already going to be dead in a year or two!
What does cancer smell like?
Some lady swore she could smell her husbands Parkinson's. Like he'd developed a new scent since his diagnosis.
They gave her 10 men's worn-for-a-day t-shirts to smell.
She picked out 6 that she thought smelled like Parkinson's patients. 5 were, one wasn't.
Except 6 months later the "wasn't" came back and was diagnosed with Parkinson's.
Probably normal healthy cells but noisier
Smells exactly like the scent of a new car.
Also, a lot of people, like myself, react strongly / negatively to strong aromas, especially artificial ones. There's no way I could focus on therapy with a bunch of those plugged in.
At my Autism assessment, they had something similar to this in the hallway, and I had to ask that it be turned off and the windows opened because I couldn't concentrate and was getting a headache from the small.
Where the are you people located. The sheer stupidity to have these at any type of place that does autism testing is just mind boggling 🤦🏽♀️
same here. My wife bought some with cat pheromones in them, supposed to calm them. We have some high anxiety cats. They left greasy streaks on the walls above them. I said I did not want to breathe that and we stopped using them.
they make collars that have pheromones in them. If your cats do have anxiety, try those.
Composure treats/liquid has worked amazingly for my cat.
It doesn’t make the mold go away, so you’re just getting bonus cancer
The correct answer is inhaling both. You just can't smell the mold.
The mould is already harmful to breathe in, adding cancerous air fresheners is only going to make the air more toxic.
They are both not good for you. Mold will mess you up quicker tho
User deleted comment
3mo
Natural odors are also made of aldehydes, phenols, and alcohols (ethanol is a specific alcohol, the one that gets you drunk), but also guaiacols, terpenes, acetates, and all the other corners of organic chemistry. Those flowers will release hundreds of them.
Aldehydes include citronellal (citronella oil, naturally), citral (just about any plant that smells like citrus, including citrus), and isodihydrolavandulal (appropriately nicknamed "lavender aldehyde"). Examples of phenols are thymol (thyme) and amyl vinyl carbinol (lavender but most characteristically mushrooms). Alcohols include cinnamic alcohol (cinnamon), phenyl ethyl alcohol (countless flowers), and benzyl alcohol (lots of food, smells like almonds).
I'm not saying there aren't problematic ingredients used in hygiene and other functional products, but claims need to be reasonably specific.
yeah these threads always get a little anti scientific fast because people don't know the natural chemicals in things like flowers and fruit are also grouped into these categories but are done so by their chemical names not what plant they came from (unless the chemical was named after the plant it was most common in which is actually pretty often like chrysantheum family used to be known as the pyrethrin family which is were we get that insectide chemical family... pyrethrins and why there is so many organic versions of it, its a flower extracted terpene that just so happens is extremely toxic to insects because if you were a flower in africa in the locusts path you would also want to make an extremely effective insecticide naturally), not artificially made but just botanically extracted from a natural source and refined from a crude extract into a purified one of whatever you were trying to grab from it. The oils they are worrying in products about are not only the same as in flowers they were probably made from the same plants too or still a biological alternative. Essential oils are just volatile so when concentrated they off gas to the point of being pungent, separate the essential oils into its constiuent parts and now you have some of the building blocks for any flavor or smell you could want. What a lot of people here don't realize is we use oil based paints because you can clean those surfaces with water based cleaners without damaging them, vapors from volatile non-polar substances will however mix right back into the pain given time and cause warping.
Really its like the medicine vs poison saying over the difference is dose and intent, the terpenes and oils are not whats bad its the concentration we are using them in, even sunlight is cancer causing if you get too much, so I always feel that gets lost in the conversation that carcinogens are naturalmand very common in our every day lives and you will ingest some carcinogens living a perfectly healthy lifestyle and diet because the things that are healthy will still have some stuff in it naturally that can damage cellurlar components but thats just life.
I had a Febreze clip on car freshener do the same thing when it leaked on my dashboard.
I honestly didn’t know this.
My mom is crazy with those plug-ins and candles. They always gave me a headache.
Make her stop! Read the evidence, they are literally cancer causing
Bout an indoor air quality monitor. Those scented plug ins made my VOC levels go nuts.
I mean the scented plugins probably use something like ethanol or isopropyl alcohol as a solvent. That gets vaporized and would get picked up by your detector.
Ethanol is literally the alcohol you drink and is a known carcinogen. It also dissolves/weakens plastic and people still consume it. Everything depends on dosage and the dose you are getting from a scented plug in should be extremely low.
Also both the articles/reviews you linked aren’t even talking about wall plug ins. They’re talking about perfume and cologne.
Theyd be really mad if they could read
Too bad you don’t recognize the ingredients in food! Artificial flavors are using phenols to smell like food.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23072531/
https://jasbsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40104-021-00565-3
https://tacanow.org/family-resources/phenols-salicylates-and-additives/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278691522003325
User deleted comment
3mo
Idk but air fresherners and such always give me asthma attacks.
Ethanol (the alcohol everyone drinks) will do stuff like this. Just because a chemical harms plastics doesn’t mean it’s super dangerous to the human body.
Edited because my dumbass didn't read
Is this stuff in candles? Not burning them, but placing one on a coffee/candle warmer?
Wife didn't read the instructions. You're not supposed to have those close to anything at all.
not even humanoids.
User deleted comment
3mo
RIP u/Leodan15 🙏🏻
Throw it in the trash or die from cancer
Feel free to DM me about your favorite hobbies and your family so I can include it all in your imminent eulogy 🙏
Especially not pets
Ideally they are outside the environment.
User deleted comment
3mo
Yeah you’re not supposed to put them behind furniture or under anything, and this is why.
Looks like something from the Upside Down trying to break into our dimension.
I was going to say the cordyceps fungus from "The Last of Us", but that works too.
User deleted comment
3mo
It ruined that 10% genuine wood
Genuine woodgrain
I have a catgenie automatic cat little machine. It uses a concentrated cleaner in proprietary containers. One of the containers leaked just a little in my cabinet on the melamine covered particleboard. We cleaned up the cleaner and a month later the particleboard swelled and looked like a volcano on the top and bottom of the shelf.
Somehow, the catgenie cleaner soaked through the melamine and swelled the particleboard like I've never seen before.
scentsless destruction
Imagine what it's doing to your lungs.
It’s just ethanol or isopropyl alcohol. It’s not doing anything to your lungs.
If dihydrogen monoxide can rust these pipes, imagine what it's doing to your insides!
this thread is freaking me out. are these really not safe to have plugged in?
It's probably not going to harm you, a big human, but be careful if you have small pets! The chemicals can do a number on their little lungs. I've heard of cats getting real sick from this.
Birds are also very suseptible to bad things in the air, being even smaller than cats, and having smaller lungs.
I have heard that if you have birds in your house you should not use non-stick [ans because they out-gas something when you cook with them.
The amount that is out-gassed is not enough to bother humans, but is enough to negatively affect birds.
I doubt that these plug-ins would be good for them either.
Simply put, it's so heavily diluted in the air that it's safe. This damage only happened because it was literally right on top of it, which you're not supposed to do.
There are a ton of essential oils diehards in here. They're greatly exaggerating the danger posed by these.
Kind of funny. While big homeopathy claims their product dose have an effect on the body, big Petro-chem is claiming their product do not.
Both lying of course.
I’m guessing now it makes no scents…
Looks like heat deformed some cheap laminate
And nothing of value was lost that day
Those things give me asthma attacks. I HATE glade plug ins. I have no idea what is inside them but that brand in particular makes it immediately impossible to breathe. Plenty of the other kinds do the same, too. I don’t know why people would fill their house with something like that. I genuinely fear the day I enter an Uber filled with that glade shit and I don’t have a rescue inhaler on me. Even after I use my inhaler, my throat burns for days being around the scented plug ins.
On second thought I change my mind on buying those.....
One was on top of our fridge and tipped over. Ate the enamel right off of it.
And people are BREATHING this garbage in!
This is a logical fallacy. Compare with how Coca Cola can dissolve rust, yet still people are DRINKING IT? Or people sous videing beef at 60 C (140 F if you are lazy and can't google it yourself) and people are SITTING IN THAT TEMPERATURE IN THE SAUNA (actually that's even cold for a sauna)??
Because it's not the same. That doesn't mean that breathing this in is healthy*, but saying that because something unrelated to how you consume something is happening means that it's unsafe to consume is false. If you want to convince people that something is unsafe it's better to use good logic and researched facts.
*Just to add, I don't use these types of things myself because I know that it's not so healthy for you. It's possible to disagree with the use of logical fallacies and still think something is unhealthy.
Well, your not supposed to rub it all over your skin. It's supposed to be heavily diluted in the air.
It’s bc it’s cheap laminate and the plug in is warm people.
Yeah they shouldn’t really be under things like shelves or cabinets
People are pointing out the chemicals in the plug in, but not the cheap shelf
slaps roof of this sub
You can fit so many non-scientific/scientific illiterate comments in here
We very nearly had a house fire on Friday due to a feliway plug in. Wife stacked some clothes by the wall which covered the plug in. Only by chance I went upstairs to find something and pulled the clothes back from the wall and smoke billowed out. If that had been going for another 10/15 mins it would of been a different story
That shelf sucks
isn't that because of the heat? why are ppl in the thread commenting like these things are leaking poison. aren't they just alcohol, or are they really not safe to have plugged in?
I absolutely hate those things
That stuff stained my walls and outlet. Never again bath and body works.
Now imagine what those shitty chemicals are doing to your brain, lungs, and liver.
Imagine what it’s doing to you!
all butt-plugs are 'scented plug-ins'
amirite?
A lot of people are blowing this out of proportion, you got a cheap particle board shelf and it got wet from the steam.
I'm not going to defend the plugin as "safe," but the plugin is a heat source that constantly releases vapor.
A small warm mist humidifier could do pretty similar damage.
Coffee makers (or toasters) can do this to low-end cabinets.
Its hot vapor and you put something directly in its path what do you expect to happen? This is like standing in the middle of the highway getting run over, then (in the after life) going, "see? Cars are dangerous"
To me this would be r/mildlyinfuriating
Close your lungs!
Ya thought it was real wood??
Might wanna fix that before shit starts coming through from the upside down.
It's okay if strangers think it's your scented plugin
It’s probably just the ethanol or isopropyl alcohol (drinking and rubbing alcohol) that was used as the solvent to dissolve the fragrances. They can weaken plastics and even strip paint.
This can happen with any air freshener tbh if they are too close to something of the liquid leaks. Pure essentia and fragrancel oils are not something to mess with before they have been diluted to skin safe levels.
Damn, who makes that plugin?
The Umbrella Corporation?
Yes but now hang it upright like you have here and it becomes artwork
Plugging a device with oil in it that goes unsupervised for weeks seems like a bad idea.
Heat and humidity have that effect.
Hi, u/electrowiz64, thank you for your submission in r/mildlyinteresting!
Unfortunately, your post has been removed because it violates our rule on concise, descriptive titles.
Still confused? For more elaboration and examples, see here .
Normally we do not allow reposts, but if it's been less than one hour after your post was submitted, or if it's received less than 100 upvotes, you may resubmit your content with a better title and try again.
You can find more information about our rules on the mildlyinteresting wiki.
If you feel this was incorrectly removed, please message the mods.