Is it a universally agreed-upon “fresh” smell? Cultural? Or is lemon fragrance just cheap to manufacture and use in products? Something else?
I don’t hate it, but I also don’t care for it, either. Now I’m curious why so many cleaning products use that smell.
Lemon and orange are the easiest scents to achieve from a chemistry standpoint. It probably complements the base smell of a product easier.
Fun fact A professor once told us that a molecule’s chirality can make a diffeence. For example Limonene can either smell like pine or oranges depending on what way the molecule is mirrored.
Citric acid can be used as a cleaner and fruit used to be an important ingredient for cleaning agents.
They switched from fruits to fungus because it’s cheaper, and added the smell consumers were used.
So even generations later, it’ll smell like citrus because that’s what everyone is still used to
That makes sense. I guess more people than me are also sick of lemon since the orange scents are always out of stock.
It depends, a lot of the time, most cleaning products have that shitty “lemon” smell that fucking sucks, where it’s obviously only masking a more unpleasant smell even if the unpleasant smell is just the actual cleaning product. That usually means it’s even worse when there really is a foul odor present, cause then it smells like shit and lemon.
For example Limonene can either smell like pine or oranges depending on what way the molecule is mirrored.
And would you look at that, pine is another extremely common cleaning scent
This stuff is truly fascinating as well as mystifying.
Limonene can either smell like pine or oranges depending on what way the molecule is mirrored.
Damn, that’s interesting. My first thought on hearing that was wondering if pine scented cleaning products are a thing because it’s cheaper to synthesize limonene in both chiralities and then separate after the fact than it is to just synthesize the orange-smelling version.
It doesn’t really hold up to much scrutiny, but it would be pretty damn cool if that fact explained both OP’s question, as well as explained pine-scented cleaning products!
Is this why green sweets are usually lime flavoured when they should all be apple flavoured?
Lemon is, itself, an effective cleaning product. You can use acid to clean a lot of surfaces and lemons, with their low sugar content, make an excellent natural source of acid for cleaning. You’d be surprised what kinds of stains you can get out with nothing more than half a lemon and elbow grease.
Limonene is a pretty good solvent and as it’s naturally occurring about 90% of the oils in citrus peels. I would imagine there’s a good connection between Orange juice manufacturing and cleaning products
Aside from what others have mentioned about the easy chemistry of it, decades of market research, have determined that people associate the lemony smell with “clean“, so it’s what they expect.
Before the rampant scenting of everything, most cleaning products just smell like ammonia or bleach or vinegar. So, when companies decided to cover that smell with something more pleasant, it also had to smell as astringent as other cleaning chemicals. That’s probably where the association comes from.
You can go a step further. Lemon is a cleaning agent and was used in households mixed with vinager and baking soda to scrub and clean. So people associated the lemon smell with a cleaned house. It was only natural to use lemon scents in industrialized products. Same reason lavender is also popular. Lavender flowers are incredibly easy to extract the smell and were a common homemade aroma. So it was the first smell industrialized for ambient scenters and cleaners.
No idea if this is true but that is awesome and explains so much.
Eucalypt scented products are very common in Australia so we tend to get those a lot. Thankfully I love the smell of Eucalypt
At least it isnt flower scented.
The artificial lavender smell they put on those scented trash bags gives me migraines :/
And I thought I was the only one who hates the smell of the purple Fabuloso
Probably because this easy/cheap to manufacture and lemons are used for cleaning things because if the acid so is used to trick people. Plus it is considered a plesant scent.
Take all this with a brick of salt
I don’t know whether that’s one of the reasons, but limonene, which is one of the scent compounds in lemon, also happens to be a good organic solvent. We routinely use it for some lab procedures, and not because it smells nice.
I think part of it is disguising that harsh acid smell
Because when life give you a lemon…
I like the Lemon scent - it typically lasts the longest for the liquid I use
Well, you could make a cleaning product that smells like durian or surströmming to see how well it sells. I have a sneaking suspicion that the lemon variant of the same product will be more popular.
Probably some holdover from when citrus was seen as a high class rich person thing. Or its cheap. Who knows
