Scent

Ask anyone who has slept in enough hotel rooms what real luxury smells of. The honest ones say nothing at all.

Cool air, linen washed in plain water, a room that leaves your nose alone and lets you notice the view instead. It is the most expensive thing on that floor and it costs the house nothing but an open window.

I should say where I stand, because I am not against beautiful smells. I love them. A real essential oil, pressed from a plant with a name and a country, is a small marvel, and plenty of honest brands scent their products exactly that way.

What I keep out of the house is one word.

The word near the bottom

Turn a bottle over and read to the end of the ingredients. Somewhere near the bottom, in most cases, sits a single word: fragrance, or parfum. That word is a heading. Underneath it a maker can put dozens of separate chemicals without naming one.

The law says so on both sides of the Atlantic. American law treats a scent formula as a trade secret, under a packaging act written in 1966, so the one word counts as a complete ingredient list. Europe allows parfum in the same way, with one useful exception. Known fragrance allergens have to be named individually, and that list is being widened by another 56 substances, due on labels by 2028. California went further in 2020 and now asks companies to report designated fragrance ingredients to the state.

Everywhere else, the word stands on its own.

Somebody measured

In 2018 a team at the University of Melbourne bought 42 fragranced baby products, the shampoos and lotions and creams and oils, half of them sold as green, organic or all-natural. Then they measured what each one released into the air. Between them the 42 gave off 684 volatile compounds. Of those, 5% appeared anywhere on a label, a safety sheet or a website.

The green versions released much the same compounds as the ordinary ones, which tells you how little work the word on the front was doing.

The same research group asked the American public a different question, and the answer is the cheerful part. More than half said they would rather their workplace, their hotel and their aeroplane were fragrance-free.

Unscented and fragrance-free

These two look like synonyms on a shelf. They do quite different jobs.

Unscented means the product is meant not to smell of much, and the usual way to manage that is to lay a masking scent over whatever the raw ingredients smelled of by themselves. Fragrance-free means nothing was added for smell at all.

Neither word is defined in law, in America or in Europe, so the front of the bottle is a promise rather than a rule. The check takes three seconds. Turn it over, read to the end, and see whether fragrance, parfum or aroma is sitting down there.

The guesthouse in Spain

We once left a guesthouse over a smell, and it was a nice one. A plug-in freshener in every room, sweet and warm and absolutely everywhere. When I said it was not the best thing for small children to be breathing, the owner was genuinely offended, as though I had criticised her cooking.

She was being hospitable. That is exactly what the plug-in is sold as, and she had bought the promise the same way the rest of us do.

A freshener has no way to take a smell out of a room. It can only put a stronger one on top and hold it there while the windows stay shut. Ten minutes of through-draught does the thing the plug-in is imitating, and does it properly. It is the same fix as for the stale air in a closed room.

Where to start

Nothing here needs buying, until the last line.

• Open two windows on opposite sides of the house for ten minutes. Morning and evening, summer and winter. A cross-draught changes the whole volume of air in a room faster than anything you can plug into a wall.
• Take out the fresheners and see what the room smells of on its own. Usually it is nothing, and that is the answer. If a smell does turn up, you have found something worth dealing with rather than covering: a damp cupboard, a bin, a drain that wants a kettle of hot water.
• Finish what you own. Nothing needs throwing away today. Use up the bottle, and let the next one be the different one. That is how a shelf changes without a shopping list.
• Give the laundry the biggest win. Detergent and softener stay in the fabric, and the pillowcase spends seven hours against your face. An unperfumed detergent and no softener is one change that reaches every textile in the house.
• Read the back of anything that stays on the skin. Creams, oils, deodorant, sunscreen. Rinse-off things can relax a little; what sits on you all day deserves the three-second check.
• Scent the room on purpose, when you want it. A bowl of citrus, coffee on the stove, rosemary or a cinnamon stick simmered in a pan of water, a cut branch of pine in December, one drop of a good oil on a cloth. It arrives, it does its work, it goes.
• Then, when something runs out, replace it with the plain version. The creams, cleansers and deodorants I use are in the Vanity directory, and the fragrance-free ones are marked as such.

A week later

The nose recalibrates, and quickly. After a week or two in an unperfumed house you walk into a lift and notice how much is going on in there. Cut grass, rain on a pavement, bread, a person: all of it comes back up in volume, because nothing is standing in front of it.

This is the third principle of the Vanity, that what stays on the body has to be simple, and it is the reason so much of that shelf is unperfumed.

So I take my creams and cleaners with no smell whatsoever. And then, when a room deserves a scent, I hand it one myself: a single beautiful oil, or a bowl of oranges going soft on the windowsill.