this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
93 points (98.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35781 readers
1122 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

top 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works 82 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 days ago

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

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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

[–] MeatCat@dubvee.org 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That makes sense. I guess more people than me are also sick of lemon since the orange scents are always out of stock.

[–] MagnyusG@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] dmention7@lemm.ee 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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!

[–] AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

This stuff is truly fascinating as well as mystifying.

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 2 points 2 days ago

Is this why green sweets are usually lime flavoured when they should all be apple flavoured?

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 38 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] viralJ@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] Ardyssian@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

I like the Lemon scent - it typically lasts the longest for the liquid I use

[–] sirico@feddit.uk 21 points 3 days ago

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

[–] EleventhHour@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Scubus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

No idea if this is true but that is awesome and explains so much.

[–] joshcodes@programming.dev 10 points 2 days ago

Eucalypt scented products are very common in Australia so we tend to get those a lot. Thankfully I love the smell of Eucalypt

[–] Lightsong@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Because when life give you a lemon...

[–] Coreidan@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

At least it isnt flower scented.

[–] Marighost@lemm.ee 9 points 2 days ago

The artificial lavender smell they put on those scented trash bags gives me migraines :/

[–] EtherWhack@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

And I thought I was the only one who hates the smell of the purple Fabuloso

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] n3m37h@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 days ago

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 think part of it is disguising that harsh acid smell

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee -4 points 3 days ago

Probably some holdover from when citrus was seen as a high class rich person thing. Or its cheap. Who knows