scented dryer sheets and chemical perfumes are a big problem for some of us - please stop using them!!

Date:   5/14/2010 2:04:22 PM ( 14 y ago)

Scented Senselessness

Artificial scents are created from chemicals and are used in myriad consumer products.

Scented "dryer sheets" and detergents, scented deodorants, and of course artificial perfumes, are the absolute bain of some people's lives. It is really necessary to cause those one-in-a-hundred "chemically sensitive" folks so much agony?

In fact, I think I could make a human rights case against both the people who use such products, and especially against the manufacturers of those products. How is it possibly justified to create, sell, or profit from something that so obviously causes illness and distress to at least 1% of our population? And perhaps many more? - some estimates say that up to 10% of us are chemically sensitive, and that there is a carcinogenity in these artificial scents that is affecting everyone in the longer time frame.

Regulatory bodies of government should be tackling this problem but like with so many other insults and dangers inherant in certain products there seems to be a conspiracy between the manufacturers and the regulators to keep quite on the issue.

Alternatively, the scent of orange peels or lilac flowers is available on planet earth. There are 1000s upon 1000s of natural, harmless sources of scents here. Unfortunately, it costs more to harvest natural scents, and so the chemically derived scents are favoured by the corporations producing scented products. There is no small degree of insanity and economic sillyness in all this, as is often the case with a capitalist economy - we have many unemployed people who would gladly work to gather natural scents for use in consumer goods; even disabled people could find a niche to work at in this pursuit of natural scents, but the cost of their labour would be too great to compete with chemical scents [if only we could do away with currency, eh?]

And so it is that everywhere we go where there are people or clothes dryers, we are exposed to chemical scents. I, for one, get a headache and I feel nauseous and even a little bit weak if the exposure goes on for long. Some of the more severe cases of chemical sensitivity will experience much worse than that. Long term effects include cancer.

Rather than demanding that our governments regulate these products, how about we just stop using them? Be bold - politely request of people wearing perfumes and using scented dryer sheets to "please do not do that to me". It is our right to ask this of them because, after all, they are causing chemically sensitive people a lot MORE problems than "just not using something" [and there are unscented dryer sheets out there].

 

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URL:   http://www.curezone.org/blogs/fm.asp?i=1622404

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