Baked Goods

NASA is worried that SpaceX execs are threatening their safety reputation by engaging in a culture of recreational drug use, meanwhile Ford scientists are the ones trying to turn your car into an autonomous easy bake oven.

In an effort to satisfy its Chinese customer base, Ford has presciently researched basic components of a car that can smell itself and bake its own VOCs right out of it, if you're into that sort of thing.

That is to say, if you're not into "new car smell." If you ever thought a deep whiff of evaporated plastic was gross, you're not alone. It's hurting sales in China, where many customers in China find it repulsive.

Before we get to the great idea that Ford came up with to get rid of new-car-smell (while they were apparently evaporating some VOCs of their own) we have to talk about this modern marvel for just a moment.

Smell of the New

The smell of new things is an interesting category in itself. What does a "new thing" smell like? Babies have a pretty strong reputation for smelling good, on their heads at least. When food comes out of the oven, is this a "new" smell? How about when you come out of the shower?

When your car comes off the factory line, it has "new" baked right into it. But your car didn't just come out of the oven, or out of the shower, so where does this smell come from? Let's pretend, for dialectical purposes, that the trifecta of new car smell is leather, fabric and plastic.

Leather - You may think that because leather is animal skin, that the smell we associate with this descriptor is from dried skin. Not even close. The smell of animal-anything in leather is long gone before we get our hands on it. In fact, the chemicals used to treat and preserve animal skin are themselves so offputting that leather is impregnated with extra fragrance to counteract it. This overall recipe is what we call Leather, and it's added to things that aren't even leather to make us think they are.

Fabric - I am willing to bet that the smell you call "fabric" has little to do with the fabric itself. If an olfactory image was imparted to your mind as you read "the smell of fabric," it was caused by laundry detergent, which probably smells like musk (because these molecules work well with both fabric and detergent)*. If we can get more specific and refer to your impression of the fabric in a new car, then I will predict that what you're imagining is actually adhesives. Adhesives are made with strong solvents that emit a pretty intense odor, but they are required to attach fabric interiors. In the same way that some people love the smell of gasoline, magic markers and spray paint, despite their deleterious health effects, it is entirely possible that consumers can come to love this "new" smell also.

Plastic - If I say to you "brand new plastic," you're limbic system may not perk up with anticipation and nostalgia. But if I say brand new cassette tape, or new CD, or new toy, this is a different story (depending on how old you are, of course). All of these things smell great, and different, and they're all designed around the smell of plastic that is central to the product, but impossible to remove. In the case of a cassette tape, there was no intent to augment that blast of plastic air that snaps into space as it opens for the first time.** It has now become commonplace however, that the inherent smell of plastic in our products are camouflaged by masking agents, creating something else entirely.

This leads to the core of the issue - the smell of newness in your car is not a natural by-product of the material istelf. It is designed, just like every other part of it. The new car, in its un-masked odor state, does not smell "good" or "new." It smells like hot plastic and glue.

China and Olfactory Identity

What's up China, you don't like hot plastic and glue? This comes as a surprise to many Americans who love this petrochemical harbinger of exclusivity and reward. Is it because the Chinese work in the factories that make these products, so the smell reminds them of work, not luxury? Or better yet, because they are so familiar with the base smells that they can still detect them under their olfactory camouflage? Probably not, as the folks buying new cars are not the same class of people making them. Not to mention, in America, the manufacturers and consumers were the same people, and they liked it.

Querying the olfactory preferences of a culture is not easy. The variables involved are myriad and dynamic, just as the flux of people that make it up. Here's a quick one that just came to mind - Coconut.

In America just about any personal hygiene product you can think of now comes in coconut flavor. Your shampoo, lotion, body scrub, conditioner, lip balm, lip gloss and nail polish remover jk. It's also in every food imaginable, including your gum, your cooking oil, granola bars, breakfast cereal, cookies, ice cream...in fact Coconut has dominated the American market so fully, there's probably coconut flavored pasta out there. You get the idea.

Right about the same time I was living with a sociopathic naturopath, hence my nose swimming in coconut flavored everything all day, La Croix jumped on the tropical jeepney, as it were. Now, St. Croix isn't known for it's delicious, mouth-watering flavors. It's perhaps better known for being good at negative flavor, that is, adding flavor to a thing to make it taste even less like nothing than it did before. Anyway, I tried this "flavor" around the same time my entire apartment was filled with volatile organic coconuts. It didn't taste like a drink to me; it tasted like body lotion. This is simple association, and the risk that any culture runs as they adopt a new olfactory identity.

McDonald's doesn't have the same menu or the same recipes in New York as it does in Beijing. The inside of the restuarant doesn't smell the same and that is by design not by accident. So why should cars smell the same?

Ford on Drugs

This is where it gets crazy. In order to appease its vast customer base that detests the new smell of their cars, Ford has spent enough time on this to try and get a patent for it: on warm, sunny days, the car will drive itself to a safe location, roll down the windows and bake the shit out of itself. I will assume it does this repeatedly until it has no more "new" left. And only for customers who declare that they don't like new.

You may wonder why Ford doesn't try to get the hot plastic and glue out of the car in the first place. You may also wonder how an autonomous vehicle with a sub-directive to offgass itself didn't show up in any of the scifi you've been reading. Then again, it is understandable; why would they take all the "gas" out of their cars if not all of their customers want it out. Let the customer decide. And with autonomous cars a fertile crescent for innovation, there's probably way crazier ideas buzzing around their research department.

*It is true, the smell that we associate with fresh, clean linen is musk. It is so ubiquitous in laudry detergent, that it now has a stronger association with "fresh laundry" than it does to "musk," which is ironic because this smell comes from an animal's butt, and you wouldn't think that to carry a clean association.

**There is a pesticide used in my neighborhood that smells identical to a new cassette tape. I only notice it in the height of summer and don't know if it's really a pesticide, but that's my guess. Anyone having experience with this, please share.

Image source

Notes:

Chinese customers hate “new car smell,” so Ford files a patent to bake it out

Nov 2018, Ars Technica

Post Script:

Ozium is an odor neutralizing air spray popular with car interiors.

Secrets of That New-Car Smell: A rose by any other name would likely smell like, oh, gunmetal and maybe tennis balls.

Listen to this sommelier describe a bunch of different new cars’ smells.

Nov 2003, Sherri Daley for Car and Driver

"Boat shop; cavernous vintage boat hangar, mahogany or varnished rosewood, lovingly crafted, hand-rubbed. All natural, nothing artificial or manufactured" – 2003 Bentley Arnage

"Boom! Leather and beurre noisette. Rich without being overbearing" – 2001 Bentley Arnage

"Subtle, stiff smells of burnished metal and dry leather. A harder, more masculine smell, short bits of hide, gunmetal. This smell is straightforward, fast, and clean. The aroma is quickly perceived and erased" – 2003 Ferrari 360 Modena

"A mélange of basketball, football, and baseball leather. Bright, bold rubberized smells" – another 2003 Ferrari 360 Modena

“Like smelling the palm of a well-broken-in kidskin driving glove" – and another 2003 Ferrari 360 Modena, Spider

"Very unattractive smell of cleaner of some sort. No wood or leather" – a Lexus

"Very one-dimensional, nothing lying underneath. Clean, pleasant, sterile, a touch of plastic" – 2004 Acura TSX

"Very faint, almost an absence of aromas. No leather smell at all. Light plastic or cleaner."  – 2003 Acura 3.2TL

"Mixed aromas of leather, rubber mats, carpet, and plastic" – 2003 Ford Escape

all these descriptions come from the abovementioned Car and Driver article.

These retailers think “new car smell” is about having no smells at all, or rather not adding new smells to the original new car smell.(?!) They sell a product that neutralizes odors. 

I stand corrected; to them, new car smell is the smell of success:

“Enjoy the crisp scent of successful achievement with Chemical Guys New Car Smell Air Freshener & Odor Eliminator.”

Here's a few posts that may or may not be relevant.

Patent Lingo

On intellectual property and the smell of Play-Doh

Getting Old Stinks

On the smell of old people

Instant Grandpa

Make yourself smell like Grandpa in 3 easy steps

On the Science of Vintage Thrift Store Smells

Exactly what the title says it's about, but by Jolie Kerr the cleaning expert

Olfactory Comfort

WELL certification program for indoor environmental quality for buildings, for people who don't like that "new building" smell

Why You Probably Don’t Know What Musk Really Smells Like

Continue the digression on musk and clean laundry

The Decanting Process

Source.

This isn’t about the decanting process; it’s about a fatal nerve agent disguised in a bottle of perfume.

Perhaps you heard about the assassination that became a public health emergency in England this year. A foreign military wanted to teach someone a lesson, so they put a deadly chemical in a bottle and sent it to England, where it poisoned a man and his daughter. It’s still not known how they came in contact with it, but trace of the chemical was discovered at the two restaurants they visited that day.

It became a public health emergency because they didn’t know where the substance came from or where it went, only that these people got dosed with enough of it to incapacitate them in a very short time. This meant that anyone in the community could face the same fate, and in fact, many people could have been affected, or will be affected. A police officer investigating the incident was poisoned, for example.

Not long after this incident, another couple is struck. A man finds a bottle of perfume lying around and he gives it to his girlfriend. She sprays it on her wrists, gets a headache in 15 minutes, passes out in 30, and dies a few days later. And this happened after a week-long cleanup operation.

I am not sure how big this perfume bottle is, but I will assume it’s like a sample bottle for promotional purposes. You can get somewhere between 10 and 100 sprays out of that. This woman died one week after spraying herself once.

Nerve agents get into your system however they can, even through the surface of your skin (which is not made of plastic as you may think, but is more like paper in that it absorbs liquids which can then migrate into your bloodstream). When these things are used for assassination purposes they are designed at such a high concentration that they kill the target on the spot, or at least within a few days.

The way they do this is by disrupting the dance between Acetylcholine and Acetylcholinesterase that makes your muscles twitch and then relax. Whenever you do something, your brain sends a nerve signal to your muscles, acetycholine acts, and a muscle twitches. And then acetylcholinesterase reacts, and the muscle relaxes. Nerve agents stop the second part from happening; you’re all twitch, no relax.

Uncontrolled release of all bodily fluids including excessive salivation, drooling, tearing, runny nose, dilated pupils, and seizures lead to all of your muscles being prevented from relaxing. That leads to paralysis, especially of the diaphragm muscle. Once the lungs stop working, they fill with all that excess fluid, with suffocation being the final effect.

Victims who recover can be left with all kinds of neurological damage, like not being able to sleep, walk, talk, or think, and that’s not even addressing its other toxic effects on organs like the liver, for example.

This is the thing – we're not talking about people, individuals, being harmed here. An entire bottle of this substance (a few cubic centimeters at most) is enough to poison dozens and potentially hundreds of people. All it has to do is get into the right place.

So until we can guarantee that military grade chemical weapons aren’t being carelessly thrown into a garbage can near you, let’s be careful about what we find lying around.

Image source: https://www.fragrantica.com/news/Dear-Fragrantica-What-is-a-Decant-and-How-Can-I-Make-One--10021.html

Novichok Was in a Perfume Bottle, U.K. Victim Says

July 2018, NYTimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/world/europe/russia-uk-poison-charlie-rowley.html

Domestic Chemical Signature

1950 Commercial for Lysol

Considering the impact of the indoor chemistry cocktail

Feb 2018, phys.org

It comes as a surprise to me sometimes when I read that “no one really knows” about the most basic things. For example, I see a headline that says – Science Finally Understands Why Ribbons Curl (you know when you the back of a pair of scissors on decorative packaging ribbon and it curls?). How do we have a roaming robot on Mars and not know about things like this?

In the article above, science wonders what kind of chemical reactions are going on inside our homes.

The stuff we use to clean our homes, our clothes, and ourselves, as well as the stuff that gets in the air when we cook, as well as the general environmental pollutants around us, these are all chemicals that interact with each other, and we don’t know the full extent of these reactions.

Cigarette smoke reacts with gaseous nitrous acid in our homes (a waste product from cooking and heating, and a general environmental pollutant from car exhaust etc. ) which is then absorbed by wood furniture and the like. So yes, there is a particular smell for a house that’s been smoked in for twenty years vs. smoke itself.

Here’s another one – chlorine bleach, as a gas in the air, oxidizes stuff, which in combination with UV light forms radical molecules.

You don’t have to be a chemist to know that everyone’s home smells different. And that difference is made by all the chemicals we use in our daily lives. The thing is, if you were to try and pinpoint the source of that smell – the chemicals – you would fail. Chemistry is a thing in flux, it is always changing, and even Plato recognized it as such when he described odors in his Timaeus as “emanating from a body undergoing change.”  Therefore, the odor fingerprint of your home comes not only from the myriad substances you use in your house, but from the reactions of those things with each other.

And if Science doesn’t even know how all that stuff works, then how are you supposed to know?

On a side note:

Cleaning products as bad for lungs as smoking 20 cigarettes a day:

Scientists advise that harmful sprays could be replaced with simple microfibre cloths and water

Feb 2018, The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/cleaning-products-lungs-damage-cigarettes-smoking-20-day-scientists-warning-a8214051.html

And on that note:

This one is about cleanliness and the illusion of cleanliness. Lived in a basement apartment for awhile and decided to pay a friend of my landlord to do a “deep clean”. She brings her own cleaning products (because I use mostly microfiber and water, and lots of people either don’t know how to use that or don’t believe that it works.)

So this lady comes in and cleans up my place. Hella Lysol. My landlord comes down to visit that day, to see what she did, and boy is she delighted. “It’s so clean in here, wow you really needed it!”

First of all, my apartment is not dirty. I was a custodian at almost every job I had, not to mention keeping a high school art classroom in pristine condition for ten years, not to mention that this very apartment had been hit by a massive mold attack one summer, and I’ve been hypervigilant/paranoid about its return ever since. And, not only am I the guy that cleans for the maid, but this time at least, I had to clean again after the maid left.

My landlord, however, is suffering from olfactory insinuation. She smells Lysol and thinks it’s clean, like, cleaner than it was before. Funny, because as soon as I walked into my apartment, you know what I smelled? “Dirty mop” that’s what I call it.

“Dirty mop” is when you don’t clean the mop itself after mopping, and you also don’t let it dry, and you also keep it in a dark place until the next time you use it. And when you do use it next, you, instead of cleaning, spread that dirty plethora of microbes all over your floor.

So I smiled, paid the woman, and got to work cleaning my apartment, and wondering how long it would take for this Lysol smell to dissipate.