I love cooking with onions. Onions with my steak. Onions with my fish. Onions with my baked chicken. If onions have some sort of health benefit, I’m surely reaping a ton of it.

But as any avid onion cooker knows, when you throw those ends in the trash, they can stink up the entire kitchen - even when your trash can has a lid on it. It’s almost like an oniony smelling film covers the walls or something.

Unfortunately if you’re an apartment dweller, you can’t always just jump up and take your onion ends to the dumpster or the trash room.

That’s why I decided to try the Glad Force Flex Tall Kitchen Bags. They have a built in odor neutralizer. So I figured that would be the ultimate cure for those occasional trash bag stinks.

The copy on the box says “fresh, clean scent.” But that’s not true. It does have a scent. Although I wouldn’t call it fresh and clean. It reminds of an attempt at fresh. Pseudo-fresh. (But it’s going in the trash can, right?)

Over the course of the day I put in: pancakes with syrup, a half eaten pizza, apple skin and core, grapefrut skin, microwave popcorn bag, and yes… about a quarter of a medium sized white onion.

I just opened the trash can lid and took a whiff. Hideous.

Then I closed the lid, and smelled around the trash can. I could still smell the trash.

Not only that, the trash odor mixed with the ‘fresh, clean scent’ of the bag. So it created an entirely new odor in the kitchen. And it ain’t a fresh, clean scent.

My synopsis? Not a keeper.

Now excuse me while I go take out my trash.

The only thing I hunt is hormone free chicken at the grocery store.

So I had no idea that hunters sometimes go through elaborate odor elimination rituals before hitting the great outdoors.

It’s true. They do so in order to sneak attack their human scent savvy prey.

In fact there’s an entire treasure chest of products specifically designed to get rid of odors from the human body.

Dead Wind Down is one such brand.

They manufacture a laundry detergenet called ScentPrevent that uses a patented bio-engineering process known as Enzyme Scent Prevention. This nifty little strand of enzymes prevent odor causing bacteria from forming.

If you’re the parent of maturing, sports plaing teenager, this stuff might be a godsend.

I’m curious to see how it works smell-wise so I’m ordering a bottle.

Stay tuned for my upcoming review.

Last week I went to my local pharmacy to scope out some new odor eliminating goodies.

I’m in Canada right now. And even though I’m a stones throw from the US border, there’s still a fair selection of products here that they don’t sell in the States. So every few days I go try something new from the smell good aisle.

Anyway I picked up a bottle of this stuff called Fresh Ayre.

From first glance it sounded interesting. According to the directions on the packaging, you put a drop on a lightbulb… turn on the light… and it helps to freshen the air.

I’m all about quick and easy odor elimination, so I dropped it in the shopping cart.

I decided to give this Fresh Ayre a test yesterday. But when I opened the package, the smell of a clean public restroom rudely insulted my olfactory system.

Mind you, I didn’t even open the bottle. I just pulled it out of the paper packaging.

The problem? Fresh Ayre isn’t a neutralizer. In other words, it doesn’t get rid of odors. It’s a deodorizer. Like a can of air freshener, it just sits on top of the odor.

I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if it was a scent I liked. But clean public restroom smell isn’t something I easily vibe with. So I threw it in the trash.

The moral of the story… read the packaging.

Deodorizers = Bad odor + Artificial smell

Neutralizers = Bad smell gone

I have a really big phobia about going to someone’s house and having to use the bathroom.

I’m not talking about an odorless in and out bathroom break. I mean a poop. A bowel movement.

The thing is, you just don’t know how badly you’re going to smell up the bathroom, or the persons house, for that matter. And let’s face it, poop smell is bad. But poop and air freshener is 1,000 times worse. It travels through the air like a smelly laser beam!

I guess that’s just the woman in me.

Well imagine my delight when I recently ran across an odor neutralizing product called Just a Drop.

You squeeze a bit of Just a Drop into the toilet water before you assume the sitting position.

It has a slightly minty smell that creates a blocking layer in the water. That blocking layer traps 98% of odors before they escape into the air.

Right now I’m in Montreal, and I was able to purchase Just a Drop from the local Jean Coutu pharmacy. (In the US, you have to order from the Just a Drop web site.)

Of course, I gave it a test. I won’t go into the precise logistics of my test. But it did indeed work as the bottle stated. Most of the odor was gone.

My 4-year old daughter - a budding stink-a-phobe - religiously uses it. For her it works so well that I find myself checking to make sure she’s made a bowel movement. I never smell anything when she comes out of the bathroom!

And what’s really neat is that the bottle is small enough (like an eyedrop bottle) that you can carry it into the bathroom, without people wondering what it is.

Alexis Dawes
Editor, No More Smelly House

It’s no secret that I’m all about having a nice smelling home.

But the one thing I realized is that you can’t have a nice smelling home if your constantly trying to cover up bad odors with a can of air freshener.

Air freshener to odor is like putting a bandage on a gun shot wound. It ain’t gonna work.

You have to neutralize the bad odors first.

Fresh2 provides a rather ingenious method for neutralizing smells, without even having to think about it. In fact, every time you turn on the light you’re killing odors.

Fresh2 is a titanium dioxide coated fluorescent light bulb.

According to Ellis Yan, CEO of Technical Consumer Products, which manufactures fresh2, “When this coating is exposed to fluorescent light, which is given off by the bulb itself, it produces a photocatalytic reaction. This creates very strong oxidizers that completely break down odors. The purifying process begins to work 10 minutes after the bulb is turned on.”
 
The bulbs themselves are only 23 watts, so they’ll work in any standard sized socket. However because they’re compact fluorescent bulbs, they give off the same light as a 100 watt bulb, at a lower energy cost.

They’ll last approximately 10,000 hours or three years - which totally justifies the price tag of $19.95 for two bulbs.

Fresh2 bulbs are only available through the manufacturers web site.

A review of Fresh2 bulbs can be found at The Gadgeteer.

Alexis Dawes
Editor, No More Smelly House