P&G releasing two new products

Automatic Washer - The world's coolest Washing Machines, Dryers and Dishwashers

Help Support :

I actually know a few people working in the fragrance industry and one of the major changes that happened in Europe at least for perfumes and household products was a shift towards more citrus / pine / herbal light type scents as opposed to heavy floral ones.

The major reason for this was a reduction in smoking.

If you think about it, your grandma's favourite perfume's quite likely to be some really toxic combination of very heavy scents that would nearly suffocate you and can be smelt from about 300 meters and lingers in the room after she's left. Scents like that were very popular right into the 1980s as they had to overcome smokey environments in bars and other entertainment venues and people also had much less sensitive noses as they were usually smoked out.

Smoking died out, so scents changed a lot.
 
That is not what is happening here. Even effing dishwasher detergents have acquired heavy floral scents that will permeate plastic drink bottles to ruin the flavor of anything you put in them. Some stores do not even stock DW detergents that have no added fragrance. I only buy the Fresh scent which is fairly odorless. It is getting to the point of using heavy stink to cover up worse stink, a type of olfactory warfare so that even if the clothes, for example, are not clean, you can't readily smell the soil or if your body is not clean, the BO is masked (partially and temporarily).

It is not the well-to-do who have come to the United States to work. It is the poor. In their culture, as in most, the wealthy could afford perfume to mask odors. The poor could not. So the poor long for the fragrances they associate with wealth, even if it is in the stuff they use to clean floors and wash clothes. The strong floral scents may remind them of their native lands and families. I can understand scented hand dishwashing detergents, but why the need for strong scent in machine dishwasher detergent? I think anyone working with products appreciates working with one that smells good to them. That is why we long for the fragrances of cleaning products of long ago, but the marketing forces are not interested in what appeals to us.
 
I don't understand the compulsion to add fragrances to anything and everything these days.  When did "clean" become synonymous with stinking like cheap cologne?   Air "freshener" products have to be among the worst offenders, and seem to be marketed as though they are an acceptable alternative to actually washing or cleaning anything.  Don't take out the garbage before it stinks up the house, just use scented trash bags to "trap" the odor.  Use a "plug in" to hide the fact that the kitty litter box needs to be emptied.  If your teenager's bedroom smells like something died in there, heaven forbid the room should actually get cleaned, just "Febreeze" it.   And since it's impossible to open the windows to let in some fresh air, use motion detecting dispensers to squirt "virtual" freshness into your house.

 

Has anyone considered the health consequences of longterm exposure to all these chemicals?  I had a run in with the automatic air freshener in the restroom at work once that landed me in urgent care.   I walked through the mist it had just sprayed into the air and got a dose of it in my eyes.  It BURNED LIKE HELL and someone had to take me to get my eyes irrigated..............NOT a pleasant experience!  It took a couple days before my vision was back to normal, and even a week later my eyes were still extremely sensitive.  When I was able to go back to work I took a spare container of the air freshener from the janitor closet to my desk and looked up the ingredients online.  There was one known carcinogen, and several chemicals that were linked to liver or kidney failure, nerve damage, or birth defects. 

 

 

 
 
You shouldn't need air freshener in your house at all. If you want to use something to create a scent, try essential oils or something like that. Otherwise, if your house is clean and properly ventilated you should not need to artificially mask odours as there simply shouldn't be any to begin with.

We have over-scented detergent products here too. P&G's Ariel went through a phase of being unbearable and you can chose Bold (P&G) or Surf (Unilever) if you want your clothes to wreak of something. There's also a large range of fabric softener options most of which are pretty heavily scented.

However, the two biggest selling products are the least stinky : Unilever Persil and Comfort Pure.
There's a big focus on hypoallergenic stuff here too.

I lived in the the US for a bit, and I remember noticing that a lot of homes were really over scented with Bounce-like fragrances. People here do it too, but I think perhaps a little less than you guys do.

Also, what's the point in using some really over-fragranced product if it's going to clash with your own choice of perfumes / colognes etc.

In general, I prefer mild and fresh scents that smell like 'clean laundry', which to my nose, is a very subtle fragrance. I don't want my clothes to smell of something else.
 
Laundry Fragrances and or Scent

No, heavy scented laundry products are not confined to countries south of the United States border.

All over Europe, especially in France one can find detergents and fabric softeners with enough perfume to send one running for an open window, even when outdoors. Indeed even products sold for baby's wash are heavily perfumed. In fact last time one looked "unscented" laundry products are hard to find,so much so know Americans living on that side of the pond who fetch back unscented products on their visits back to the States.

P&G, Unilever and the rest all have done extensive R&D regarding their products and it seems by large numbers consumers all over their broad global reach prefer not only laundry products with strong perfumes, but want the scent to last days after the wash is dried, folded and put away.

To be fair there is a long tradition in France and elsewhere of using various plants, herbs or perfumes stored with linens and or garments to give them scent. Lavender, amber, musk, roses, violets, and many others were all used .

Historically yes, the use of heavy perfumes was to cover-up the fact one had not bathed, and while one would think in these modern times the need would have lessened; but as they say in the film "Moonstruck" "I guess these ain't modern times ......".

Have several bottles of laundry detergent from France, and am here to tell you from Ariel on down all have a whiff that lasts days after laundry day is over.
 
Tom:

I remember Texize products and even watching some of their commercials on TV when I was only 3 years old.

Do you remember their cartoon and iconic "wide-eyed" maid that appeared on these commercials and the label of their products?
 
Don't they still market Glass Plus? I make my own from ammonia, hand dishwashing detergent and rubbing alcohol. The recipe was in Consumer Reports in the 70s, I think. Then the next time they tested glass cleaners, the home brew was either not mentioned or not rated highly. Peculiar. I think I have seen some Texize products at Home Depot. Pray and wash, I remember in the aerosol cans, but that disappeared decades ago here, replaced by the ineffectual on grease liquid in a trigger sprayer. The aerosol we find now is by SHOUT. Texize also came out with that Stain Stick pretreater that was replaced by the little container of gel with the red plastic bristles. The only thing Texize I remember us buying long ago was the knock off on StaPuf called Texize Laundry Fluff (funny how that is the European or British term for lint). It was pink, but did not smell as good as StaPuf. We used it for my baby sister's clothes before we got a dryer.

Bill, sorry, I don't remember the TV commercials.
 
I saw Glass Plus at Big Lots yesterday. Down towards the bottom of the label, it stated that Reckett-Benckiser is now the "new" producer and manufacturer.
 
Texize Was Sold To Down Chemical In The 1980's

Since that time many of it's consumer products were sold off, in some cases more than once.

Glass Plus was sold to SC Johnson who in turn sold the brand off to Reckitt Beckiser.

Texixe company is still around it just has gone back to it's original roots in supplying products in bulk for industrial/commercial use. The comany's name comes from it's orignal purpose to supply products to various textile mills.

http://www.texize.com/
 
I'm trying to remember when I last remember seeing any Texize products and it had to be way back when I was still living at home with my parents when I was just out of college or it may have even been before that!

Was it called Texize Pine Sol or was Pine Sol someone else's product. We never used any of the pine scented cleaners. My mom thought they were too strong-smelling. She did use a Texize liquid that was amonia based for mopping and cleaning. White tornado in a bottle was the slogan.
 
Andy, the Texize pine product was "Pine Power". My Aunt Julie in MS has always used this, including pouring it into the commode. I call it her signature fragrance!

Pine Sol is now a Clorox Co. product. For many years it was manufactured by American Cyanamid Co., and was originaly just the Pine Sol Co. based in Mississippi. My Aunt Doris knows some of the family of the inventor.

I don't remember Texize having an ammonia cleaner. The ammonia cleaner that advertised as a "White Tornado" was Ajax All Purpose liquid by Colgate-Palmolive.
 
Mr. Clean Jeans

I remember Janitor in a Drum. Never could convince my mom to buy it. She was a Top Job gal and I still remember how fresh it smelled. My aunt was the first person around here to buy Grease Relief. I remember it funky packaging. I also remember her say she hoped it really cut grease as the dish detergents she was using did not!
 
I agree with Tomturbomatic,

about the demographic changes in the United States and their effect on consumer products.

I have mentioned it in a phrase here before, calling it "the Suavitel effect."

I do love real, live flowers with scents, particularly lilacs and lily of the valley, and I do frequently wear colognes, particularly Givenchy's "Pi," but I like to be in charge of how my clothes smell, and how my body smells, thank you very much.

Lawrence/Maytagbear
 
Sometimes we need the extra scents to cover up the odors of others........like if your in a waiting room of certain buildings, and you have to sit next to these individuals.....many times I overdose on cologne before entering, just to get me thru the session.......I may gag my own self, but it beats smelling others who offend...

I miss Pine Jelly, Mom used to add a scoopful to the laundry, barely a scent left after washing, but smelled great during the washing process, and when it drained into the sink.....

When Clorox first added Lemon to their lineup, it made the laundry smell great, now its barely a scent there.....
 
I LOL'D at some of the comments and I agree. Sorting, loading, unloading, folding are the real chores of doing laundry......Not measuring detergent or selecting the cycle. I too can't stand the stench of a lot of detergents........But I have to say........I LOVE the smell of Gain HE powder
 
Unilever and P&G in particular, as well as all the other major manufactures of household products like R&B, SC Johnson and Henkel all excel at one thing : Marketing and you can be damn sure that they do a *lot* of research on what sell and one thing that definitely sells is scent.

The scent of a product is as important or more important than how it actually performs. Detergent products now all basically perform excellently. In the past the major differentiators in the 1950s were performance and the likes of Persil or Tide outperformed their cheap competitors by vast amounts and led through cleaning innovation.

However, in 2011, even a cheap store brand will clean very adequately so the innovation is all around scent and packaging and branding.

I don't really accept that immigration in the US is changing the scents of detergents. Most detergents are bought by the same people who always bought them i.e. mom's in every household in the US, Canada, Europe etc. However, certainly over here anyway, there is much more branding and pushing aimed at male shoppers e.g. you're starting to see much more 'technological looking' branding which is definitely aimed at younger shoppers and particularly male singletons and dad's out doing the shopping.

Tastes change over time, and I think fad-ish scents in laundry detergents are one of those things. In both Europe and the US, P&G seems to find that strong scents sell, so someone's obviously buying them and in Europe Unilever's jumped on that bandwaggon in a big way.

Don't forget that both P&G and Unilever also produce vast arrays of scented products ranging from high end perfumes and colognes to cheap body sprays like AXE/Lynx etc. They are extremely good at marketing scents and they are experts at creating them. So, it's no surprise they are using all that know-how in their detergents and household products to keep them differentiated from the supermarket own brands and other cheap products.

Some of the 'laundry purists' might not love their laundry to smell over scented, but quite clearly lots and lots of consumers do.

The people on these forums aren't really representative of your typical shopper when it comes to picking up laundry products. Many normal shoppers will go 'Mmmm... popcorn with a hint of the swiss mountains" sounds great. While many people on this forum might be utterly horrified by that :D
 
K2R

No, K2R came in a aerosol can and it sprayed a solvent like dry cleaning fluid that carried a white powder. You sprayed it on oil-based stains and let it dry then you brushed off the powder to which the soil had been transferred. TA-DAH. We used to have a saying: KY to get things in and K2R to get stains out.

MrX, I would say that, not living and shopping here and not seeing who is shopping here, maybe you are not a complete expert on who buys what and for what reason over here. The very picture of the "mom" who buys detergent is rapidly changing. Detergents and soaps usually had fragrances added to mask the smell of the ingredients and to bolster their appeal to the women who used them. The first really distinct, artificial, botanical fragrance to be added to laundry detergents here, in that it was a food fragrance, that I can remember was Lemon, as in Lemon FAB with borax (or was it Fab with lemon and borax) for clothes. Lemon fragrance was added to hand dishwashing and, later, to machine dishwashing detergents and lemon oil also had an association with cleaning as in lemon oil for cleaning various things. But Orange Blossom fragrance and other tropical floral scents are not fragrances Americans have associated with cleaning products. They are associated with with flowers and some facial soaps like Cashmmere Boquet and Camay and maybe some others. I remember how we loved the fragrance of Sweetheart soap, but do not remember it as particularly floral. They are pleasant scents for most, but were not associated with cleaning products or laundry detergents. Sometimes pine oil had the association with clean, because it did have solvent properties and was more plesant smelling than either turpentine or kerosene for treating oil-based stains on clothing when those were the alternatives. It also had an undeserved reputation as a disinfectant but, fragrance-wise, that was pretty much it for decades for household cleaning products until the explosive growth of our segment of the population from south of the US/Mexico boarder. In an effort to make domestic detergents attractive to them so that they would buy them instead of the brands imported and sold by the mercados latinos, perfuming began to change in many products, often first in the cheaper brands. For decades, you could buy cheap, pink, rose-scented hand dishwashing detergent but, again, roses were part of American culture and that appealed to a class of consumer more than the fragrances of other products like Palmolive and Dawn. It smelled nice, certainly better than Palmolive to me, but was not strong enough for really heavy cleaning. I am not saying these scents are bad, if you like heavy, tropical floral scents and a nice fragrance can make a job seem easier, but they have arrived on the market with a burgeoning population to whom they are more familiar than they are to those of us who grew up with the classic fragrances of Tide, Cheer, Dash, Fab, Duz and others imprinted in our memories.

Maybe it is easier to add these floral fragrances to liquid detergents and maybe they linger because of the peculiarities of the way they rinse out, but they have to appeal to enough customers for the manufacturers to use the fragrances and here, it is a relatively recent and growing phenomenon. To have the same fragrances in fabric softeners to make sure it stays in the fabrics would seem to indicate that: 1. some people like the fragrance and 2. even if the clothes are not washed clean, they can be treated to cover up the smell of soil, maybe, for a while and if that satisfies the customer that's OK.
 
K2R

Ok. I remember the white powder. It was real cold if you happen to get some of it on your fingers while you were spraying the stain. Our's was used mostly on neck ties. It was really good for spot cleaning stuff like that or at least that's what we mostly used it for.

Thanks for that clarification. I tell you. Some of this stuff I had completely forgotten about. Kinda fun to stroll down memory lane. :)
 
K2R also came in a tube. I remember this distinctly when my aunt used it on her carpet to get out a grape soda stain that my brother had spilled on it.

As far as rose scented dish liquids, the one that comes to mind is "Rose Lotion Vel".

And last but not least..(
singing) "Oh Fab, we're glad, there's lemon-freshened Borax in you".
 
@tomturbomatic

I've spent years working in marketing with FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) companies and I know the US and EU markets like the back of my hand.

The major driving force behind all of these scents is quite simple. The large FMCG markers are desperately trying to distinguish their products. Scent is a very easy way of turning one generic product into 10 or 20 highly banded and distinguished products on a shelf. The more variants you have, the more shelf space you can occupy and the more market share you can achieve with the illusion of consumer choice.

Tide in the US is the ultimate example of this strategy and it has managed to push other brands off the shelves through sheer brute force merchandising and vast arrays of slightly tweaked products.

The same is true in Europe, but to a somewhat less single-company dominated extent i.e. you tend to have more of a balance between P&G and Unilever in the UK/Ireland and P&G, Henkel and Unilever in other EU markets.

What is freaking the FMCGs out at the moment is that consumers are starting to buy store brands in rather larger numbers than they have ever done in the past. The supermarkets have managed to create viable private label brands which have really done serious damage, particularly in Europe, to P&G, Unilever and Henkel's bottom line.

In the US, the threat is more from the likes of Henkel/Dial, Sun products etc which are disruptive to P&G's cozy position at the top of the food chain there.

Cultural norms for scents and also for food flavours are changing very rapidly. People are exposed to much strong flavours and scents than they were in the 1950s and they expect those kinds of options in a lot of consumer goods as a result. For example, if you look at the UK and Ireland, the average consumer now expects levels of herbs, spices and also strong cheeses that would have been totally unpalatable to a 1970s consumer in the same market. This is because of a change of general broadening of the pallet.

In terms of scents for detergents and other household products, there have been a major shift towards florals and towards nature-mimicing products and natural extracts. This is partially because there has been a shift away from 'chemical-type' scents due to 'green washing' i.e. an attempt to make a product seem natural and also because it's just possible to do it now and it wasn't decades ago.

In fact, I would say you might have difficulty selling some of the old formula scents to a modern market as they would be seen as over-simplistic or even unpleasant.

Laundry scents, like everything else follow fashions and trends, and a lot of the old classic scents are simply not likely to sell like they used to.

In a local context here, the old scents of Persil, Omo and Ariel were far more robust and simple clean fragrances than their modern varieties which are much closer to the kinds of scents found in cosmetics in many cases.

There's a hell of a lot of science behind "olfactory marketing" and companies spend literally hundreds of millions getting those scents just right :)

As for who makes the decisions on household products, sadly (in terms of the changing role of women) they are still very much in the driving seat in North America and in Europe when it comes to the weekly shopping.

That gender bias, is changing, actually fastest in Northern Europe, not the US, which might explain some of the marketing of Ariel and Persil in the UK which is now much more 'techie' products than they used to be. Take a look at the Persil small and mighty packaging or the Ariel Excel Gel packs. They're aimed at people who make decisions based on technology / slick branding and environmental concerns. Where as some of the other packaging and marketing is squarely aimed at the traditional female decision maker.

All-in-all, this kind of consumer marketing is actually a fascinating area of applied psychology ! Laundry detergents are still one of the key marker products too as they have been some of the heaviest promoted and most sophisticatedly marketed FMCGs going right back to the late 1800s. So, they always make for a great case study / trend analysis.

Soft drinks, perfumes, alcohols/beers etc are also the usual text book cases :D
 
Marketing is as effective to what works AS appliance designers are to a washing machine...a washing machine designed to do just THAT...wash clothes "effectively"

they promote the idea of thousands of people surveyed......I have never met ONE person who has ever been asked!......

all that is thought is SALES/PROFIT/CAPITAL GAIN in the market, lets create a detergent that smells good, who cares if it works?.......lets create a machine that looks pretty with lots of useless buttons and lights, that has the illussion of super size, and "GREEN" using very little water, BUT effective at truly washing and cleaning a standard load of laundry....NOT HAPPENNING!

When I complained to Frigidaire about my FL not using enough water or being able to adjust the level...Their response was that they were able to wash 4 bath towels with enough water and great cleaning results......BULLSHIT!....I recommended them come to my house and wash a regular load only to see the center of the load never gets wet.........

These people have their head up their ASS....and you won't change my mind otherwise!

Stepping down from my Soap Box!
 

Similar threads

frigilux
New Detergent Ratings
2
Replies
58
Views
2K
gelaundry4ever
G
launderess
P&G Raising Prices on Tide & Other Laundry Products
Replies
24
Views
149
ea56
ea56
sarahperdue
P&G EC30 carbon neutral cleaning product line
Replies
6
Views
155
iej
I
supersuds
P&G to change Tide Pods packaging
Replies
16
Views
114
angus
A
J
New Product News
Replies
14
Views
96
cehalstead
C

Latest posts

Back
Top