A Warning about Fragrances, Colognes, and Scented products

Perfumes, artificial air deodorizers, and other artificially-scented personal care products often contain petroleum-based chemicals which over time can lead to serious health problems. 

All too often, companies market said products under the guise of cleanliness but in fact they are anything but.  The important thing to remember is that the perfume industry is entirely unregulated, which means many of the ingredients are not tested for long-term health hazards and many of the said companies are not required to disclose potentially harmful and dangerous ingredients their products may contain.

This is especially true for the less-expensive 'generic' perfumes or to put it bluntly, cheap ones.

How might the ingredients affect someone's health you ask? Without going into too much detail, the way scented products generally retain their fragrance over a period of time is often because they contain plastics/petroleum-based chemicals which are just that: chemical reactions.  Many of these ingredients are in fact mutagenic, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Mutagen meaning that they have the ability to bind to a person's DNA, causing low-level cellular damage and in some cases, Cancer. 

Apart from the mutagenic factor, it is now being understood that many chemicals and additives act like the female hormone Estrogen once inside the body, both for Men and for Women, and can cause a person to gain weight because these substances store themselves in fat cells.  As a result, it can make burning fat even THAT much harder, even if one is active, because the body fat now contains chemical substances which become very difficult to flush out. 

A final consequence of using products which contain artificial scents is a phenomena called Chemical Sensitivity or MCS https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Multiple_chemical_sensitivity

To give an example, I once worked with a middle-aged woman who wore a heavy amount of perfume.  To myself and to many others, her perfume smelled quite chemical and quite strong.  Over a period of a year, I gradually began to notice the woman had constant phlegm, and a constant cough.  She was a non-smoker, yet had a cough like she had been smoking for years.  She also began to have an appearance like she was 'high' or 'stoned' but in fact she did not take any illegal substances.  The culprit it was found was her perfume: because she didn't ever give thought to it, and because she constantly exposed herself to some chemical component present in it, she began to manifest constant flu-like symptoms. 

Physiologically, she developed excessive constant phlegm because that was a defense of her body, the phlegm was a reaction by her body to the chemicals present in her perfume.  Usually these symptoms disappear once a person removes their particular trigger (in this case a certain perfume) because the body has a remarkable ability to heal itself if it is allowed to.