Guides and articles about fragrance and your health, built on graded evidence. Every claim shows how strong it is and links to its source.
Guides
At work
Ask for a fragrance-free workplace
Your rights, what to ask for, a letter builder, a doctor’s note checklist, the pledge, and a guide for employers.
Everyday air
What’s in your air, room by room
Home, kitchen, bathroom, laundry, childcare, classrooms, offices, cars, shops, restrooms, planes and hotels.
Tools
Label decoder
Paste or scan an ingredient list to spot fragrance, allergens, ingredients banned in EU cosmetics, and listed carcinogens and hormone disruptors. Then look the product up in EWG Skin Deep or EWG’s Guide to Healthy Cleaning, or read our shopping guide. To look up a single name, try the ingredient guide.
Parents
Fragrance, pregnancy and kids
What’s in kids’ products and childcare air, pregnancy, breast milk, and the lavender question.
The gaps
What the science doesn’t know yet
What’s never been tested, and why that’s not a reason to relax.
Fragrance-free signs
Free PDFs for offices, desks, meeting rooms and classrooms, plus the 1 in 3 symbol as stickers, a profile badge and a wallpaper.
Your rights
What the law says
At work, at school, where you live and in health care, plus how to report a reaction and the rules outside the US.
Health care
Fragrance-free health care
What to ask for at appointments and in the hospital, and why a sign on the door isn’t enough.
Home
Home, neighbors and landlords
The dryer vent next door, scented hallways, and what to ask your landlord for.
Quick answers
Common questions
Headaches, “unscented” labels, essential oils, coworkers and air fresheners, answered with graded evidence.
Articles
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Scented laundry: what comes out of your dryer vent
That “fresh laundry” smell goes out the dryer vent and into your laundry room. What’s been measured, what hasn’t, and one easy…
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Fragrance and asthma
Most people with asthma say fragranced products make them ill. What the research shows about scent as an asthma trigger, and what…
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The perfume in your blood
Perfume doesn’t stay on your skin. Its chemicals turn up in people’s blood, body fat and breast milk. What’s been measured, what…
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Air fresheners: paying to pollute your own air
What air fresheners put into your home, car and office, what the label leaves out, and what to do instead.
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“Unscented” doesn’t mean fragrance-free
“Unscented” and “fragrance-free” have no legal definition in the US. What the words really mean, and how to find products that are…
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What scented cleaning does to your air
The smell isn’t the end of it. Scent chemicals keep reacting in your air after you clean, making compounds that were never…
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The fragrance loophole
How one word on a label can hide what’s in a product, what the 2022 US law changed, and what it didn’t.
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“Natural” doesn’t mean allergen-free
Essential oils are fragrance too, and many of them cause skin allergy. Why a “natural” label doesn’t get a product off the…