Count what you put on before you leave the house: deodorant, lotion, hair product, a spritz of something. Fragrance gets sold as part of being a woman. Here’s what researchers found about how many products women use, what turns up in their bodies, who reports getting sick, and where the industry’s own usage numbers fall short.
Evidence key Strong Moderate Weak How we grade
The product count adds up
In a New Jersey university community, adults had used an average of about 14 personal care products in the previous day or two. Moderate evidence. Barrett 2025
The most common personal-care product combination in this 36,446-subject Europe/US survey was deodorant, oral care, and a shower product used together, at about 19% of subjects; only about 1% of men but about 7% of women used products from all 7 surveyed product categories. Moderate evidence. Comiskey 2015 (RIFM/Creme Global) Industry-funded
US women in this study used far more hair conditioner (28.2 g/day at the 90th percentile) and somewhat more eye shadow (0.052 g/day) than the amounts the EU's cosmetics safety regulator (SCCS) uses in its own risk-assessment formula for those same product categories (3.92 g/day and 0.02 g/day) — a 7.2-fold and 2.6-fold gap, unlike lipstick, where the EU and US figures are essentially identical when compared at the same percentile. Moderate evidence. Loretz 2008 Industry-funded
And the counts may run low.
Real-time diaries found people using hairspray and other personal-care products up to six times more often than an older survey that just asked women to recall their past use, even though the two studies agreed fairly well on how much was used per application — suggesting recall surveys mainly undercount how often people use a product, not how much they use each time. Moderate evidence. Loretz 2006 Industry-funded
Product use shows up in urine tests
Women who had used perfume in the previous day had nearly 3 times as much of a phthalate breakdown product (from diethyl phthalate, a chemical used to carry fragrance) in their urine as women who hadn't. Moderate evidence. Parlett 2013
Pregnant women who used lotion had 111% higher butyl paraben, a preservative that weakly mimics estrogen. Moderate evidence. Braun 2014
Cutting back is likely to show up in the numbers too.
Using fewer scented personal care products is likely to lower phthalate and paraben levels, because levels tracked the number of products used. Moderate evidence. Braun 2014
More on this: what your skin absorbs and fragrance and your hormones.
More women report symptoms
In a random-based sample of 946 Danish adults, 42% said fragranced products gave them eye, nose, or breathing symptoms in the past year (50% of women, 30% of men). Moderate evidence. Elberling 2005
Teenage girls reported chemical sensitivity about twice as often as boys (20.6% vs 9.9%), and being female, being sensitive to noise, or having probable anxiety each roughly doubled the odds of reporting it. Moderate evidence. Andersson 2008
That doesn’t make scent sensitivity a women’s issue. Everyone breathes the same air.
At work, most of the cases were women
94% of workers with fragrance-related work asthma in California were women, mostly in offices, health care, and schools, and most cases came from perfume worn by others. Moderate evidence. Weinberg 2017
About 80% of workers with scent- and irritant-triggered irritable larynx syndrome were women, versus 24–52% of workers with occupational asthma at the same clinic. Moderate evidence. Hoy 2010
More on your options: fragrance at work.
Products sold for women’s bodies
In a nationally representative sample of 2,432 US women aged 20-49, women who douched frequently (2+ times/month) had 81% higher blood levels of 1,4-dichlorobenzene than women who never douched, with a dose-response trend across frequency categories (p=0.04). Moderate evidence. Ding 2020
Here is the advice that came out of that testing and that biomarker study.
Choose unscented feminine hygiene products rather than relying on organic or natural labels, and avoid frequent vaginal douching and feminine powder use: scented tampons had far more terpenes in product testing, and a separate NHANES biomarker study found frequent douching (2+ times/month) linked to 81% higher blood 1,4-dichlorobenzene (dose-response, p=0.04) and feminine powder use linked to 36% higher blood ethylbenzene. Moderate evidence. Lin 2020
Scented candles show the same split, at least in one student survey.
Among 718 non-smoking Saudi university students surveyed in 2020, 65.7% (472) reported using scented candles, and usage was far more common among women (74.9% of female respondents) than men (28.4% of male respondents, chi-square p=0.0001). Moderate evidence. Al Khathlan et al. 2023
More on scent in tampons, pads, and liners: fragrance where you don’t expect it.
Linked to lung function, too
In a large Canadian population survey, more frequent use of personal care products was associated with small but statistically significant reductions in objectively measured lung function. Moderate evidence. Dales 2013
Take smokers out of the picture and the link in women stayed.
Restricting the analysis to never-smokers did not remove the association between personal care product use and lower lung function in women. Moderate evidence. Dales 2013
The industry’s numbers have holes
The industry’s exposure model rests on assumptions about how people use products.
To build this exposure model, the fragrance industry combined three surveys that were never designed to work together — a 7-day product diary, a monthly recall survey, and a categorical daily-frequency questionnaire — by matching subjects only on age and gender and assuming they share the same habits for entirely unrelated products. Moderate evidence. Comiskey 2017 (RIFM/Creme Global) Industry-funded
The fragrance industry's amount-per-use inputs for lipstick, body lotion, and face cream in its own aggregate exposure model come from a study where subjects used an unfamiliar substitute product for two weeks, not their own regular brand, and where the probability of daily use fell from about 99% on day 1 to 74-79% by day 14, fastest among the women who disliked the assigned product. Moderate evidence. Loretz 2005 Industry-funded
A three-day swap lowered a fragrance phthalate
The phthalate most linked to fragrance (diethyl phthalate) fell by 27% in 3 days when girls avoided products listing fragrance unless labeled phthalate-free. Moderate evidence. Harley 2016
Choosing fragrance-free personal care products is a reasonable way to cut DEP exposure, since DEP is used as a fragrance solvent; label reading alone will not catch phthalates. Strong evidence. Crinnion 2010
Just don’t trust the front of the bottle.
Labels are not a guarantee: ethyl and butyl paraben actually rose after girls switched to paraben-free-labeled products, probably because some replacements contained them. Moderate evidence. Harley 2016
What you can do
- Count what you use in a day, then drop the scented ones first: perfume, lotion, body spray, and hair products.
- Choose unscented tampons, pads, and liners, and skip douches and feminine powders.
- Check ingredient lists with our label decoder and EWG Skin Deep, but don’t treat “natural” or “paraben-free” on the front of the bottle as a guarantee.
- If scent at work makes you sick, you’re not being difficult. Our letter builder helps you ask for a fragrance-free workplace.
- You don’t owe anyone a scent. Smelling like nothing is allowed.
Every claim above shows its evidence grade and names its source. See all the facts and the claims we won’t make. Information, not medical advice.
