A Common Fight for Bill Gates, Unicorn Gold & Poo-Pourri : United against Third-World & First-World Toilet Malodors {The 5th Sense in the News} {New Perfumes}
A real ad for a real product
A real sentence about a real project "From poop water to poop perfume, I'm amazed by the innovation that's underway in the field of sanitation" -- Bill Gates
A Common Fight for Bill Gates, Unicorn Gold & Poo-Pourri : United against Third-World & First-World Toilet Malodors.
It's in the air. Brands and philanthropists are paying attention to fecal malodors no longer with fatalism, as a by-product of human activities, but as a cause behind which to unite - and to fight into oblivion. In the third world, the issue is related to public hygiene; in the first world, it impacts sociability and personal comfort...
Bill Gates recently published a post on his blog describing what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are doing in partnership with Swiss fragrance company Firmenich: create better-smelling toilets in countries like India so that people will actually want to use them. The alternative to entering a foul-smelling, overheated cubicle there is to use the outdoors. This poses threats to public health.
Gates could have mentioned another downside of this practice: rape. Women in rural India, it's been shown, are raped at the times when they venture out to relieve themselves in the open.
While toilet stench might seem a relatively frivolous topic compared with disease, epidemics and social violence, you quickly realize it is directly linked to these issues.
Firmenich's solution is to block malodor odor receptors in the brain.
« Our noses have 350 olfactory receptors, each one awakening us to new sensations from the smell of a rose to stinky feet. Just a handful of them allow us to smell repulsive odors. Firmenich researchers used this knowledge to develop fragrances that block certain receptors in our noses, making us unable to register certain malodors. »
They also identified the four main chemical culprits: indole, p-cresol, dimethyl trisulfide, and butyric acid.
Blocking out sources of olfactory stress sounds like a good idea. We are used to covering up bad smells. Perceiving bad smells however serves a function. It enables us to detect danger and unwholesomeness. It might be best to cover and clean at the same time. If you are going to enter that stinky toilet, you may want to cover up the stench, but also sanitize at the same time. You need a double-duty spray to make it worhwhile - and safe. You don't want to inhale more of the bacteria and viruses just because the air seems fresh.
You can read more about the project here (2016) and here (2011); and watch this video,
Several years ago, Poo-Pourri came with a proposition, to trap malodors at their source, in the toilet bowl - and made it sound fun. This fall, they released a new commercial right after the presidential elections - not because we need to deodorize more after the mud-slinging (the gorilla-poop-slinging has been reserved for 2020) - but because they wanted to avoid the « craziness » of the elections.
Here's Poo-Pourri's latest commercial,
Unicorn Gold is a new collection of toilet-bowl sprays available in five scents; they are proposed as companion products to the Squatty Potty, which is meant to help you adopt the best posture on the throne.
Like with Poo-Pourri, you spray downwards towards the bowl. It traps malodors, both in the « drop zone » and « below the surface », thanks to gold nanoparticles using colloidal gold's property of binding to Sulfur compounds. The scents come from essential oils, which is an added bonus as many eos have antiseptic properties.
You can watch the Unicorn-Gold commercial below,
Deodorizing and sanitizing toilets is now fully seen as a societal issue to tackle, one spray at a time. While it sounds like « fake news », it is « real news ». How can you tell? The action on smells. There might be potentially a third, weaponized use of toilet-bowl sprays in some risky places: pepper gas. Now, that's even more real.
