Top 10 Ways To Banish Bad Smells From Your Home And Your Body

Pet odours, stinky shoes, mildew-y wet laundry, and your everyday household odours: A spray of Febreze might not be enough to conquer them. Here’s how to get your home and yourself smelling fresher.

Photos by Kaz, HomeSpot HQ, trendttsd

10. Neutralise Pet Odours With Vinegar Or Tea Leaves

Magical substance vinegar works great for deodorising rooms and pets (who don’t don deodorisers). The vinegar neutralises both new and old pet odours if you spray on carpets.

If the awful smells are coming from the cat litter (which is supposed to help reduce odour!), you might want to mix some dried tea leaves into the litter box.

9. Deodorise Just About Anything With Cat Litter

On the other hand, if the smell is outside of a litter box, kitty litter could do wonders: in stinky shoes, in the fridge, at the bottom of trashcans. The cat litter soaks up odours — even musty ones from clothes pulled out of storage — but you’ll have to change it weekly (or before it gets damp).

8. Store Newspaper In Plastic Containers To Keep Them Odour-Free

Plastic containers absorb the smells of whatever you’ve stored in them, sometimes even long after washing the containers. Crumple up some newspaper pages and store them in the containers and you’ve got an odour-free container for your next use.

7. Remove Odours From Trash Cans And Fridges With Newspapers

Yup, newspapers again. Crumpled-up newspaper can take the place of bicarb soda for deodorising just about any container in your home — trashcans, shoes and fridges could be considered containers of sorts.

6. Make Your Closet Smell Fresher With Chalk

Hang some chalk in your closet and the chalk will absorb moisture, which could cause your clothes to stink. That’s probably enough said.

5. Get The Smoke Smell Out of Clothes With Dryer Sheets

Dryer sheets to the rescue. If there are a few things you own with some lingering smoke odour on them, try putting then in Ziploc bags with a dryer sheet or two. For furniture and other smoke-tainted items, we’ve got other suggestions.

4. Get Rid Of Garlic Or Onion Smell On Your Hands

So maybe you don’t have any of the odour issues above. Chances are, though, if you cook you’ll get some stinky garlic or onion smell on your hands. The quick solution: rub your hands with something that’s stainless steel — a spoon or even the edge of your sink — under cold water. Goodbye lingering cooking smell.

3. Neutralise Body Odour With Bicarb Soda

Baking soda neutralises the PH of your sweat, decreasing the odour-causing bacteria in your armpits and feet. In other words, it’s a natural deodorant.

2. Learn How To Defeat Bad Breath

Don’t be embarrassed, halitosis affects many of us. But there’s lots you can do about it, from seeing if you have bad breath to fixing it with good-breath-friendly foods like cinnamon and good hygiene.

1. When In Doubt, Try Vinegar, Bicarb Soda Or Newspapers

So many of the odour-busting tips we’ve featured over the years involve the same ingredients: vinegar, baking soda and newspapers. So you should probably have these items on hand to conquer most odourp roblems, inexpensively and naturally. (Vinegar removes mildew smells from wet laundry, as well as many lingering food smells.) Unlike air fresheners, they don’t mask smells, but rather work to absorb moisture and neutralise the causes of these odours so both you and your home can smell fresh.