Is it a universally agreed-upon “fresh” smell? Cultural? Or is lemon fragrance just cheap to manufacture and use in products? Something else?
I don’t hate it, but I also don’t care for it, either. Now I’m curious why so many cleaning products use that smell.
Lemon and orange are the easiest scents to achieve from a chemistry standpoint. It probably complements the base smell of a product easier.
Fun fact A professor once told us that a molecule’s chirality can make a diffeence. For example Limonene can either smell like pine or oranges depending on what way the molecule is mirrored.
That makes sense. I guess more people than me are also sick of lemon since the orange scents are always out of stock.
And would you look at that, pine is another extremely common cleaning scent
Damn, that’s interesting. My first thought on hearing that was wondering if pine scented cleaning products are a thing because it’s cheaper to synthesize limonene in both chiralities and then separate after the fact than it is to just synthesize the orange-smelling version.
It doesn’t really hold up to much scrutiny, but it would be pretty damn cool if that fact explained both OP’s question, as well as explained pine-scented cleaning products!
Is this why green sweets are usually lime flavoured when they should all be apple flavoured?