This Is the Easiest Way to Make Your Home Smell Incredible

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Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

Last week, I saw a hack on social media for making your home smell nice that was quite bad. It involved putting essential oils in your vacuum, which you should never do. I recommended a few other home-scenting tips instead, but all of those focused on neutralizing odors, not introducing pleasant ones to the environment. This week, however, social media delivered me a new suggestion for making any room smell nice—and this one won’t damage vacuums (or anything else). It involves hiding little extract-scented pads around your home. 

Use extracts to easily scent your home

First of all, the video I saw was this one, from Kelly the Cleaning Girl, a TikTokker who loves to clean and wear pink. I trusted her instantly when she said that dabbing some extract on a furniture pad and hiding it in your house will make the place smell nice, but I still had some concerns and wanted to test it out. 

My first concern was, “What is a furniture pad?” I went to Target, where I found Scotch felt pads, which I realized have adhesive backing and are meant to be stuck under chair legs to stop them from scratching hardwood flooring. (I have rugs; I didn’t know!) The ones I got aren’t on Target’s site, but they’re comparable to this 32-pack for $4.97. 

My second concern was, “Won’t extract attract bugs?” I checked with Lifehacker’s baking guru, Allie Reinmann, and she said that while extracts are used in food, they themselves have too much alcohol to be considered foodstuffs. They have, she said, “no sugar or anything for bacteria to grow,” so I was sold. She did wonder about how long the smell would last, since the extract would likely evaporate quickly, but I assured her I would find out. I got regular old McCormick pure vanilla extract ($8.39 for two ounces). 

Then I got to work. 

How to covertly scent your home

I got out a sheet of six pads and set it on the counter. I decided to put a little extract on each pad while they were still affixed to the backing sheet, which turned out to be much more clever than I realized. The extract came rushing out of the bottle and got all over the sheet, so I had to kind of move it around so it would touch all the pads. Some pads had more extract and others had less. I thought that was a good experiment. I noticed they looked a little shiny, but were pretty quickly absorbing the liquid, so I let them sit for about five minutes so it could all sink in. Then I took one of the lightly dampened pads and stuck it under the countertop. 

It smelled nice, like vanilla, right away, but I wondered how long it would last. I put the sheet containing the five remaining pads in another room, to see if the smell would be more intense—and long-lasting—in there. 

It’s been about four hours since I did it, but the vanilla smell is still evident in both rooms. A huge success. 

The nice thing about this method is that these pads are already sticky, so you can hide them anywhere, unlike other kinds of air fresheners. The technique is sustainable, too, since you won’t need to buy new pads very often. You can try with essential oils, if you’d like—they would likely last longer, as oil isn't going to evaporate the way an alcohol-based extract would. That said, for me, the extract worked just fine.