By Brenna Conway, Tend, Orange County, California
You can do everything right and still have a scented property.
You can buy the fragrance-free detergent. You can throw out the plug-ins and the candles. You can air the place out for two days between guests. And then a cleaning company arrives with a caddy of their own products and undoes all that progress of evicting the scent.
This is the part most hosts overlook, and it’s arguably the most important one. We’ve been taught that clean is something you can smell. It isn’t. That smell is fragrance.
Most hosts don’t know this, and most never thought to ask. The products in the house are not the products that get used in it. Cleaners bring their own, and they have to, mostly. I’ll explain why further down. But what comes through your door in a caddy is your property’s air quality, and that makes it yours to ask about.
And most people who work around fragrance all day cannot smell it anymore. Spend eight hours a week in it, every week, and your nose simply stops registering it. So when a cleaner tells you a property smells like nothing, they are very often telling you the truth as they experience it.
The reverse is also true. Once you have taken fragrance out of your own life, walking into a room that still has it is overwhelming. That is the person you are preparing the property for. And fragrance only has to get in through one of these doors for the whole effort to come undone, which is why it is worth thinking through every one of them.
That is why these questions have to be about what is in the bottle rather than what the room smells like afterwards. The person who cleaned it is the last person who can answer that second question.
So if you’re converting a property, the cleaner is not a detail you sort out at the end. They are the single biggest variable in whether the place is actually fragrance-free when a guest walks in.
Here is what I would ask, in the order I would ask it.
1. What do you bring with you, and will you use mine instead?
Start here, because the answer tells you almost everything.
A company that can name every product in its kit without looking is a company that has thought about it. A company that says “we use green products” or “we use natural cleaners” has not, or is hoping you won’t ask a second question.
Ask for three things. The products they bring. The ingredient list for each one. And the safety data sheet for each one.
They should be able to send all three on request. A company that employs its cleaners is required to hold a safety data sheet for the hazardous products its staff handle, so that one in particular should take a minute to forward rather than a week to find.
Then ask whether they’ll use products you supply instead.
Many will say no, and a no here is not necessarily a bad sign. If a company employs its cleaners rather than using contractors, those employees’ chemical exposure is the company’s legal responsibility, and in most places that means they can only use products they hold safety documentation for.
A company that says “we can’t use yours, but here is everything we bring and here are the safety data sheets” is giving you a better answer than one that says yes to anything.
What you’re listening for is whether they can explain the no. That is the part that tells you who you’re dealing with, and whether this is going to work.
2. What happens to the cloths between rooms?
This is the question that separates people.
A cloth used in a bathroom and then used on a kitchen counter has moved whatever was in the bathroom onto the surface where someone will prepare food. The same applies to anything scented. If a cloth was washed in a fragranced detergent, it will leave that fragrance on every surface it touches, no matter what was in the spray bottle.
So ask two things. Are the cloths color coded by room, and is a fresh set used in each property.
One set of cloths rotated through five houses carries the first house into the fifth. In an ordinary home that is a hygiene question. In a fragrance-free rental it means the property isn’t fragrance-free.
And ask what the cloths themselves are laundered in. I have met hosts who switched every product in the house and never thought to ask what the cleaner’s microfiber had been washed in. It is the most common way scent gets into a property that is otherwise clean.
3. What goes on the soft surfaces?
Hard surfaces are easy. You wipe them, and whatever you used is mostly gone.
Mattresses, sofas, upholstered headboards, curtains and rugs are different. They hold what you put on them, and they release it slowly for weeks. A fabric refresher sprayed on a mattress is still releasing on day twelve, which is four guests later.
So ask specifically: is anything sprayed on the beds, the sofa or the curtains. Not “do you use air freshener,” which everyone says no to, but what goes on the soft surfaces.
The right answer is usually nothing. Vacuumed with a sealed machine, steamed if the fabric allows it, and left alone otherwise.
If something does need to go on a soft surface, baking soda is the usual fragrance-free answer. It absorbs odor rather than covering it. Ask that all of it is vacuumed back out. Baking soda left behind in the fabric feels gritty and holds moisture. And ask them to leave wool rugs alone. Baking soda is alkaline, and wool does not take well to that.
4. Do they know the difference between fragrance-free and unscented?
Unscented often means a masking agent has been added to cover the smell of the other ingredients. There is more in the bottle, not less.
Fragrance-free means no fragrance has been added.
Essential oils are fragrance. They can be lovely, but they are still a scent that will be in the room after the cleaner leaves. A product can be plant-based, beautifully made, free of everything you’d want it free of, and still leave a property smelling of fir for two days.
If a cleaner’s kit includes something with essential oils in it, that is worth knowing before a guest arrives.
And if a cleaner uses those two words interchangeably, you will need to be specific with them, in writing, about which one you mean.
5. What about the laundry?
I left this one for last because most hosts think they have already handled it. What happens to the laundry once a cleaner is involved is the part that gets overlooked.
If the cleaning company launders your linens, ask what they wash them in, where, and whether that machine also washes other properties’ linens. A fragrance-free detergent in a machine that ran a scented load an hour earlier is not a fragrance-free wash.
In the past I have opened a washer somebody else had been using their own detergent in, and I could smell it before anything had even gone in.
Ask about dryer sheets and fabric softener specifically, by name. They are so routine in most laundries that they often don’t register as products at all. And softener is the harder of the two to undo, because it is designed to coat the fibers rather than rinse out of them.
This is the one I have not solved for myself. I have not found a laundry service I would trust with my microfiber, so I wash all of it at my own home, in a machine that has never run anything but Branch Basics. That is the honest answer.
And if you handle the laundry yourself, or have someone else handle it, be clear in your instructions about what to use. Only the detergent you provide, and nothing added to it.
What a good answer sounds like
You are not looking for a company that says yes to everything. You are looking for one that answers specifically, says no where no is the honest answer, and can tell you why.
And if their values turn out not to align with yours, you will know that early, because they were transparent and knowledgeable about what they carry. That is worth something too.
“We use fragrance-free products” is not an answer.
“Here is every product we bring, here is the ingredient list and the safety data sheet for each one, here is what we use on soft furnishings, our cloths are color coded and a fresh set goes into every property, and they’re laundered in the same fragrance-free detergent” is an answer.
If a company can give you that in one email, you have most likely found the right one.
Brenna Conway owns Tend, a fragrance-free residential cleaning company in Orange County, California.