Tag: smell

odor-absorbing paint

The other day I painted the baby room, and the paint was supposedly odor-free.  That was a lie!  It might be reduced odor, but there was most definitely still a paint smell to it.  At least it was VOC-free, so hopefully it wasn’t harmful.

One nice benefit of the paint is that it’s supposed to absorb odors.  (So shouldn’t it absorb its own odor?  If so, then wouldn’t it not smell when you open the lid?  But it did, so their claim smells fishy, er, well, painty.  Whatever.)  The odor-absorbing feature will be a good thing in a baby room, with all the upcoming diaper changes.  Maybe I should repaint the bathroom while I’m at it…  🙂

BTW, the name of the color is “potentially purple”.  (It’s for a girl’s room, and it’s a nice compromise of not being hardcore pink).  It’s definitely purple, so I don’t know what is “potentially” about it.  It is or it isn’t.  But what do I know about colors — I’m a man.  To men, there are 16 colors, and you can have light or dark variations of those colors.  There’s no need to know the names of 16.7 million colors.

Help, my bathroom smells like crap!

If your bathroom stinks, a common practice is to light a candle.  But sometimes a single candle just doesn’t cut through the effervescence of flatulescence.  You could try lighting an array of candles, although you might not want to go through that trouble, or you might not have multiple candles available.  So here’s what you can do — just burn the whole candle at once.  That way, all the freshness gets released at once.

(Tip: It works better if the candle is not in a glass container.  Photo is for illustration purposes only.)

a new promotional idea for restaurants

I thought of a great marketing scheme for restaurants that have foods with a particular olfactory “signature”.  By that, I mean they have a certain recognizable smell that makes people think of that restaurant.  The example I will provide is Arby’s, where I ate earlier this week with some of the Buffet o’ Blog staff.  Their curly fries are scrumptious, and even the smell of them is good.

So I think places like Arby’s should give promotional (read: free or discounted) meals to a few folks at each company in town every so often, around 11:15, with the restrictions that they eat it at their desk.  Imagine the smell of Arby’s curly fries wafting over the cubicle walls, causing co-workers to drool over the appealing aroma.  This would surely increase sales at Arby’s, because some people would go that day because “it just sounds good” (even though they were unknowingly coerced), and some people would get the idea in their head and start looking for the next convenient time to stop by there.

I think this would work.  They spend a lot of money on TV commercials and other ads, and they have their place, but the smell of curly fries and one of their famous roast beef sandwiches would bring in more people, I think.  It’s easy to overlook TV commercials and radio jingles, but it’s difficult to put aside the idea of Arby’s after smelling those curly fries.

I volunteer the services of the entire Buffet o’ Blog staff (all 3 of us) to participate in this venture.  We will conduct market research and report the effectiveness of our campaign.  Arby’s just needs to provide the food on a recurring basis.  (So if any Arby’s rep is reading this, have your people contact my people.)