OT: alcohol based perfume removal?

We been there. Ask the neighbors is no help.

I sincerely hope you or anyone you love ever get sensitive. Your outlook will change dramatically.

Magazines and catalogs have finally stopped putting sniffers in them around here. They made all your mail sitting with them in the box toxic.

Except they give folks with sensitive skin a rash. Do not believe the hype. We found out the hard way.

It goes all the way through to my skin. Even gets my socks under my boots. My shower after going to work are interesting.

And it get in my lungs, which I blow off on my family. Wearing a carbon impregnated mask helps about 50% -- both at work and at home. It takes three days for my lungs to fully clear out. They are not real effective.

Yup. I inherited my mother's sensitivity to a bunch of aromatics - orange oil and perfumes are the biggest problems. They give me (and her) a really nasty headache, which seems to involve some amount of vasoconstriction in the veins or arteries in the skull. I learned at a very early age to avoid people wearing perfume, the perfume sections of stores, and so forth... "exhale sharply, hold breath, leave the area ASAP" is still my recipe 60-some years later. Getting past the duty-free area in airports is often a trial.

A couple of decades ago, when I was working at a small startup company in Palo Alto, the office manager (wife of the engineering VP) came in to work wearing the then-popular perfume "Giorgio" - a very strong floral/musky scent. By lunchtime I had developed the only migrane headache I've ever had, including scotomas in my visual field so bad I could barely see. I went home. When I got there, I found I'd actually become aphasic - I could't speak coherently to my wife (which scared her quite badly). All I could do was take some painkillers, a dose of antihistamine, and a Bronkaid (contains ephedrine, which seems to help) and doze for a few hours until it wore off.

I was fine the next day (and had a personal appreciation for what a stroke might feel like). I spoke with the office manager and asked her _never_ to wear that perfume to the office again - she was horrified by what had happened and promised to avoid it (and did, for the rest of the time we worked together).

I, like some others here, hate those perfumed fabric-softener "dryer sheets". They dump so much perfume into the outside air during a drying cycle that I can smell and taste them a hundred yards down-wind of the house using them. They're the olfactory equivalent of a car which sits at a light blasting away with 300 watts of whomp-whomp- whomp amelodic music... a socially-unpleasant way of marking territory, I suppose.

One of the things which immediately caught my notice about a lady in my Tai Chi class, decades ago, was that she didn't wear any perfume (or makeup for that matter). When she invited me for "gastronomic decadence" after class (frozen yoghurt at The Good Earth) I accepted. We've been married for 35 years now, and she still doesn't use perfume or makeup.

Even so, you still have no grounds to sue anyone. If you want your neighbour to redirect the exhaust vent, rather offer to pay yourself the modification, and add a bonus to your neighbours for the disturbance you provoke.

That's how things are.

Suing over things like this is like pissing in the wind. Either your neighbors will be considerate of others or they will not. Karma will eventually catch up with them.

I was a chemist for maybe two years. I had a BS and was just a pair of hands. You need a PhD to do anything useful. Any lesser degree and you are just Beaker, the lab assistant getting blown up and developing cancer, one step above the lab rats.

I quit and got a job in electronics at the same pay, without a degree.

My having the condition does not change the facts which you seem to be exaggerating.

No, that's not how things are. But you have to be able to prove your claims and that is not easy to do in a court using their rules of evidence. It would be a civil case and you have to prove harm and causality. I think proving harm is the hard part, but causality is not going to be easy either.

Would it not be nice if folks were just considerate of others?

On one occasion I stopped at a stall set up by the local Council to promote something-or-other they were doing. As I was talking to one of the Officers, the wind changed direction and I was overpowered by perfume from a shop two streets away.

The Officer was appaled and said I should get in touch with them in writing and make a formal complaint. This I did - the reply a couple of weeks later was that my complaint could only be followed up if I lived in the same street as the shop.

On another occasion some neighbours sprayed perfume around and drove me out of my house completely. I finished up sleeping on the floor at a relative's house. Having got no action whatsoever from the Environmental Health Officer, I decided to retaliate against my neighbours and drive them out of their house. I set up a large P.A. amplifier on a time switch and played loud disturbing sounds for periods of about ten minutes each at random intervals throughout the night.

Eventually they called in the Environmnetal Health Officer, who came round and threatened me with prosecution and imprisonment. He backed down when I pointed out that I would make sure the court and the press knew that I was only doing it because of his department's failure to take action.

He then gave me an emergency 'phone number to contact him if I was driven out by perfume again, and a sample bag to collect air samples. For a week nothing happened, then in the early hours of one morning the house filled with perfume. The 'emergency' number was never answered and the air sample, which I delivered to their office in person later that morning, went missing and was found under a desk three weeks later.

From personal experience I have many more stories like that. Perfume allergy just isn't treated seriously.

That is a good excuse for not giving a s*it about what harm your behavior causes your neighbors.

And I am not exaggerating. You need to watch helplessly as someone you love gasps in terror trying to breath. Or maybe have it happen to you.

Whatsoever you would have others do unto you, do unto them. Have you ever heard of "karma"?

I'm surprised that natural scents are an issue. If you are sensitive to orange oil, can you not handle an orange or eat orange?

I stopped wearing cologne and now wear essential oils because they don't cause me any trouble. They don't last as long, but I haven't found anyone they offend. Now that you mention it, I will look for orange oil next time I'm in the store. I would like wearing that and I don't think it will be strong enough to bother anyone here through the Internet.

Never in retaliation to perfume attacks, but I have often fantasized about acoustic responses to acoustic attacks from my neighbors. Where I live in Virginia is on a lake with seasonal neighbors. 8 months out of the year I hear nothing because they aren't there. When they show up in the summer months they want to play loud music at all hours. I'd like to find their weekday homes and play loud music when they are trying to relax or sleep.

I understand you can mix two ultrasonic sources and produce a beat pattern. If the ultrasonic signals are modulated, one of the results is the unmodulated signal. :0 They wouldn't even know which direction it is coming from. It wouldn't even need to be loud, just disturbing in some way. Maybe something from a horror movie?

Done at a very low level might allow for subliminal messages... That could be interesting.

This is the sort of exaggeration I'm referring to.

You still can't respond to the actual statement I made.

Here you have gone off the deep end casting me as someone who creates problems for you. You've lost it now.

The condition is very real. People like you who can't be rational about it and only talk in terms of emotion should stay away from the forefront or others will think we are all like you.

The normal thought is that you are simply mad and ignore you, as that neighbour did with her clothes dryer.

Would you say that if I were your neighbour and regularly made a bonfire of old tyres?

Most people, you included, have no idea how disruptive and debilitating perfume allergy can be. I cannot use public transport, many shops are out of bounds, on occasions I have had to leave my purchases on the counter and walk out when someone wearing perfume joined the queue behind me.

I have twice been invited to appear as a guest speaker at events and then had the invitation cancelled when they discovered I was perfume allergic. In one job, a cleaner thought it would be funny to spray perfume into the laboratory where I worked - I finished up having to climb out of a window onto the roof outside. In another employment I wasn't able to use the toilets until I had gone in with breathing apparatus and disconnected the newly-installed perfume dispenser which the manager kept referring to as a "Fresh air unit". He had installed it in the full knowledge that I was allergic to it, but simply didn't care.

I have had to miss planned trips when a passenger got in the van wearing perfume - I had to get out the other side quickly and wouldn't have been fit to drive if I had stayed in there. I have travelled 40 miles to a dance, only to turn round and come home again because someone was wearing overpowering perfume.

There is a small group of us that meet regularly to listen to music, I can no longer go to the meetings because a disabled member, who is brought by his carers, always uses perfume. If I suggested that he shouldn't be allowed to come because of the effect his perfume had on me, there would be uproar and charges of discriminiation - but all he has to do to accommodate my disability is just stop wearing the poisonous stuff.