Gareth Williams - 16 Jan 2025
Do air purifiers get rid of cooking and curry smells?
WWhen you live in a city, in close proximity to lots of other humans, it’s inevitable: at some point, their gross smells are going to encroach on your life. 🤢
You don’t even have to be living above a curry house or fish and chip shop to experience this distinct downside of city life. You could just be living in a flat, where neighbours’ cooking smells creep up uninvited through the air conditioning or bathroom ventilation systems.
Or maybe you’re in a tightly packed terrace, and next door’s curry smells are all-too-regularly drifting in on a warm summer’s evening when you have the windows and doors open. We love a tikka masala as much as the next person, but nobody wants their homes smelling of one. Especially not someone else’s. And especially not when it goes stale and lingers all day long. 🍛
If you’ve ever tried lighting a scented candle or plugging in an air freshener to get rid of these stubborn smells, you’ll already know that it’s sadly not a very effective strategy. ☹️ If you’re at your wits’ end, you might also be considering tackling the problem with an air purifier, and that’s the subject we’ll be delving into in this article.
Using an air purifier to get rid of cooking smells
Air purifiers are many people’s first port of call when getting serious about cooking smells, but the truth is that their pong impact potential is limited.
That’s because they’re designed to trap particles – such as allergens and specks of dust and pollution – and smells aren’t particles. Getting sciency for a moment 🤓, smells are chemical molecules in the air that we experience as particular scents due to their interaction with the chemicals in our nervous system.
The gold standard of air purifiers have what’s known as a HEPA filter, which stands for High Efficiency Particulate Arrestor, or Absorbing, depending on who you ask. They’re particularly good at trapping particles, but even they don’t work on smells.
So while an air purifier will definitely ‘clean’ the air in your home, and therefore make a difference to how fresh a room feels, don’t be surprised if you’re still smelling that stinky curry even when it’s been quietly whirring away for hours.
But there IS a solution. Step forward the Smell Away®.
How to eliminate cooking odours
The key difference with a Smell Away® is that it has a carbon filter, which is far more effective at trapping disgusting smells and keeping them safely tucked away out of harm’s way.
We might have majored on Indian cooking smells so far in this article, but curry is by no means the only culprit that carbon filter is waiting to tackle. There are of course plenty of other food smells that, while they might get you drooling when you’re labouring over a hot stove and anticipating a meal, you don’t want lingering in your home.
● Bacon 🥓, for instance, is great for breakfast, but that greasy smell isn’t going to seem quite so appealing when you can still smell it by bedtime.
● Same goes for deep fat frying and cooking oil of any kind.
● Chinese cuisines, like stir fry. 🍜
● Heck, even a good old-fashioned Sunday roast can create a bit of a stink for hours after the last spud is dished up. 🍗
The Smell Away® does away with all of this. As one Smell Away user told us: “I have Nigerian neighbours below me who cook very strong-smelling food, and the smell gets into my flat both through the floorboards and via the bathroom ventilation. It really gets me down. Now, at the first whiff of the telltale smells I plug the Smell Away in and it’s smelling fresher within half an hour.”
Conclusion: can you get rid of cooking smells with an air purifier?
Well, in a word, no. You’ll need a Smell Away® for that. Designed to bust all manner of foul odours, the great thing is that as well as dealing with other families’ pesky food smells, it’ll banish everything from the stench of a cat litter tray to the particularly grim and stubborn stink of cigarettes and other types of smoke.
And, added bonus: it’ll also tackle all the things a regular air purifier will, too. So, say goodbye to cooking smells and you can also wave away pollen, mould spores, dust, pollution, pathogens, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and goodness knows what else. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. More like a dozen.