How to Make Your Bathroom Smell Good: 10 Genius Hacks to Get the Stink Out

These tips and tricks will become game- changers to make your bathroom smell nice and get rid of that nasty stench forever.

1. Keep your towels dry.

Storing towels when they’re still damp is a bad idea in any case. But if you do it in the bathroom, it’s especially bad, as it’s a very humid environment. It’s advised to dry towels, just after using them, in the sun. Then you can hang them again in the shower when they’re a bit dry, but it’s better if you keep them somewhere even drier. In addition, it’s also very important to wash them frequently and to hang them instead of folding them when storing them.

2. Take advantage of the acidic power of lemon.

The lemon is one of your best friends when it comes to cleaning and removing bad odors. Besides leaving a pleasant smell and neutralizing bad odors, it’s a good natural cleaner. These properties come from the high levels of citric acid it contains. Ideally, the way you should use lemon is by rubbing one all over your bathroom after cleaning things with your everyday household detergent. This way, its effect will last longer on surfaces and it will get the job done.

3. Aromatize with oils.

Aromatic oils are great allies when it comes to perfuming your home and avoiding bad smells. A good way to use aromatic oils is to soak a cotton ball in baby oil — or any other essential oil of your choice — and strategically place it around the bathroom. For example, you can keep one inside the wastebasket before putting a liner in it so that when you open it, the whole area will smell nice. Another good place is in the toilet paper roll or the mug or glass in which you keep your toothbrush.

4. Combine water and softener.

Here’s another good hack to ensure that your towels always smell good, especially those that you use most often (like hand towels and shower towels). Since these towels are constantly exposed to bad smells and bacteria from your skin, you can spray a mixture of water and fabric softener on them. A mix of water, baking soda, and fabric softener can also be used as a DIY freshener.

5. Rely on baking soda.

Another household cleaning product we can always rely on is baking soda. Baking soda is already well known for getting rid of the nastiest and toughest smells. Ideally, you should use it in your cleaning routine by combining it with boiling water. You can then use the resulting mix by pouring it onto surfaces you want to clean. Let it sit for a while before removing it. If you really want it to go a long way, you can combine this method with the cleaning suggestions from point 2.

6. Make perfume for your toilet brush.

Despite what many people believe, the toilet brush is not sentenced to be forever nasty and bad smelling. On the contrary, it can actually become a great way to keep your bathroom smell pleasant. In fact, one of the top-secret and most effective hacks hotel owners use is to scent their brushes. Yep, you read that right, they scent the brushes. After finishing your cleaning session, it’s recommended to add a few drops of essential oil to the brush so that it evaporates, little by little, while leaving a pleasant scent behind, keeping the place fresh.

7. Place aromatic soaps in the bathroom.

A very important thing to take into account when thinking about bathroom scents is the choice of soap you use. Depending on what your preferences are, you might choose to use an unscented soap or a combination of different scented soaps. In any case, what’s clear is that the scent they give off will affect the smell of the room in general. If what you want to achieve is a space with a pleasant fragrance, choose scented soaps, especially if you keep them exposed, like on the sink, for example.

8. Add detergent to the toilet tank.

In addition to all the products available to make the water running through the toilet fresher, there is also a little tip you can use to make it smell nice. Just add a little detergent (that has a pleasant scent, of course) to the water that will be released once you press the handle down to flush. That way, it will release a pleasant and vibrant scent that will linger in the air for a long time.

9. Make homemade air fresheners.

Lately, making homemade air fresheners has become a sort of trend that many people decided to embrace, mainly because of how practical and inexpensive the whole idea is compared to buying traditional products. Making a homemade air freshener is actually quite simple. The only things you’ll need are a nice glass bottle, sticks, water, alcohol, and your favorite essential oils. If you have not yet decided which oil you like most, we’ve made a short list of the most popular oils that people typically use to make the air in their homes fresh.

Lavender
Tea tree
Eucalyptus
Peppermint
Sweet orange
Lemongrass

10. Ventilate the room on a daily basis.

In addition to all of the above, the simplest and healthiest hack of all is the most obvious one: allow for air circulation. Ventilating your place will make any musty odors flow out. It is recommended to open the windows every day for at least 15 minutes, which, according to electric companies, should be enough to make sure fresh air comes in without you having to spend too much energy reheating the place during the winter months, for example. Not only will you breathe in fresh air, but any viruses or bacteria that may have accumulated since the last time you ventilated the place will also be gone.