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Get a Whiff of This: Lemon-Scented Clothes

June 27, 2008 -- Looking for a new way to smell better or hide body odor? A new, lemon-scented fabric may help.

In a lab, Portuguese scientists infused a wool-polyester blend with limonene, a lemony scent chemical. Then they tested the fragrance's staying power through dry cleaning and being flexed, rubbed, stretched, and otherwise jostled by an abrasion machine.

The fabric lost 24% of its limonene after one round of dry cleaning, 57% after three dry cleaning cycles, and virtually all of it -- 97% -- after five dry cleaning cycles. It also lost up to 60% of its scent in the abrasion machine.

Still, the researchers call the fabric successful in those tests, since the fragrance held up well enough to meet industrial requirements.

You can't buy that fabric just yet. But potential uses of scented fabrics include shirts, underwear, and suits, the scientists note.

How well did it hide body odor? That wasn't one of the fabric's tests, detailed in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.