Latest / Privycast / Ep. 195 Mist Madness Privycast March Madness Bracket Tournament of Bathroom Odorizers

Transcript

Ep. 195 Mist Madness Privycast March Madness Bracket Tournament of Bathroom Odorizers · Privycast

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And in short, this is something I levy equally to the medieval apothecaries and to the 20th century, 21st century doTERRA moms.
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Prove it.
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Welcome back to privy privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
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I'm your host, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
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Welcome back everyone.
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Thank you so much for being here and we are nearing the end of February and so that happened.
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real quick, quick brief, we'll peek behind the curtain.
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Today at our church, we had the chili cook-off and I did house probably upwards of a pound, if not two pounds of chili in the course of about an hour between the taste testing
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and the festivities, chili was consumed.
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then chili does what it does when it enters the human person.
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It turns into air somehow.
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And so I do have a bit of a tumble.
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Tumbly rumbly.
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It's mostly air, but we'll keep those things silenced for you, listener of the show.
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But welcome back.
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Thank you for being here.
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And something that pops up at the end of February, as we move into March is everybody is a buzz and everybody is just getting hyped for bracket season.
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Everywhere you look, there seems to be a bracket.
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People are making their brackets for all sorts of things.
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Primarily, it seems basketball, but they also have book brackets, candy brackets, brackets to determine how your door hangs on the wall and the such.
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March is really the month of brackets.
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We might mistake it and say it is spring or March is when the rain might finally let up.
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for us enough to mow the lawn out here in the Pacific Northwest.
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You can tell when you're a Pacific Northwestern-er when you mow the lawn in the rain.
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I am not.
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I'm still a Montana transplant in many ways.
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And so I am not about mowing my lawn in the rain.
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I don't like mowing a wet lawn.
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I'm actually not convinced that mowing your lawn when it's wet is actually all that good for your lawn either.
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But March is bracket month and
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I think that's why it's described as madness.
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Like these brackets truly are madness.
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And when you look at them, you're like, what in the world?
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Like who, who the heck determines this stuff?
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And as I have gone about trying to put together, as we're going to talk here in just a moment.
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somewhat of a bracket for us here on the pod this month.
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I can tell you these brackets are racket.
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Like they are a bunch of noise, a bunch of just nonsense rankings that are really difficult to like get your head around.
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But it's bracket season and here on privy, it's going to be bracket season as well.
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We've done a number of episodes in the past where we have ranked some various things.
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We've ranked
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the best toilet paper, the best shower drink.
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We've ranked the best pumpkin spice bathroom product.
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And in the month of March, we are for our first attempt at this.
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Privy presents to you Mist Madness, a contest and bracket of bathroom air fresheners.
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As is the case with all
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bracket fun, you can fill your bracket out.
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I'm working on helping this be more fillable, but you can fill your bracket out.
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And I would love for you to share those filled brackets with us on the show.
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If, if the bracketing platform of choice that I use does not allow you to fill it in, feel free to print it out even, or you can like save a screenshot on your phone, fill it in and
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send us a picture of those filled out brackets.
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to privycast at gmail.com.
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We would love for you to participate in Mist Madness.
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And there might even be like, you know.
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a little attaboy for how well you do on filling out your missed madness bracket.
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The form can be found in the description down below and I'll be posting it out on privy socials and you can find it on the privycast website privycast privycast privy dash In our
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first venture out
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I want to address a concern at the top that this is just a rank in disguise.
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And in short, no, it is not ranked is trying to look at the best of a thing.
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And while that is what we will be doing, as we will see, we're going to be determining the best way or the most preferred way to control our stink in the bathroom.
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But instead of me sitting here and ranking them via a variety of unconditional means, somehow I always seem to be eating these strange things, putting them in my mouth to try
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to flavor them, to see how they taste.
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We're of course going to look at the history and development of each of these bathroom air fresheners and try to, via a system of voting, more on that in a moment, and
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A system of in-house privy cast trial and error determine what is the winner of Mist Madness tournament of bathroom fresheners.
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Again, there will be an opportunity for you, the listener of privy to interact.
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Keep your eyes open, not just for those brackets to fill out, but for the form to be able to vote in order to determine and
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help guide the winner of this Miss Madness Brackets.
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That said, this is privy Miss Madness.
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So you might fill out your brackets, feel free to send them and share them with the show.
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And to give us some sort of a direction as we dive into the topic of bathroom air fresheners, we're gonna be looking at the history and the development of the winner of the
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bracket in the end of March.
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So the end of March's episode will highlight the winner of these things.
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Now, if there is a total and complete upset, we will...
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retcon in acknowledging the winner and celebrating them while still observing other seats.
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However, we want to cover them all.
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And so we are beginning this week, leading into March, discussing the bottom four seated bathroom freshener items.
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And so we will be discussing in this episode our fifth through eighth seed offerings.
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And that said, we need to lay out the bracket.
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What does it look like and who are the contenders?
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Again, you can find this bracket.
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online and in the links that are provided, but here is a sampling of how things are stacking up.
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So we have number one seed, the scented candle up against odor powders.
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We have our number five seed, potpourri up against our number four seed, potpourri.
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Our number three seed, air freshener.
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versus our number six seed, the fan all by itself, ventilation.
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Then our number seven seed, the oil diffuser up against our number two seed, air spray.
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And while this is not just ranked, there are criteria that we are looking at these bathroom fresheners on.
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The criteria are their effectiveness in de-stinking a big stank like
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If I produce a large, chilly, inspired stink, how good is this bathroom freshener at de-stinking that mess?
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What is the ease of use of the item and the ease of access to you, the privy listener?
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And of course, the popularity vote will be considered.
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Please vote, rank your top eight.
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bathroom freshener products at the survey that is available in the description and on our website privy-caste.
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Again, this is a good time to go fill out your brackets while you listen to this.
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Go, go download that, fill it out, vote in the poll while you're listening and taking in the history of these fifth through eighth seeds.
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And while you're at it, sign up for our email list.
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Don't miss an episode and other things that might happen with us online.
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We would love for you to join us here.
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Your choice.
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But you can find the link for those things in the ding dong below.
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And now as we officially dive into Miss Madness, we got to get to know the competitors a bit.
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First up this week is our eighth seed odor neutralizing powder.
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When we think of odor powders, I often think of those weird foot powders, the stuff my mom would make me sprinkle in my shoes when I was growing up.
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I would play outside in Montana and my feet would get wet from the snow and it really just produced a nasty toe stank in my shoes.
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It wasn't that I had stinky feet.
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It was that my feet got wet and that wet shoe smell really does a number on things.
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It's weird.
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Now that I'm an adult, I don't really have that bad of foot stink.
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Isn't really like noticeable at all.
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And I think it was again, more of my shoes getting wet, but it turns out people have been using powders of various types as deodorants for a long time.
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In the 1800s was a big push for talc and other quote, dusting powders to try and address the various stinks.
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that were a part of everyday life.
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The idea was that you sprinkle the powder and the powder absorbs
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the moisture that the bacteria would make the stink in.
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Bacteria like to procreate and do sex in moisture.
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And so you really got to like limit the moisture.
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And what better way to just drop a fat stack of powder on the mix, really sap that, that wet up.
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In time, they began perfuming these mixtures and giving them a scent to go along with the drying agent.
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We're going to talk more about this when we discuss deodorant and perfume in the future.
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And what's interesting is there was a moment where the odor powders actually like dipped down into the world of liquids, where there were antiseptic liquids that were used for
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odor control.
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under the same premise.
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If the odors are designed to absorb moisture and deal with the bacteria, then if there was an antiseptic or some sort of liquid bacterial killer, it could deal with the bacteria and
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make things smell better by the same means.
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And while at the outset, talc and other deodorizing powders were used on people, would just boom, boom, powder crotch.
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We know that they were used in a wider uses.
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They dumped lime and talc powder into the river Thames to try to deal with the great stink of 1854.
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Go check out our episode on the great stink if you want to know more.
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In fact, many people had a large pit in their backyards or down at the town center where you went to dump your nasty bowls of skeet and well, it gave a whole new meaning to pit
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stank.
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There's accounts of people adding dry soil, ash or lime to these pits to try to deal and mitigate with the smells that dwell there.
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It's like they got these ideas to dump the stuff into the river later.
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And while there is an absorption thing at play here, when things are introduced like lime and others, where there's an actual chemical thing going on, where the pH levels are being
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altered, pH being something I do not understand at all, but I understand it's a science thing, it makes things, for lack of a better way of talking about it, less stinky.
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When toilets began to move above ground and were essentially tanks that dropped down into lower pits, the powders served much like what that mysterious blue juice serves in porta
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potties.
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You got to love the mysterious blue juice.
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Over time, there have been a number of anti-stink powders, which sought to decrease the stank levels in this way.
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Others sought to put the odor blocking technology
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in a packet for easy placement.
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Think it like an odor fighting Zin pouch for your toilet.
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You pop a stank Zin and your toilet gets its little stank buzz on.
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Modern toilet bowl deodorizers contain a mix of baking soda, powdered vinegar for fizzing and odor blocking compounds like Zorbax and Sepofidic scents to help freshen the bowl.
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I need my bowl freshened frequently, might I add.
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Nowadays, most of these powders are hardened into tablets and things you drop either into the bowl or as is most often the case sprinkled into the tank of your toilet.
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So when you flush the smell goody, it's distributed down below.
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Most of the classic powders don't do what they do for home toilets.
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because they're designed and used primarily where the poop will be standing for some time, which in our toilets it does not.
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Most of these are like bath bombs, drop and go solutions for your tank.
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We've come a long way.
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Next up are essential oils.
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There's some white moms out there who heard me say essential oils and they're to be super psyched.
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In short, cultures throughout time have burned oil as a means for their religious practices.
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And often this is done for the various smells which will pour off that oil when you do so.
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How'd they get there?
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Well, when you burn certain things, the things that smell better than the other stuff
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are burned more because they smell better.
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It's really that simple.
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They don't have like old nasty car tire essential oil.
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I mean, they do, but like nobody's buying that because it reeks really bad.
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Ancient cultures would burn these fragrant oils, resins, stained woods as a type of incense not only for worship, but as a means for controlling the stink that was ever
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present in hotter parts of the world and in crowds.
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In fact, there are accounts in many cultures that the gods they worshiped were like disgusted by the stink of the people and demanded that they burn
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these oils and other things to make the people in the crowds more tolerable to them.
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Egyptians would be most famous for their embalming practices and the various spices and other things used in odor control and preservation there.
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Indian medicine and other medicine practices throughout Asia also made these connections.
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Greeks and Romans adopted many of the ancient Mesopotamian practices
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and would even use oils in the public baths, home baths, and for washing their clothes.
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Turns out life's better when things smell really good.
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For a lot of them, the closest equivalent to diffusing oils is that they get when they would heat these large baths and dump oils for fragrance in the oils heated by the water
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served to make the room smell better.
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The idea of what
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Essential oils accomplish really shifted in the Middle Ages where before the thought process about these oils is that they help to cover or mask the smell.
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In the Middle Ages, it is believed the oils and other spices when applied to a space would actually cleanse the air or heal the air of miasma.
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As a result,
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People would often carry around scented burners, burned herbs, or used fragrant oils in crowded spaces or sick bays.
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Apothecaries even began using essential oils and putting them into water and other balms and tinctures.
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This, in many cases, became known as snake oil.
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And these smell good fluids would be used and prescribed to treat many ailments, often simply by their ability to clean or cleanse the air.
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And in short, this is something I levy equally to the medieval apothecaries and the 20th century, 21st century doTERRA moms.
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Prove it.
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It exploded in the face of global trade when the access of these oils and spices exploded.
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They also began to distill these oils and it occurred in the middle ages where the first documents of essential oils being used out of Catalan by a physician named Arnold Dave
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Villanova.
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In the 1600s, Hieronymus Brunchwig, what a name, Hieronymus.
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If you're ever looking for kid names, look no further than Hieronymus Brunschwig.
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But he detailed the extraction of oils like lavender and juniper in a book called, quote, new book on distillation of waters.
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This distilling took the ideas of the apothecary and applied them to the ideas of aromatherapy.
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The idea that the things you breathe and the things you smell can have an impact
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on your overall health.
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However, when it comes to odor control, it turns out in the 1800s, which how bad did the 1800s smell, that every turn they were just grasping for ways to control how bad
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everything smelled.
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Like the world has to reek pretty bad for you to be like, I wonder if we can use this other new strange item to make our world smell better.
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But in the late 1800s, they did scientific experiments to figure out
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What exactly these extracted oils did?
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Like we've extracted the oil from these very good leaves, but like, what does it do?
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Much like the powders, some of them had antiseptic qualities, which not only freshened the air, but likely helped remove or diminish bacteria.
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The rest really is history.
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With varying claims and healing properties, today,
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There are over 40 essential oils that have been identified.
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Essential oils is a liquid and aromatic extract usually obtained by steam distillation from a plant which concentrates its active ingredients into an oil.
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The essentials, if you will.
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I'm told by the internet that the best bathroom essential oils are lemon,
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tea tree, eucalyptus, peppermint, and lemongrass.
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I'll be using a orange scented essential oil.
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And when they figured out that you can actually market and sell a machine that'll diffuse these oils and spit them into your air, well, boy, when there was money to be made, they
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figured out how to make it.
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Next up, and
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Probably our most lackluster and definitely the most unique amongst our contestants are fans.
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It's solely designed to remove the stain.
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Fans do little to actually like change the smell of the room other than like removing the bad smell.
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They are.
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primarily focused on getting rid of the bad stank.
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Fans have been around forever, but that isn't exactly what we're talking about here.
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The fans in question don't need you to do much, other than just, like, turn on the switch.
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In ceiling home ventilation bathroom fans saw their rise around the industrial revolution.
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With growing population centers and other concentrations of people into rural settings, the need to vent the stink and to get the air moving became evident.
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It became clear that you want to make sure a room is well ventilated because you never know who is going to let loose when they're in there.
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While natural ventilation probably did a lot in the past, no windows in a space means you need to pump the bad air out.
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We'll look at fans more in the future because they're actually super cool.
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But yeah, for this
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Tournament.
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Our-
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Number 6 seed is JustFan
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And that brings us to our number five, potpourri.
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Potpourri or as I thought it was called potpourri up until probably like high school is in short a mixture of like dried dead plants.
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You dry out plant material and you use it to create a natural scent in residential spaces.
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The term potpourri.
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is French and could come from a couple places.
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The French called the soup that it could be named after the rotten pot, which is a loose translation from the Spanish soup again that they are trying to make fun of.
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That Spanish soup being made by just kind of throwing everything that you can into the pot, if you will.
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Popery can also be the term used for a medley.
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And honestly, no matter which way you go about it, both ideas work pretty well here.
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As the fragrant flowers and other sweet smells of the season faded into the wintertime and into the fall, they would be dried and placed in a bowl to continue the smells of the
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spring and summer
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into the next season.
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Modern potpourri contains a large variety of dried plant material and in some cases they actually odourize, apply an additional scent to the things contained in the potpourri bag.
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Some common natural contenders as potpourri mixtures include allspice, cedar, cinnamon bark, cloves, cypress, fennel, incense, jasmine, jujube, juniper, lavender, lemon balm,
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lemon peel, morjoram, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon, mignon,
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Mugwort, that sounds like a Harry Potter thing.
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Mugwort.
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Professor Mugwort.
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Orange peel.
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Pellar- Pelargonium.
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Yep.
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Pine.
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Love pine.
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Pine's so good.
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Rose and Rosemary.
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Popery is an interesting thing.
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And honestly, whenever I see popery, which I have bought some for this missed madness, a tournament in bracket,
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of bathroom air fresheners.
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Anytime I look at it and anytime I see poper anywhere though, I just think, that's weird.
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Kind of freaks me out.
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And so these are our four bottom seed contenders.
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We'll be looking at more of our contenders as we move further into our tournament of bathroom fresheners.
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Again, please go fill out your brackets, go rank your favorite bathroom fresheners using the survey that is in the description.
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And this will bring us to the end of another episode of privy.
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Before saying bye.
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I want to tell you something that I'm very excited about.
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It's been a long time and a lot of work coming, but we have privycast merch.
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Now, you can find this merch at privy-cast.com slash store, or you can just go to the privycast website, privy-cast.com, and there is a button at the top with a link to our
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store.
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Now, right now, we have a handful of items and we plan to continue to add more things
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as the store grows.
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But go get some merch, rep your favorite bathroom podcast, and we would love to see you in that stuff.
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You can post it online and use hashtag privy merch or tag us at privycast or you can just send us privycast at gmail.com.
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We would love to hear from you and see those things.
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And it's just one more way that you can support the show.
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Thank you so much.
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Another way you can support the show is by leaving a rating review.
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The five star options are preferred and for every rating review you leave, we'll donate some money to Wounded Warriors and Living Water International in a reminder to keep
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pooping in the free world.
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This free world was not always free and in pursuit of cleaner water for all.
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Not everybody has it, but everybody should.
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Purchases on that privycast store help generate funds which can be help facilitate those donations to these nonprofits.
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Thank you so much.
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for listening and for supporting the show in that way.
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This brings us to the end of another episode of privy.
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Thank you so much for listening.
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Thank you to Kevin and Pondy for the use of their music and all other people whose music we use.
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You can find links and what music was used in the ding dong below.
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This brings us to the end of another episode of privy.
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Thanks for being here.
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Thanks for listening.
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Keep pooping in the free world.
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Own your sting.
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Don't forget to fill out them brackets.
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It's bracket season.
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And now, as always,
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Don't forget to flush.