You just painted your room, but you just can’t stand the awful paint smell. What must you do to get rid of the fumes? Read on to find out.

When something has a smell or odor, you are inhaling very small concentrations of a chemical compound that is present in the air you breathe. Human beings can detect concentrations in parts per billion (ppb), while some animals are even more sensitive and can detect concentrations that are imperceptible to the human nose.

If you are bothered by the smell of a liquid, it’s because a very small concentration of the liquid is evaporating and you can detect the molecules of the vapor that you inhale. Oil-based paints predominantly have an odor due to the organic solvents that are incorporated in their formulation.

As the solvents evaporate through the paint film, you can easily smell them. Fortunately, most of the solvents evaporate fairly soon after painting has been completed, but bear in mind that some solvents evaporate very quickly while others take longer to escape from the paint film.

Oil-based paints also contain liquid plasticizers and resins that evaporate extremely slowly. Unfortunately, these agents often contain the most unpleasant odors. Soon after oil-based paint is applied, you will predominantly smell the solvents, but as time passes, you start to smell the slowly evaporating plasticizers and resins.

Over a period of time, the evaporation of minute concentrations of these ingredients will be so small that they will be undetectable. In any case, there are ways to alleviate the smell of these myriad of volatile organic compounds as quickly as possible.

Paint Smell Removal

• Of course, the best way to remove paint smell is to wait for it to go away. In just a couple of days or less, the paint smell should be gone on its own. Eventually, the evaporation of the ingredients will be below the detectable limit and you will no longer experience the odor.
• Open your windows and let the fresh air in. It turns out that opening the windows and doors every couple of days for a whole day will help get the stink of paint out of a home. Lord knows why, but it’s possible that the air flow allows the paint fumes to escape, leaving the house smelling more like a house than a paint factory.
• If the paint smell is particularly harsh, and you need to cover it up fast, simply light a wooden match in the middle of that room. Lighting a match produces sulfur dioxide. This chemical is so strong that it hides most other odors from your noses for a short time.



• Lighting a candle even an unscented one in your freshly painted room can eliminate odors. If you don’t want to create a possible fire hazard because you have kids or pets, set a candle that has a strong fragrance in your bathroom. It will just cover up odors instead of getting rid of them, but at least that room in your house will smell better for a little while.You can also hit two birds with one stone by lighting a Bath & Body Works Vanilla Candle. Burn one after painting your room — it’s gentle enough scent to not be too overpowering in and of itself and you will notice that the area smells quite nice.
• Speaking of vanilla, you can get that nice vanilla scent without the fire hazard by adding the vanilla extract right into the paint itself. So instead of dizzying fumes, you’ll get a nice vanilla scent with your freshly painted room. All you need to do is add one teaspoon of vanilla extract to every gallon of paint.
• Another method for masking odors is to place small bags of coffee, tea, mint extract or other fragrances in the areas where the odors are most offensive. Be aware however, since this ploy only masks the paint odors and does not remove them.
• There’s another way to speed smell removal time without lighting up or masking the fumes. Put a bucket of water in the middle of the freshly painted room and let it stay with the paint fumes. You’ll be surprised to find in the morning that the smell is gone. The water actually absorbs the smell. Just like if you put uncovered water in the fridge where the water absorbs everything around it and tastes terrible, the same principle applies to this deodorizing method. Also, if a bucket of water could do that, just imagine what natural absorbents can accomplish!



• Charcoal is on the top of the list of smell deodorizers as it is one of the best absorbent agents that can soak up the bad odor. You can put a medium-sized chunks of charcoal inside the freshly painted room, and leave it there for a whole days. You will notice that it can effectively remove the paint fume smell.
• Baking soda is also a good absorbent. Put a generous amount of baking soda in an uncovered container — the size of the container depends on the size of the room you’ve painted — and leave it for several days. Remove the baking soda and replace it with a new one every couple of days. Continue replacing the baking soda until it has cleared the paint fume smell.
• Chop an onion in half and put both halves inside the room. The onion works as an absorbent as well. Don’t worry about the onion smell, because the paint smell that it’ll absorb basically trumps that out.

In addition, the best thing about using absorbents is that you can actually use them all at the same time or with other deodorizing methods to achieve better results without worrying about violent chemical reactions. That is, you can use the onion, baking soda and bucket of water methods simultaneously for better odor removal.

Of course, it need not be said that some of these deodorizing agents can be fire hazards, so please don’t use the vanilla-scented candle method with the bricks of charcoal method; that’s just asking for trouble, especially considering that paint is flammable.

Paint Smell FAQ

* What is paint?

When the mixture is applied to a surface, the solvent evaporates into the air, but the binder and pigment remain. The binder is a glue-like material that forms a film that clings to the surface. The pigment, or color, is dispersed in the film and acts as the evaporating solvent that gives paint its odor.

That’s all there is to basic paint. But latex paint is a bit more complicated. Like all paint, it contains binder, pigment and solvent, but it has another ingredient–water. Many people call the water in latex paint the solvent. But strictly speaking, the water does not dissolve anything. It merely separates and suspends the spherical globs of binder and pigment particles. This is why you may have heard latex paint referred to as an emulsion. It’s a mixture in which particles of a substance are immersed, but not dissolved, in a liquid.

In latex paint, the binder particles are as hard in the can as in the final film. It’s no coincidence that paint chemists refer to binder as a solid. The binder gives paint its resistance to abrasion, called scrubability. To a large degree, it’s responsible for the paint’s shine and its resistance to ultraviolet rays. A chemically sophisticated binder has more binder particles, which makes the paint more expensive.

* What causes paint to smell so bad?

Traditional latex binder is so hard that it needs to be temporarily softened with solvent to allow the binder globs to stretch and become oval-shaped. As already mentioned, it’s the solvent itself that gives paint its distinctively harsh smell.

There are also other chemicals, aside from solvents, that contribute to latex-paint odor. As a class, these materials are known as paint additives. For example, amines, which are materials that are chemically related to ammonia, are added to paint to improve its chemical stability across a range of temperatures. This is especially important in latex paint, because even the best quality latex is 65% water. Other materials that contribute to paint odor are mildewcides and chemicals called rheology modifiers. These are the substances that help the paint form a smooth coating.

Finally, no matter what kind of paint you use, you’re liable to notice some odor immediately after applying it. This phenomenon has less to do with the paint than the substrate. If you apply any liquid over a surface, the surface itself will release an odor. Some of the odor associated with paint is really the smell of the surface below it being moistened with water or solvent.

Paint Smell Prevention

* Low Odor, Solvent-free Latex Paint

Until recently, you just had to grin and bear it when it came to paint fumes. Today, you can avoid the harsh smell of paints entirely by buying some genuine low odor, solvent-free latex paint. Indeed, the odorless, self-coalescing binders of solvent-free latex paint are certainly a major chemical breakthrough, but paint manufacturers told consumers that there are trade offs to that. For example, the softer binders don’t provide the hardness or scrubability that other binders do.

Also, solvent-containing latex paint is available in a gloss that rivals oil-based paint, but solvent-free latex is available only to the semi-gloss level. While solvent-free latex paint can be tinted to any color, the colorants contain solvents and the darker colors contain more solvent than the lighter colors.