For example, a couch that smells like a household animal, a stuffed animal having that “grandma” smell, or a carpet peed on and not properly cleaned: it seems like these sorts of smells seep into the object and become nearly impossible to remove economically. You can mask smells with air fresheners, but those usually fade, and they just impart their own opinionated odor to the object. What about odors makes them so inherent to an object over time?
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It’s all down to three factors : smell retention potential of the material, smell sensitivity of the olfactive receptors to said smell, and chemical stability of the smell molecules.
Two different smells will be detected at two VERY variable concentration levels. Then some materials will be hard do clean (think carpets, textiles) as they are on a microscopic level acting like a sponge or a system of caves, compared to order surfaces (glass, PVC flooring, etc.). And finally some molecules will degrade very easily, some others are impossible to break using common cleaning substances or even just UV rays or air oxydation
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