When crafting a welcoming living space, the way it looks is usually top of mind. But even if your home is outfitted with the best designer furniture, striking decor and original art by a top interior designer, it's still going to underwhelm and possibly offend your guests — and yourself — if it smells bad. A good-smelling home makes a huge difference in the overall livability of your space, and there are a few ways to make your place smell better.
You can light candles, opt for an oil diffuser or use an air freshener. Traditional air fresheners release harmful pollutants and chemicals into your air, and for that reason, we don't recommend them (honestly, they don't smell that great either). But as the cleaning and home goods industries have shifted to more natural products in recent years, a new crop of natural and luxurious room sprays has cropped up. These room sprays are simple to use, make your home smell great and do so while still being safe for your family. We tested several of the best room sprays on the market to find the ones you should be using to freshen up your home.
What to Look for in a Room Spray
When searching for a room spray, the main thing you need to be checking is the ingredient label. We like sprays that are naturally formulated and free of harmful chemicals like VOCs, phosphates, phthalates, all of which are potentially linked to various health problems. Sprays should be scented with essential oils and other natural sources rather than artificially, as these will both smell better and give you peace of mind.
Another thing to check is the bottle itself and how it sprays. Traditional air fresheners use aerosol cans, which have been shown to have an adverse effect on the environment and are a driver of climate change. Our recommended room sprays eschew aerosol cans in favor of spray bottles, which don't use any pressurized gas. This results in larger droplets and a less efficient spray, but the lessened environmental impact is definitely worth it.
How We Tested
After seeking out quality brands and scents that garnered the most interest and best reviews online, we called in our top candidates and got to testing. We sprayed these room sprays in our own homes, seeing how they performed in a variety of settings: freshening up a stuffy bedroom, spraying them directly on furniture to test for longevity, spraying in the entryway before leaving home to see if any scent remained hours later upon returning, covering up smells from cooking and cat litter and more. After living with these sprays for several weeks, these are the bottles that most impressed us.
Diptyque Baies Room Spray
Yes, Diptyque's products are expensive. Yes, it's a luxury brand. That doesn't matter. This is one of those times when the seemingly inflated price of a luxury product is 100 percent justified in our eyes. Of all the room sprays we tested, none came close to matching Diptyque's overall combination of scent quality and staying power. We tested its most popular Baies scent, which translates to berries, but in our experience smelled more like walking into a fresh meadow of spring flowers and raspberry bushes than a pile of fruit — and that's a good thing.
In addition to being the lushest and lifelike scent we tested, Diptyque's room spray also offered the most staying power. Our tester could spray two spritzes in a room and still pick up the scent a couple of hours later. That's important because this is expensive juice. It also looks pricey, with a beautiful glass bottle — and nice outer box — that is begging to be put on display.
Aesop Istros Aromatique Room Spray
If you thought Diptyque was pricey, meet Aesop. The cult-favorite luxe home goods brand offers its room sprays at $61 a bottle, which is $11 less than Diptyque's $72 price tag. But with Diptyque, you're getting 5.1 oz of product, while Aesop's bottle contains just 3.4 oz, making it almost 4 bucks more per ounce. So what are you getting for that extra cost? In a word: luxury. While Diptyque's Baies smells fresh and gorgeous, Aesop's Istros — which has notes of tobacco, cedar and sandalwood — smells like the lobby of a five-star hotel. It smells like a place where rich people hang out, as cheesy as that sounds, and spraying it in your home will definitely make you and your guests feel like they're living it up a bit.
Aesop's brown glass bottle matches the rest of the brand's bougie apothecary aesthetic, and the nozzle sprays efficiently with better dispersion than others we tested. This does result in a bit of an aerosol-like hairspray note when you first spray it, our tester says, but that dissipates within a minute or so. Afterward, you're left with a smokey, incense-like smell that will last a good hour or two.
Mrs. Meyer's Room Freshener
Mrs. Meyer's is one of the most popular natural cleaning brands on the market, and they owe a big chunk of its popularity to the way its products smell. Every Mrs. Meyer's product is scented, and all of its scents are naturally derived and garden-inspired. When it comes to room sprays, they offer a ton of options — around five bucks — and your mileage may vary with them. But they're cheap enough to try out a few until you find one you like, and then switch it up when you're tired of it (our tester enjoys Lemon Verbena for its tart, summery scent).
While our tester appreciates Mrs. Meyer's scent quality and lack of harmful chemicals, he did note that their scents definitely don't last long. You can expect about 15 minutes of freshness before you need to respray. Luckily, this stuff is cheap and comes in a huge bottle — a full 8 oz — so having to spray so often at least won't break the bank.
P. F. Candle Co. Teakwood & Tobacco Room & Linen Spray
Of all the sprays we tested, our tester enjoyed this scent the most. The original scent by P.F. Candle Co. remains the brand's best, in our opinion. Even though it's labeled "Teakwood & Tobacco," our tester interprets the smell as fresh apple pie. It's sweet, spicy and warm, and will transform any space into a comforting and cozy oasis.
Although P.F. Candle Co.'s room spray smelled the best of any scent we tested, there is one area where it came up massively short, and that's its use as a room spray. If you just spray this stuff in the air, it will disappear within minutes, leaving you longing for another whiff. The brand seems to know this, and it even recommends spraying the stuff directly on furniture or fabrics if you want it to last. Our tester did just that, dousing his couch and lounge chair, where he was then able to enjoy the scent for a full afternoon and into the evening.
Grove Co. Room Spray Concentrate
Another top natural cleaning product brand, Grove Co. is the house brand of sustainable online retailer Grove Collaborative. Like all of Grove's products, its room spray is both natural and sustainable, as it's scented with essential oils and sold as a concentrate with a refillable glass bottle. To use it, you simply mix the concentrate with water and order more concentrate when you run out. This setup easily made Grove the most sustainable choice of all the room sprays we tested.
In our testing, though, Grove Co's room spray might have come across as a bit too natural. If you follow the brand's mixing instructions, the resultant spray is quite watered down. It dissipates too quickly, so for longer staying power, our tester recommends adding a little less water to your bottle when mixing up your concentrate. Meanwhile, the scent — we tested the herbal-smelling Stargazing flavor — is a bit on the traditional air freshener side, which seems to aid it in covering up bad odors.
Brooklinen Happy Hour Room Spray
Brooklinen makes a lot more than just bedding. The brand offers two room spray scents, the uplifting Bright Idea and mellowed-out Happy Hour. We tested both, and while they're of similar quality, our tester preferred the toned-down appeal of Happy Hour. With its heavy lavender notes, the spray makes for a relaxing and ideal environment for sleeping when sprayed in the bedroom. Its orange note, meanwhile, does a good job of covering up any stale or stuffy bedroom odors.
The spray also comes in a nice frosted glass bottle, and while it's on the smaller side at 3.4 oz, it's priced moderately at around half of what Aesop charges. One area where Brooklinen's spray could improve, however, is staying power. It lasts less than an hour, generally, which isn't an issue when using it to fall asleep. But if you're looking to freshen up other areas of your home, there are better options.
Nest New York Wild Mint & Eucalyptus Room & Linen Spray
Nest may be a luxury brand, with its beloved candles and perfumes being sold at top department stores, but the affordability of its room spray may cause you to do a double-take. With an SRP of just $28 for a 3.4 oz bottle, Nest is one of the cheapest room sprays in this guide, but it still boasts the quality you'd expect from a luxury brand. That means vegan and cruelty-free certification, high-quality fragrance and no parabens or phthalates. The standout scent for the brand is Wild Mint & Eucalyptus, as its potent nose-clearing botanicals will make your bathroom smell more like a spa.
Loewe Home Scents Tomato Leaves Room Spray
There are luxury room sprays, and then there is Loewe. The brand's creative director Jonathan Anderson, founder of designer brand J.W. Anderson, collaborated with Loewe's in-house perfumer Nuria Cruelles on a series of plant-scented room sprays. The smells are like nothing else on the market, from Beetroot to Oregano to our favorite, Tomato Leaves. It's incredibly green and fresh-smelling and is especially suited to stuffy apartments without outdoor access. The packaging is also the height of luxury, with an artful presentation box containing a glass bottle with a cotton label and a ceramic, leather-capped stopper. This is high-class stuff, and naturally, it's priced as such at $125 for a 5.1 oz bottle.
