Is it a universally agreed-upon “fresh” smell? Cultural? Or is lemon fragrance just cheap to manufacture and use in products? Something else?
I don’t hate it, but I also don’t care for it, either. Now I’m curious why so many cleaning products use that smell.
Aside from what others have mentioned about the easy chemistry of it, decades of market research, have determined that people associate the lemony smell with “clean“, so it’s what they expect.
Before the rampant scenting of everything, most cleaning products just smell like ammonia or bleach or vinegar. So, when companies decided to cover that smell with something more pleasant, it also had to smell as astringent as other cleaning chemicals. That’s probably where the association comes from.
You can go a step further. Lemon is a cleaning agent and was used in households mixed with vinager and baking soda to scrub and clean. So people associated the lemon smell with a cleaned house. It was only natural to use lemon scents in industrialized products. Same reason lavender is also popular. Lavender flowers are incredibly easy to extract the smell and were a common homemade aroma. So it was the first smell industrialized for ambient scenters and cleaners.
No idea if this is true but that is awesome and explains so much.