The card
A printable card to hand to staff or leave at the counter. First-person and factual — "I had to leave; I'd have been a customer." Managers act on that far more often than on an accusation.
Your rights
Documenting it is the thing that works.
What to do after a bad visit, how to tell a business in a way that lands, and where Dirty Scent draws its lines.
This page is general information, not legal advice.
Nothing here is a substitute for talking to a lawyer about your own situation. We are not a law firm, we do not represent anyone, and we do not refer members to any particular firm.
Instead of taking it off the wall
There's a well-established habit in this community: react to a bathroom air freshener, unplug it, bin it. Everyone understands why. You've just been made ill by something somebody chose to install, and it feels like the only available response.
It isn't, and it's a bad trade — it's someone else's property, it can put you in a confrontation you didn't ask for, and there's a new one in the socket by Thursday.
Photograph it and file a report. One report is one record. Four reports across four locations is a pattern that a district manager has to answer for, and it's still there long after you've gone home.
Describe access, not injury
When you write it down, lead with what you couldn't do rather than what it did to you.
| Write this | Rather than this |
|---|---|
| "I couldn't use the restaurant." | "They made me sick." |
| "I left after ten minutes." | "Their diffuser gave me a migraine." |
| "I didn't attempt a visit." | — usually goes unrecorded |
Three reasons, and they compound:
- It's a statement about your own experience, which you are entitled to make. What caused a medical reaction is usually something you can't prove, and asserting it invites an argument you don't need.
- It's more accurate. Most people leave. Many don't go at all.
- Access is the thing the law is actually concerned with.
You can still record a physical reaction — it's a separate field. But you don't have to describe your symptoms to register that a place didn't work for you.
Telling the business
Message management
A message you can actually send, including the number that moves a manager: how many members reported this location, and the visits that represents.
Go over their head
A single branch can't change a scent-marketing policy — head office can. Reports aggregate to the operator, so the pattern across every location is visible at once.
Please don't put stickers on anything.
We deliberately don't produce anything meant to be stuck to someone's wall. It's still damage to property, it hands the business an easy way to dismiss the whole complaint, and it makes every fragrance-free business less likely to work with us.
If you want to take it further
In some places, fragrance in a business is treated as an access issue — a barrier that stops disabled people using a service — rather than as a question of whether a product harmed you. There is active litigation in the United States on exactly that basis, particularly around venues that diffuse scent through their ventilation.
We are not part of any of it, and we don't route you anywhere.
What we do is make sure that if you ever walk into a lawyer's office, you arrive with something worth reading:
- Export your own reports — a dated, structured PDF of everywhere you filed, what the access outcome was, and any photos you attached.
- It's your data. You choose who sees it. We don't send it anywhere.
What we don't do
No "report this business to a lawsuit" button. No referral fees. We don't hand member reports to third parties without your specific consent, report by report — you joined under a pseudonym and told us about your health, and that stays yours.
Keeping the record honest
One consequence of any of this being useful is that it creates a reason to exaggerate. We'd rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise.
Access outcome and physical reaction are separate fields precisely so that nobody has to overstate a symptom to record that they were turned away. A registry people can trust is the only thing here with any value — including for anyone who eventually needs it to hold up.