Following a “fat ER bill,” 5.2 million “likes” and hundreds of thousands of shares on TikTok, a woman has gone viral for suffering chemical burns from a car freshener.
According to Healthnews, Kyndal Bret posted a video of herself in the hospital for her near quarter million TikTok followers.
“A Bath & Body Works car air freshener overheated and exploded in your face so now you have ocular damage and chemical burns,” the post read. The owner of Tennessee-based salon KB Haven explained the explosion also caused damage to her car’s interior, bleaching parts of the roof white.
Dr. Kunal Sood later took to Instagram to break down what happened, explaining the explosion was likely caused by overheating. This is not the first time someone has been burned by an air freshener product.
In 2011, researchers published a study in PubMed Central featuring an incident where a 44-year-old woman was hospitalized for a week because of burns suffered from an exploding air freshener canister.
“To our knowledge this is one of the few documented cases of burns as a result of air-fresheners,” the researchers reported. “As they become more ubiquitous, we anticipate the incidence of such cases to increase. As such, they pose a potential public health concern on a massive scale.”
The researchers largely laid the blame at the feet of aerosols.
“Aerosols, a dispersion of liquid droplets into the air, contain chemical propellants, usually hydrocarbon such as propane, butane and isoprane, stored in a pressurized liquid form,” they said. “These chemicals have replaced chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the main propellant due to environmental concerns. The ability of these flammable droplets to spread over a large area compared to their liquid equivalents, coupled with the larger surface-to-volume ratio than bulk liquids makes aerosols extremely flammable and more susceptible to causing devastating fires and explosions.”
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