Weed has a very distinctive smell, and many people will recognize it at first whiff. The aroma is evidence, and it’s hard to discreetly smoke weed if you leave behind its scent. Haven’t we all tried the “It’s my incense, mom!” excuse? It never works.
If you’re looking to get the weed smell out of your house before company comes over, or out of your clothes before it’s time to visit your parents, there are a few things you can do.
Attempting to cover up the smell with other smells may work in a pinch. Just make sure you’re not contributing to the smells without overtaking them, causing the room to smell overwhelmingly of pot and apple cinnamon. Unless, of course, that sounds delicious to you. In that case, go for it.
None of them are better than preventing the weed smell from hanging around in the first place. If you don’t want to worry about the smell of weed or if you don’t think your landlord or roommates will take too kindly to it, changing your smoking habits can help to mitigate the issue.
First, try to prevent the weed smell if you can
It’s so much easier to prevent a problem than it is to solve a problem. If you know you can’t smell like weed or if you need to be discrete about weed in your house, adopting better practices can prevent the weed smell from ever becoming a problem. Set yourself up for odor-free success.
Store your weed properly
If your weed is not in an airtight container stored away from light and heat, it’s going to go lose potency faster. It’s also going to make the entire room smell like weed. Airtight containers keep the aromas locked in, and avoiding heat prevents cannabinoids from evaporating into the air. Never keep your weed in a plastic jar or use a container for its aesthetic design. Function matters more than form in this scenario.
Smoke in the right environment
Smoking inside will make everything smell like weed. The smoke can travel through your air ducts and doom the whole house. The smell embeds itself into soft surfaces like carpets, couches, bedsheets, and clothing, even more, when it’s trapped within the confines of your walls.
If you absolutely must smoke inside, use a shed or a detached garage. They usually don’t contain a lot of soft surfaces and they won’t be attached to your home’s central air. Leaving the doors and windows open to air them out after you smoke will help the scent dissipate sooner.
Minimize contact with your body and the smoke
If you don’t want your body to smell like smoke, take a few precautions. Put together an “I’m going outside to smoke weed” outfit, and leave it in a zippered bag outside. Put on a thick smoking jacket or a hoodie if you have long hair you’d like to protect yourself from the smell of the smoke. If you’re smoking a joint or a blunt, you may want to consider wearing gloves to keep the smell from sticking to your hands.
Try a low odor approach to smoking
Vape cartridges and dabs don’t produce smoke. The vapor has a little bit of an odor, but it goes away fairly quickly. You can vaporize your weed inside, and someone who walks in the room half an hour later would have no idea based on the way the room smells. The only giveaway is you snacking on sweets in your bathrobe.
If you prefer to smoke flower, buy a smoke filter. Smoke filters are tubes affixed with special carbon filters that catch the smoke and break it apart, trapping the odor. This means the clouds won’t hang around and work its way into your furniture or your clothes. Ideally, you should still be using your smoke filter near an open window. Always have a backup method.
Getting weed smells out of a room
There are enzyme-based smoke odor removers, and most of them work pretty well. The only problem is that most of them leave behind an artificial scent, which can also be a dead giveaway. Consider how cops on true crime shows always mention that the smell of bleach at a potential crime scene makes them more suspicious, These scented odor removers may have the same effect.
Use an unscented odor removal spray when necessary. You can place tubs of air-purifying gel in the room to help absorb the odors from the air. Opening a window or two won’t hurt. If you have a box or pedestal fan, position it to force the air from the room out of the window.
If you tried to smoke out the window, your curtains might smell like weed. So might your bed sheets and other fabrics. Fabric freshener sprays will only add another scent on top of the weed smell, which can make it worse in some cases. The best thing you can do is launder them with hot water.
Getting weed smells off of your clothes
Enzyme-based odor remover sprays can also be used on clothing, but again, you’ll want to be mindful of the scent they leave behind. If you walk into a room loud with the scent of pine trees or fresh linen, you’re going to call a lot of attention to yourself.
The best thing to do is wash your smelly weed clothes in hot water and change into fresh clothes that don’t smell like weed. If you can’t do that and you really need to make the smell go away, borrow a friend’s clean clothes or stop off at a store to pick up a cheap emergency outfit that will suffice until you can wash your original outfit.
Getting weed smells off of your body
Smells don’t actually embed themselves in your skin or hair. Instead, the odors stick to the oils your body naturally produces. Your skin has a barrier made of fats called the lipid barrier that it uses to trap moisture. The same process happens on your scalp and the oil transfers to your hair.
Hopping in a warm shower and thoroughly scrubbing up with a strong soap will help. Avoid body washes or shampoos with moisturizer. Things like clarifying shampoo, plain bar soap, and antibacterial hand soap do a better job of stripping away the oily barrier that’s retaining the weed scent. Don’t forget to moisturize when you get out of the shower. You might wind up with dry skin.
Don’t forget to use some mouthwash and brush your teeth. Cannabis lingers on your breath the same way cigarette smoke does. The longer you wish your mouthwash, the more the odor will dissipate.
What if I need a quicker solution?
You can attempt to saturate everything in disinfectant or fabric freshener spray and hope that it works, but it never quite covers up the aroma. In most cases, you’ll smell both weed and artificial lemons, or weed with a touch of lavender.
The easiest way to mask a bad smell is with another bad smell. Although we don’t recommend it, you can burn some popcorn. Burnt popcorn smells terrible. It smells so terrible that it will overtake the smell of weed, fusing the two together into something wholly unpleasant. If you only have a few minutes to improvise, try this one at your own risk.
Stick a bag of popcorn in the microwave for one minute longer than the instructions state. If it doesn’t smell terrible, add 30 seconds. If the bag starts to smoke, take it out of the microwave. Put the bag on a plate and puncture the top. Walk around with the bag of burnt popcorn in the area of your house that smells like weed.
The takeaway
It’s easier to avoid weed smell than it is to contend with it. Weed has a strong aroma by nature, just like patchouli or frankincense. It’s a strong, musky odor that loves to sink into things. If you can’t stand the smell or if the people around you don’t want to smell it, you’ll need to take extra precautions.
If you don’t mind the smell, we don’t blame you. In fact, we’re ready to deliver it to you. Emjay offers dozens of popular strains of cannabis flower, and we can have it at your doorstep in about half an hour. Put together a smoking outfit that you can keep near your designated outdoor smoking area. By the time you’re suited up and ready, we’ll be waiting for you outside.
