On social media, girls exchange questions about where to buy hair steamers and how to use them to easily scent their hair.

There is a new form recently appeared for a hand incense burner for clothes and poetry that belongs to an ancient Arab culture, until burning incense became common all over the world, using both traditional and electric methods.

Guidelines have not yet been developed to control the use of incense, despite it being a common air pollutant inside homes, and the need to warn about it comes after initial studies to assess the health risks associated with its indoor use, and the effects of incense and cigarette smoke have also been compared, which led to surprising results.

Worse than tobacco

Incense burning is a traditional and common practice in Africa and Asia, not only for religious purposes, but also because of its beautiful smell, which made it a cross-continental and cultural commodity, but the surprise is that the average effect of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde particles resulting from the traditional incense burner exceeded environmental standards, and even emissions that Previously measured tobacco smoke.

Not much research has been done on incense as a source of air pollution, despite its association with the development of lung cancer, leukemia in children and brain tumors, until the Chinese were interested in studying its prevalence in most temples of Asia.

For the first time, a research team from the University of Southern China compared the effect of incense smoke in homes with that of cigarette smoke.

Two types of incense were chosen, both of which contain agarwood and sandalwood, which are common in its composition, and the study demonstrated the ability of Chinese hamsters to incense smoke to cause genetic mutations with its highly toxic chemical effects, as it was more toxic than the cigarette used in the study.

Both genotoxins and cytotoxins resulting from the burning of incense have been linked to the development of cancers, and 99% of its micro-components appeared in hamster ovaries, totaling 64 compounds, varying between irritant, harmful, toxic and highly toxic, all of which penetrate the body quickly and smoothly.

Burning incense can have an effect on children's immune systems in the long term (communication sites)

A deadly scent hazard

Researchers in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at the University of North Carolina studied the biological effects of incense use on 303 adults to test the hypothesis that indoor incense use is linked to compositional changes in potentially dangerous oral microbes.

A small part of the negative effects was demonstrated by the study after researchers found that exposure to the product of burning incense is associated with higher microbial diversity and overall changes in the microbial composition, which means that the use of incense affects microorganisms in the mouth even at low levels of exposure and the original products, and this is likely to be An early biological marker of toxicities associated with incense and the health consequences of inhaling it.

Burning incense can also have an effect on the immune system of children in the long term, as for formaldehyde, its smell can cause discomfort in itself, irritation of the eyes and the upper airway, and most worryingly it also affects the lungs, causing asthma, allergies and even eczema and cancer. Especially if the indoor environment is hot or humid.

According to the researchers, the results are alarming because about 94% of families burn incense to perfume clothes and air and remove cooking odors, and because people spend more than 90% of their time in closed, hot and humid places, toxins accumulate in their corners until the moment they are inhaled.

Is electric better?

In homes that mostly know incense and buy it heavily, electric incense burners will be an easier solution, but have you ever asked yourself why this feeling of fatigue once you turn it on?

The reason is that we do not see smoke resulting from combustion, so we inhale the air while it is still filled with greater concentrations of particles and levels of toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, resulting from the combustion of oils, whether one type or a mixture.

It will not pass 24 hours for these particles to collect in the human lung, causing an inflammatory response, which is a hallmark of asthma and other respiratory problems similar to those of lung cells exposed to cigarette smoke, which was confirmed by the World Health Organization when it published a report identifying common indoor air pollutants that are scientifically considered They are harmful, among them the electric evaporator device as one of the fuel burners, and the most common culprit, to join the list of gasoline, car exhaust and cleaning products.