New Car Smell May Actually Increase Your Risk of Cancer

New car smell. It’s like fresh baked cookies, or the smell of popcorn. People seem to love it. But it looks as if that smell may be more dangerous for us than we initially thought. CBS Austin reports a study has shown new car smell is linked to leukemia and rare nose cancers.

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New car smell isn’t actually a smell at all. It’s a combination of various compounds inside the vehicle undergoing a phenomenon known as “off-gassing.” Anything that has organic compounds inside, from the seats to the dash, has volatile organic compounds, or VOC, that come out of them which create the smell.

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The study to show why this is so dangerous was conducted in Melbourne, Australia at RMIT University and was overseen by Professor Oliver Jones. In the study, a new car was left in varying environmental conditions over the course of 12 days. Using Chinese safety levels as a baseline, chemicals reached unsafe levels in the interior of the car over the course of the 12 days. Formaldehyde reached 34.9 percent above standard. Acetaldehyde, a dangerous carcinogen that can cause breathing problems reached 223.5 micrograms per cubic meter, which was 61 percent higher than safe levels