Does Pooph spray work on cigarette smoke? That’s the question I’ve heard more often than any other here on Pooph Reviews. The queries seem to split along one of two lines: on the one hand are the folks hoping to use Pooph to eliminate the odor of cigarette smoke from objects – clothing or furniture etc; while on the other hand there are the folks who hope that they can use Pooph to eliminate the odor of cigarette smoke in the air. Both of these are questions my teenage self would have been eager to know the answer to if Pooph had existed (way) back then.

Does Pooph work on cigarette smoke in the air?

To assess Pooph Odor Eliminator Spray’s claims that Pooph works on smoke in the air, we did what any good empiricist would and went up to the corner store and bought a pack of smokes. For science. Because I didn’t want cigarette smoke in my house, and to isolate the cigarette odor from any other, I took this experiment outside. But I also had to control for wind, which if blowing, could potentially diffuse the smoke, or simply carry it away. So I set up a “smoking area” on the back patio, with plywood panels for walls for three walls and house as the forth, and a large piece of cardboard for the roof.

I performed this test using two methods, each twice, for a total of four tests: For the first method I stood outside of the “smoking area” box, reached in with a lit cigarette and held it until I could see a visible cloud. The first test using this method was the control, to determine how much cigarette odor I could detect without the Pooph spray. The second test using this method I held the lit cigarette inside until I could see the right amount of smoke cloud, removed the cigarette, reached my arm inside with my head still outside, and shot a strong pulse from the Pooph spray bottle into the cloud of cigarette smoke. I then stepped inside and took a good sniff.

For the second method I wanted to more closely replicate the cloud of smoke that an actual cigarette smoker would produce, and for that, because cigarette smoke is notorious for diminishing your sense of smell, I needed the help of my lovely assistant. Using this method, for the control test, I had my assistant stand outside of the smoking area, take a pull from the cigarette without inhaling, and blow the cloud of smoke inside the box. I then stepped inside the box with my daisy-fresh sniffer breathed in deep. For the Pooph test my assistant again blew the cloud of smoke into the box. I then reached into the box with my head kept outside, sprayed a strong pulse from bottle of Pooph, and immediately stepped inside and gave a deep sniff.

The results: in both the first and second methods, in the control test without Pooph, the odor of cigarette smoke inside the box was – to my imperfectly subjective sense of smell – equally pungent and offensive, like having smoke blown in your face. On the second test in both methods, after spraying Pooph, the odor of cigarette smoke was only very faint, and in fact barely detectable.

My conclusion: without question Pooph works on cigarette smoke in the air. I admit I was quite surprised by this outcome.

Does Pooph work on smoke on your clothes?

It wasn’t as easy to assess Pooph Spray’s claim that Pooph works on smoke that’s been absorbed into things. In order to ensure that I could really saturate an absorbent object – in this case I used a cloth rag – with cigarette smoke, in order to ensure that the rag was in contact with enough smoke that was sufficiently thick enough inside the box that the odor on the rag after removing it from the box was unambiguous, I put the rag into a medium-sized cardboard box and then placed three lit smoking cigarettes inside with it. Three was enough – the rag reeked of smoke when I took it out, even several minutes later after outside in fresh air.

A side note on quantity: the issue that most people have encountered when they feel that Pooph disappointed is that the ratio of Pooph to odor molecules was imbalanced in favor of the odor. For example, using a slight squirt of Pooph on a large puddle of dog pee is not a fair fight, no matter how effective Pooph may be on the pee it contacts. I think it’s fair to put the responsibility for this confusion on Pooph, because the Pooph commercial makes it seem as if quantities have nothing to do with outcome. I do not find this to be true at all. To get the best results from Pooph you can’t fight a 3-alarm blaze with a fire extinguisher – you’ve got to use an amount of Pooph approiximately equal to the substance that is causing the odor. In the case of cigarette smoke however, that’s a little tough to measure.

To account for the ambiguity of quantities here I measured my results as I went, keeping track of how much smoke smell I could detect after each spray of Pooph. I used a 1-10 scale with 10 being as much as before any spray and 0 being no odor at all. The results were pretty impressive. After saturating a cloth rag in a small box with the smoke of 3 cigarettes, this is how Pooph worked on cigarette smoke:

In short, after three strong pulses from the Pooph spray bottle, being sure to cover every bit of surface area of the rag, I could not smell any smoke. Which is enough for me to conclude that Pooph really does work on cigarette smoke.

These tests I performed were, of course, far from scientific, and I don’t mean to state that there is now incontrovertible empirical evidence to substantiate the claim that Pooph does this and Pooph does that. What I am stating is that I performed these tests to assess how realistic Pooph’s almost-too-good-to-be-true claims about eliminating cigarette smoke odor were. And after performing these tests, I came away convinced that my results accomplished what I consider a “good enough” standard with respect to the aim of those claims. Good enough is not to be sniffed at, in my opinion. And Pooph has won me over as a skeptical a consumer.

If you’d like to try Pooph for yourself, you can buy a quart of it here and have it delivered to your doorstep day after tomorrow (or sooner if you’re lucky). Thanks for reading (and especially for making it all the way to the end), and I hope that Pooph makes your life a little less offensive. And if you decide to buy Pooph, please do come back and let us know whether your Pooph truth was a hit or a phlop.