Cheapskate Scent Reduction for Hunters

Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers

I have never been in a position to afford any of those expensive scent-elimination products that are marketed to hunters. I don't doubt that they are effective, up to a point. But not many of us have hundreds of dollars to drop on scent-reducing camouflage clothing.

What's a low-budget deer hunter to do about scent reduction? Here's the one easy thing you can do that costs you nothing: change your laundry detergent.

For the last few years I was washing my hunting clothing separately with a homemade mixture of Borox and baking soda (one cup of each poured over a medium load). This worked very well. If there were a few stains that didn't come out and might have with conventional detergent, so what? Surely they only enhanced the camouflaging effect.

This year I've switched to using an over-the-counter detergent. Arm & Hammer makes a laundry detergent marketed toward people with allergies and sensitive skin. No scents or dyes in it, which is exactly what you want. It costs the same as their other detergent, so I've just stopped buying regular detergent altogether. Everything in my house gets washed with this stuff. You could hunt grizzly bears wearing my bed sheets.

I don't want the rest of my laundry to smell like weird chemicals anyway. Since I have to buy detergent either way, switching to the 'sensitive skin' product has a net zero effect on my budget. It gets me scent reduction as a hunter for absolutely no cost.

I've made other scent-free changes in my grocery shopping as well. I won't buy any bar of soap that has anything but soap in it. This used to mean buying Ivory, but recently they changed the formula to include 'just a little fragrance.'

Shampoo has been harder to correct. I've spent an embarrassingly long time in the shampoo section of the grocery store looking at bottle after bottle trying to find something with no perfumes in it. You would think that with the hundred or so different shampoos on the shelves someone would be selling something that just washes your hair without tarting up the senses. But I haven't found one yet. My solution is to wash my hair with a bar of scent-free soap before going hunting.

I never wear any sort of cologne or aftershave at all. So there are no traces of any odd chemicals about my person when I hunt. Just my natural manly odor of gunpowder, pheromones, and a touch of smoked meat.