No one wants to be trapped in a room with a lingering fart smell. There’s hard data on activated carbon, at least when it comes to removing fart smells! It shows that activated carbon could be the best fart smell remover, capable of absorbing odors rather than just masking them.

How to Remove Fart Smells from Rooms

Researchers at the Department of Veteran Affairs tested whether underwear pads could capture odors.

And they published the results in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, so we’re talking about real peer-reviewed science here!

Here’s what they did. They outfitted people with different products that contain activated carbon to remove fart smells.

Theoretically, activated carbon should work because it can absorb many gas pollutants.

Some of the products were underwear with a carbon filter sewn into it.

Some were a carbon pad you can tape onto your underwear.

And some were a cushion you can sit on, with carbon inside the cushion.

The researchers measured gases that contained sulfur, which is what makes farts smell so bad. In an ideal experiment, the researchers would wait until people fart naturally and then measure the sulfur gases, but that could take a while. So they taped a tube onto people’s rear ends to pump gas out while they were using the products. They also asked people not to actually fart during the experiment!

How’d they do? The pads and the pants removed over 50% of the smelly gases. Not bad!

The cushions did worse—about 20%. But that’s still better than nothing.

What About Other Smells?

Now, these are fart smells, but activated carbon should be able to remove many other types of smells, as long as they are coming from gases. That would include many chemical smells that come from painting or remodeling.

It should also remove gas smells that come from cigarettes. At Smart Air, we tested carbon’s ability to remove gases from cigarettes.

Do Air Purifiers Remove Fart Smells?

Yes, air purifiers with carbon filters will help, but they get “full” pretty quickly and stop absorbing. That means you’ll have to change your carbon filters frequently to make sure they’re still working.

And make sure to avoid carbon filters that have just a thin layer of carbon. Those are carbon filters in name only, since there is so little carbon that it’ll lose effectiveness quickly.