Is it a universally agreed-upon “fresh” smell? Cultural? Or is lemon fragrance just cheap to manufacture and use in products? Something else?
I don’t hate it, but I also don’t care for it, either. Now I’m curious why so many cleaning products use that smell.
Aside from what others have mentioned about the easy chemistry of it, decades of market research, have determined that people associate the lemony smell with “clean“, so it’s what they expect.
Before the rampant scenting of everything, most cleaning products just smell like ammonia or bleach or vinegar. So, when companies decided to cover that smell with something more pleasant, it also had to smell as astringent as other cleaning chemicals. That’s probably where the association comes from.