I recently purchased a folk harp to return to learning on. I didn’t notice it until I got it into my study but it smells quite strongly of the previous owner’s perfume. It seems to be centered where the harp rests on your shoulder.
Does anyone have a good suggestion for helping remove the smell?
As an aside, it’s probably good that I’d told my wife where I was going first!
I once rented an older pedal harp that had a musty smell. I tied a partially filled box of baking soda inside the harp and the smell was gone in a matter of days. Now that I think about it, this might not have been the safest thing to do for the harp, but it definitely worked. It seems it might work for the smell of perfume, too.
If you don’t need to play the harp right away, you can stuff dryer sheets or the new febreze sheets into the cavity (in addition to cleaning any residue off the outside), but you won’t like playing it while they’re in there–they may smell worse than the perfume at first. It takes a while for them to work.