Blocker Outdoors® Scent Shield Cold Fusion X-Factor products build a complete scent-control system, from your skin and hair to your clothes, boots and gear
A mature buck doesn’t care what you paid for your bow or how many hours you spent hanging stands in that funnel. He cares about one thing, and that’s what’s drifting toward his nose. It only takes one leak, too. You can wash your clothes in scent-free detergent, seal them in a tote and spray down at the truck, but if your hair is still holding last night’s campfire or your boots picked up diesel at the gas station, all that work walks off with him.
Scent control is a chain, and a whitetail will find the weakest link every time.
Where It All Started
Scent control has a birthplace, and it’s a spray bottle. Back in 1985, a small Minnesota company introduced Scent Shield in its very first year in business, a spray made to eliminate human odor before a deer ever caught a whiff of it. Hunters had spent generations trying to cover up their scent with everything from skunk essence to pine boughs, but actually getting rid of it was a whole new idea.
Even more surprising is where the formula came from. It started in the lab of a French cosmetics chemist, who created it to tackle human odor for the personal care world. A deer’s nose and a crowded elevator have one thing in common: neither one should be able to smell you. So, the formula was repurposed for the deer woods, and it worked.
The founder had a favorite way of making his case. He’d spray the inside of one shoe with Scent Shield, leave the other alone and invite folks to take a sniff. The demonstration usually did the selling for him.
That little spray bottle grew into something much bigger, leading to ScentBlocker scent-control clothing in 1997, and a whole category of hunting gear took off from there. More than four decades later, Scent Shield lives on under Blocker Outdoors and the NEXUS Outdoors family in Muskegon, Mich. It still carries a line every bottle has earned: “From the Inventors of Scent Control.”
Today, that original idea anchors the Scent Shield X-Factor lineup. Rather than one product doing one job, it’s a complete system built on the same odor-fighting technology from top to bottom, and every link in the chain gets its own tool.
Up To Five Ways To Fight Odor
Most scent eliminators take one swing at odor. X-Factor products take several, and the number on the bottle tells you exactly how many. Depending on the product, X-Factor adsorbs odor molecules and traps them so they can’t drift. It prevents new odors from building and neutralizes the ones already there, and it oxidizes them, breaking them down so they’re actually gone instead of just covered up. The wash products add a fifth job, cleansing, and the Fall Blend formulas finish by masking whatever’s left with a cover scent. Every product is matched to its job, from the 3X Shampoo & Conditioner to the 5X Fall Blend Clothes & Boot Spray.
“Hunters are really good at controlling scent in pieces,” said Steve Allie, Marketing Director for NEXUS Outdoors. “They’ll wash their clothes carefully and then shower with regular soap, or spray down their jacket and forget about their pack. X-Factor closes those gaps. Every product runs on the same technology, so the system holds up from your skin to your boots.”
Follow a serious hunter through the days and hours before a rut sit, and you’ll see where each piece fits.
Laundry Detergent: Where The Hunt Really Starts
The hunt starts days early, in the laundry room. Hunting clothes washed in regular detergent come out smelling like a spring meadow or a tropical breeze, and nothing in the woods smells like that. Worse, they can come out still carrying the sweat and grime from the last sit.
Scent Shield X-Factor Laundry Detergent is a 4X formula that cleanses, prevents, neutralizes and oxidizes odors at their source instead of burying them under perfume. It’s tough enough to lift the stains hunting clothes collect, and it’s formulated for high-efficiency washers. Your base layers, jackets and pants come out truly clean and stay that way longer. It’s the foundation the rest of the system is built on, because no spray can make up for clothes that went into the tote dirty.
Liquid Body Soap: Scrub Out The Source
Clean clothes only go so far if the body inside them isn’t. Your skin is the single biggest source of human odor in the woods, and it never stops producing it. The pre-hunt shower is where you get ahead of it.
Scent Shield X-Factor Liquid Body Soap delivers up to 4X the power of ordinary body soaps, cleansing your skin while it prevents, neutralizes and oxidizes odor at the source. Instead of masking the human smell you carry into the field, it goes after it before you ever get dressed, so you start the hunt with a clean slate.
Shampoo & Conditioner: Don’t Skip The Hair
Here’s the link plenty of hunters forget. Hair works like a sponge, soaking up campfire smoke, cooking smells, truck exhaust and everything else life throws at you. Then it sits right under your hat, broadcasting all of it, for hours.
Scent Shield X-Factor Shampoo & Conditioner is a highly concentrated 3X formula made for hunters. It cleanses and conditions in one step while it neutralizes and oxidizes odors, so the smells of everyday life rinse down the drain instead of following you to the stand. It’s one bottle and one less thing to pack for camp.
Fall Blend Clothes & Boot Spray: The Final Pass
You’ve washed the clothes and scrubbed the hunter. Now comes everything that never sees the washing machine or the shower: your boots, treestand, release, bow grip, backpack, mask, hat and gloves. That gear goes everywhere with you, and it carries every odor it picks up along the way.
Scent Shield X-Factor Fall Blend Clothes & Boot Spray is the cleanup crew, and the hardest-working product in the lineup. It’s the only spray that controls odor in five different ways. It adsorbs, prevents, neutralizes and oxidizes human and other odors, then masks whatever’s left with a fall cover scent. It works whether your gear is wet or dry. Spray down at the tailgate before every hunt and again after a long, sweaty walk in, when you’re putting out the most scent. Some hunters even spray the inside of the dryer before their hunting clothes go in. It comes in 12- and 32-ounce bottles, plus a 1-gallon jug for refills and hunting camp.
Not Just A Whitetail Thing
A whitetail’s nose gets most of the credit, but elk and mule deer use theirs just as well. More western hunters are borrowing from the whitetail playbook and building scent control into their routines, especially on hunts where the wind swirls through canyons and timber.
“The rut is when hunters take the biggest chances,” Allie said. “They’re sitting longer, moving more and calling more aggressively. That’s exactly when you don’t want one weak spot giving you away. Build the whole system, and you can focus on the hunt instead of the wind.”
With the rut heating up, now’s the time to build your routine from the ground up. And the chain doesn’t stop with these four. The full Scent Shield X-Factor family also includes bar soap, antiperspirant deodorant, field wipes, dryer sheets in 4X and 5X Fall Blend versions, and a 4X Clothes & Boot Spray, with refill bottles and gallon jugs for hunting camp.
