Ozone is an interesting compound. It’s an oxygen molecule with a third atom on it, and it’s often produced by high voltage electrical discharges, UV light, and ionizing machines. Sometimes it is used to great effect to deodorize and clean car interiors and air conditioning systems. You can use canned ozone to reduce smoke fumes and odors. However, in high enough quantities it’s dangerous for human health. It causes chest pain, throat irritation, and head aches. It gathers in the ozone and causes the Earth to get excessive UV light because it can’t escape from the atmosphere. Ozone also happens to be the primary byproduct of ionizing air purifiers that are being bought and sold today. They promise to improve your indoor air quality by charging it with negative ions. There is no known correlation between negative ions and air quality of indoor spaces, but the myth continues to persist. These ionizing air purifiers instead produce a worrying amount of ozone that causes odor particles in the air to cling to surfaces, along with dust, dander, lint, spores, and so on. You get the illusion of air cleaning when it’s really just causing those contaminants to make your indoor surfaces dirtier than they would be otherwise. In the process it creates so much ozone that you could actually be putting your health at risk whenever you use one. No matter what the advertising says, ionizing air purifiers are not capable of air sanitization and disinfection. My wife wanted to buy one that was on sale the other day and I’m glad she said something to me first. She had no idea that these machines created ozone, but she believed me when I told her.