It started with shampoos, soaps and lotions, air fresheners and laundry
products. It’s become an onslaught of scents added to trash bags,
Kleenex, vacuum cleaners and even HVAC filters. Very few of these
compounds are found in nature; they are petrochemicals synthesized by
chemists to duplicate smells recognizable to the human olfactory nerve,
often by mimicking food aromas. The Federal Fair Packaging and
Labeling Act of 1973 doesn’t require fragrance ingredients to be listed on
products, so we don’t even know what they are or what their gasses might
do to us.
Perusing the aisles of our grocery stores, you’ll find Orange Pineapple
Smoothie shower gel next to the Limited-Edition Sugar Cookie Shampoo.
If your Honeysuckle conditioner is nearly gone, add in some Tropical
Coconut. Dry off with towels soaked in Coral Blast laundry detergent and
then cycled through the dryer with Amber Blossom fabric softener. Rose &
Chamomile lotion can be massaged onto feet after using Verbena &
Lavender exfoliating beads. Keep your hair in place with Candy Gumdrop
hair spray, and try this blend of nail polish; Sunlit Grass for the left hand
and April Fresh for the right. Finish up with lipstick infused with Wild Plum
and dab off the excess with a square of toilet paper marinated with
Cashmere Peach.
A man can groom his goatee with Tea Tree and Peppermint Beard Wash
and comb it down with Stagecoach Scent Beard Oil. Take Dude Face
Wipes with Energizing and Refreshing Scent if you’re on the road. At
home, shower with Shea-Butter Bay-Rum Soap before rolling on Old
Spice Mountain Spring deodorant.
For the house, you can buy Febreze infused vacuum cleaner bags, and
dust-cloths steeped with Lemon Citrus. After dinner, clean your china with
Tomato and Pomegranate Coconut dish soap, and add Green Apple Rinse Agent
to the dishwasher. Leftovers can be scraped into a Clean Burst Baby-Powder
aromatically-treated garbage bag.
Spruce up your car with Hawaiian Aloha for the upholstery, and Italian
Leather for the dashboard and steering wheel. Take Fido to the pet spa for
a Pumpkin Chai Cherry Blossom dog shampoo; change the kitty litter box
with Fresh Rose Blend. If you miss the whiff of cedar on your artificial
Christmas tree, buy some pine-scented ornaments. And when your Glade
night light burns out, replace it with the new Botanical Mist spritzing model.
Thanks to all these products, we can no longer shop without bringing home
something that smells like something it isn’t. I’d like to buy things with no
smell, or things that just smell like themselves. But what I come home with
is usually contaminated by fragrance, since the unscented products are
shipped to retailers in the same crates as the scented versions, then
stocked on shelves right next to each other. Saddest of all, since the meat
section is upwind of the cleaning products, I end up with bacon that has
Blue Iris Bliss embedded in its plastic wrapper. And if I linger too long in
Aisle 9 looking for the Free & Clear detergent, I come home reeking of
Spring Meadow Laundry Pods.
The question is, why would anyone bother to purchase perfume in this age
of odorized everything? That seems as pointless as buying a pop-up book
for a Kindle. No one will be able to detect your $50 per ounce fragrance
amid the dozens of artificially scented items in the typical home, unless you
spray it on so thick that it becomes the most aggressive odor in the room.
And if you smoke cigarettes, it’s likely that your sense of smell has been
obliterated from tobacco. But people who are allergic or sensitive to these
chemicals have to deal with the nausea, headaches, sneezing or wheezing.
If your sense of smell isn’t very good, or if you love the aromas, perhaps it
doesn’t bother you that our world is being polluted with the miasma of
thousands of fake scents, many of which contain substances that are cited
on the EPA’s hazardous waste list.
But what bothers the rest of us is that we have to inhale your cloud of vapor
everywhere we go, whether we like it or not.
Anothercarolwilliams
Shepherdstown, West Virginia