At the Tip of Your Nose

   Open the recent issue of Esquire and find this...labdanum, benzoin, tonka bean, agarwood and osmanthus.  Pop open the recent ELLE and you'll find this as well...ionones, lactones, aldehyde, Helvetolide, Paradisone and Orbitone.  The first list are all natural woods or shrubs (agarwood is said to be the most expensive wood in the world while tonka beans were once thought to have magical powers) while the latter are all synthetics.  And what they all have in common (Esquire being targeted to men and ELLE being targeted to women) is that the ingredients are all part of the resurgence of perfumes (yes, to men as well).  Jump to a popular consumer perfume page and you'll find over 40,000 perfumes (what??).  So are we that smelly or what? (I mention that not in a derogatory way but rather because of the creation of such scents to cover body odor is well documented throughout history).

   Way way back, when I was just a lad, I can remember wearing cologne.  I was working in a rather fancy men's store (not correctly dressed at all for I could have never afforded even the neckties that were carried there; nay, I was there merely to stock the shelves and keep the glass cases clean) and some of the items they carried were a few rather expensive colognes, this at a time when names such as Jade East and Old Spice were the rage in general stores, and Russian & English Leather were the rage for the more well-to-do).  But perfumes themselves were rather limited, at least to my male eyes.  Chanel #5 and Coco Chanel competed with offerings from Avon and Coty, but that seemed to be about it. So what happened?  Was I just not paying attention? (probably)  But science also began to march on as chemists began taking scents to a new level in the lab (and saving a number of animals in the process).

   Picture the old days of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette which The Week commented: ...even with access to perfumes, wealthy people often still stank.  "Descriptions of Versailles by a lot of people visiting the court of Louis XVI and his bride, Marie Antoinette, just before the revolution are really striking," Reinarz says (Jonathan Reinarz, a professor of medical history).  "They described it as a stinking cesspit."  This was a time when bathing was thought to spread further disease (think plague) so the odor of unwashed bodies became de rigeur.  Jump past the Egyptians and Romans who first developed their own concoctions to mask body odors, and onto the U.S. in the late 1880s and marketing enters the picture with Mum de-odor-ant (as in "Mum's the word").   By 1912, a new marketing tack was tried says the excerpt from the article: ...convincing self-conscious women that their body odor (which it dubbed B.O. for short) was a problem nobody would directly tell them about.  Similar campaigns were soon waged against every imaginable imperfection, whether it was flawed makeup, gray hair, torn stockings, acne, underarm hair, bad breath, or the ultimate — bad "feminine hygiene."  To describe the "life-destroying" impact of bad breath, an oral antiseptic brand called Listerine coined the now ubiquitous phrase "Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride."

   I think about some of this when I visit my mother, the smells and odors of such facilities strikingly different from what we experience at home.  As with hospitals and rehab areas, patients here are less in control of their bowels so the smells are either that of soiled diapers or of antiseptics.  We've come to expect nothing less, society asking that we change our "soiled" patients (almost unwillingly nestled here) as quickly as we would change our babies.   Of course I say "we" with a distant sigh for most of us relegate such jobs to workers to whom little is paid, either monetarily or in recognition.  A filthy job, we say, much as cleaning toilets or picking up garbage.  But why would we think that?  Why wouldn't we be thankful that someone is even willing to clean and wipe and sanitize our closest loved ones?  So we walk into rooms and quickly spray some disinfectant or odor neutralizer without realizing that we have no idea what chemicals are in those sprays (to take just one product such as Febreeze, some reports describe such sprays as safe while other sites disagree).  It's not a far jump to go from this scenario to our own bodies, with scented soaps and shampoos to lotions and sprays.  What's in all this stuff?

   Okay, the animals.  Way back when, such scent-covering products came from deer glands (musk) and civet cats (those same cats whose pooped-out coffee beans are in high demand today)..."with fatal consequences."  What was interesting in the ELLE article (April Long's piece appears in the December issue) was the reduction of molecules in the newer synthetic scents.  "Synthetics are simplified molecules," says Carlos Quintero, cofounder of aroma chemcial-based fragrace line Nomenclature. "(Perfumers) can purify them until they get a well-tested, nonallergenic molecule.  With naturals, there are many more elements that can cause allergies because they are more complex  A synthetic may have five possibilities, but a natural may have 1,000."  Adds the article: ...commercially sold fragrances are now more highly monitored than ever before.  Waves of industry regulations implemented in the last few years aligned the U.S. with EU-issued restrictions...Perfume brands are beginning to make the case that some synthetics are, in fact, more eco-friendly than naturals.  Added scent maker Rodrigo Flores-Roux: People tend to think that perfumes are made from three or four things, like rose, patchouli, and sandalwood, because those are the main notes, but a perfume on average has between 40 and 60 ingredients.  And generally speaking, synthetics are present at about 70 percent and naturals at 30 percent.  Cartier perfumer Mathilde Laurent extended the thought: We've been using synthetics for 150 years, and for 150 years no one has talked about it.  I find that to be such a lack of courage.

   The convoluted conclusion to all of this scent stuff is that perhaps we as consumers should be the ones asking about what we're spraying into the air and tossing into our washing machines and dumping down our drains and slapping all over our bodies.  Shelves of cleaning products are now as long as the shelves of cereals.  Is this a reflection of who we are as consumers and what it is that we seek?  Hmmm, coconut sunblock and menthol shampoo (Dove for Men even has added caffeine to its shampoo).  Yes, there are some interesting discoveries in sterilization (the history of the surgeon Joseph Lister is particularly revealing, those of you who perhaps more recognize the name Listerine), but what exactly are our bodies having to fight off internally as we inhale and rub and gargle such mixtures?  Chatting at a party with a person wearing fabric-scented clothes and flower-scented hair and minted breath and perfumed cheeks, we might tend to wonder who that person really is, and what are they trying to cover up...or would this person simply be just a mirror of ourselves?  Perhaps "au naturel" will even become the newest scent, a spritz of water and saline and a dash of bacteria...perspiration.  Leave it all to marketing...