No question about it: Americans like a good smell. We are a smell-crossed nation, with a powder, spray, creme, soap or gel available to "freshen" everything on our person, from the laundry to any body part capable of producing odor, which pretty much describes all of them.
Also, it's probably safe to say American homes are the best-smelling in the world, though the research on this claim is admittedly spotty. Nevertheless, Americans consume more "home fragrance" products than any other nation. Sales reached $2.7 billion last year, according to the Consumer Specialty Products Association, which represents such odor-stomping colossi as Glade, Renuzit and Airwick.
And thanks to American scientific know-how and marketing hustle, domestic smellular technology keeps evolving. It's not just Mom's Lysol aerosol anymore. The "air care" market now includes microchip-controlled "fragrancers" that automatically emit a puff of aroma every few seconds; plug-ins that look like, well, plugs, and work off electrical outlets; and miniature battery-powered fans that blow lab-concocted perfumes into a room on 15-minute cycles. Surveying this veritable smell-a-bration of the chemical arts and sciences, Samuel Epstein, professor emeritus of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, concludes, "The fragrance market is running away with itself."
One of the most curious (and heavily marketed) new entries in the field is called Scentstories by Febreze, a toaster-size device that looks like a cross between a CD player and an electronic foot massager.
The Scentstories unit plugs into a wall outlet and "plays" scented disks. The disks contain packets of gel that are heated by the unit, thus releasing the fragrances, which are blown around by a small fan. The gimmick here is that the disk rotates around a carousel every 30 minutes, so the odor keeps changing. The interchangeable disks have odorific titles and "themes," such as "Wandering Barefoot on the Shore," which includes the selections, "Walking in the Sand," "Under the Palms" and "Splashing in the Waves."
With stop and skip buttons, Scentstories functions much like a CD player. Except there's no music, just . . . smell.
For 'people who like scents'
At $35 per unit (and an additional $6 per disk), Scentstories might be the world's most elaborate jar of potpourri or perhaps the least efficient scented candle. But the product does have a powerful pedigree: It's a creation of Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati-based consumer-products giant that has been selling Tide, Crest and Pampers for generations. P&G is backing Scentstories with a massive TV and magazine ad campaign featuring singer Shania Twain, a woman who looks like she might smell pretty good. P&G recently introduced a Scentstories disk called "Shania's Wishes for Spring," making Twain perhaps the only platinum-selling musician with a CD that really smells.
Since the players were introduced late last summer, P&G has sold more than a million of them in North America, says John Sebastian, the product's brand manager.
Scentstories, he says, isn't just for the odor- and germ-elimination crowd; it's for "people who like scents and want a connection to a mood and an experience."
To judge from its advertising (which is running in People magazine and on home-and-garden cable shows), Scentstories is targeting women between 18 and 49. That is, of course, the profile of the people who buy most of the air-freshening products in the United States. But Sebastian says it's not as simple as that. He describes his likely customer as someone "who is a lover of life and all within it."
Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way was recently offered by Mark Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle's SF Gate Web site. "The Rule of Gluttony goes like this," wrote Morford of Scentstories. "When a given society's needs become so ridiculously oversatisfied and oversatiated and just plain obscenely stuffed . . . it begins to invent utterly useless landfill crap no one really needs."
Morford suggested Procter & Gamble should go after the psychographics of its female target audience with scents named "Desperate Affair in a Cheap Motel Room" or "Whatever Happened to My Dreams of Opening a Small Business" or "Mommy's Valium/Gin Headrush Chocolate Cake."
For those with sensitive noses, Scentstories can be a little tough to take. Sitting near a player for a few hours is sort of like being held hostage at the JC Penney perfume counter. After a while, the pervasive, cloying scents start to give you a mild headache and watery eyes, which doesn't make one love life and all that is within it (the disks feature a warning that eye irritation can be a problem).
The literal-minded could also take issue with the names of the scents. "Walking in the Sand," for example, doesn't smell much like walking in the sand, unless the sand was made of a particularly rich blend of chemical-soaked gel. It's also not clear how "Walking in the Sand" is different from "Wading Along the Shore" because walking in the sand smells a lot like wading along the shore.
Then again, maybe we're the wrong people to ask. We're not really "Wading Along the Shore" people. More like "Hot Pizza and a Bud."
Staff writer Linton Weeks contributed to this report.
