This article in the New York Times about the decline of the perfume industry gives me a touch more insight into why the perfume industry has developed this paranoia about the effects of the natural perfume market.
Says the article, “Last year, about 15 percent of women said they did not wear fragrance, up from 13 percent in 2003, according to a survey of 9,800 women conducted by NPD.”
((image by canonsnapper on flickr))
This isn’t wrong. I have worked for multiple workplaces that had scent policies, requesting that their employees try to only use unscented bathing products and even deodorants when possible. The tighter the cube farm I worked at, the stricter the policy. After one day behind one person’s overpowering perfume/shampoo combination, I learned to appreciate those policies.
I’ve also been stuck on airplanes where people are forced to get publicly intimate with each other. There was one point recently where, after I had just had a rough flight, I had to endure a woman bragging to me about how she would liberally spray herself and all her bags with a favorite perfume from the duty free shop. Given what I’d just endured from the flight, I felt it necessary to tell her that she was going to hell.1 The sheer selfishness of this woman’s behavior, and her complete lack of empathy for those around her, still boggles me.
Why does this give me insight into the growing fear of naturals taking over? Well, first, those women who aren’t dropping scent altogether are switching over to naturals for two reasons: first, many are claiming to react allergically to the synthetics2 and second, essential oils disadvantage in that only a few carry as far or as strong as synthetics is actually turning out to be a strength. While synthetics can push off a scent for an extended period of time, essential oils fade and can’t be smelled at the distance away that synthetic fragrancing agents can be. This means that one of the very reasons so many manufacturers opted for synthetics has turned on them.
This tendency not to linger isn’t true of all natural materials. I’ve found that clove essential oil will leak through six layers of plastic on incense and is quite aggressive; it also can disturb sensitive noses because of its sheer strength. And one of the paradoxes of a perfumer’s life is that I personally rarely wear scent - I use a lot of unscented lotions and deodorants in part because I need to keep my nasal palate clean to do my work, but also because I myself am highly sensitive.
Perfume is going to go through a social reset very soon, and this is one of the warning knells. Our society changes, our biochemistry changes, and consequently, our methods of beautification change. It may get the major perfumers of the industry in a panic, but it’s not the comet heading for earth. It’s just people, being people, with changing tastes and attitudes.
- My religion doesn’t necessarily believe in hell, but with people with a character as self-centered as this woman was in the world, I sometimes which I could make an exception. [↩]
- all my data on this is strictly anecdotal; about seven people per public showing tell me their eyes water, they hive, or they have suppressed breathing when visiting perfume counters [↩]
