The air we breathe is thick with clouds of Armani, Obsession, Escape-and a good many breathers don`t like the way things are starting to smell.
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More and more militant anti-perfume activists are demanding ”fragrance-free zones” in public places. Many are lobbying against magazines that increasingly seem to arrive stuffed full of perfume samples.
”Perfume is going to be the tobacco smoke of tomorrow,” promises Louise Kosta, New York rep for the Atlanta-based National Human Ecology League.
And in New Jersey, the National Center for Environmental Health Strategies is distributing ”Perfume Pollutes” buttons, overseeing letter-writing campaigns and organizing radio and TV talk-show spots. The group, says president Mary Lamielle, has been urging Congress and the Federal Drug Administration to regulate the ingredients-”pesticides,” she charges-in the room fresheners and scents that are often piped through large buildings.
Perfumers don`t think much of the protesters. ”Perfume does not pollute the air and there are no known carcinogens as there are in tobacco,” says Annette Green, executive director of the Fragrance Foundation. ”You can`t equate the two.”
A $75,000 lesson
In fact, though, the movement already has its Stonewall. Two years ago, an asthmatic Bloomingdale`s customer sued after a counter clerk spritzed her, unasked, with a perfume sample-and sent her to the hospital for 11 days.
”Many people are allergic to one thing or another,” argues Green, ”but you can`t impose your problem on the population at large.”
The Bloomingdale`s customer did. She collected $75,000 from the store.
A strip search
The scented strips proliferating in magazines particularly enrage the activists. ”It is an unwanted, intrusive, unnecessary exposure of people to chemicals,” says Kosta at the National Human Ecology League. ”People sensitized to those chemicals can respond severely. A lot of asthmatics with problems triggered by fragrance would like the option of saying no.”
But the scented strips are a megabucks business for the $4.8 billion fragrance industry. They`re one sure way to reach out and touch more customers. Experts calculate that last year`s launches of Calvin Klein`s Escape, Estee Lauder`s Spellbound and Elizabeth Taylor`s White Diamonds reached 90 million noses.
Michael Pashby, senior vice president of the Magazine Publishers of America, figures that in the first 10 months of 1991 there were about 700 separate scented inserts from different firms. Conde Nast and Hearst, which publish the majority of upscale major women`s magazines, accounted for two-thirds of the strips.
By U.S. Postal Service regulation-following a recently enacted California law-fragrance strips can no longer be ”free oil” on a portion of paper. Now the scent must be encapsulated in a sealed ”bubble” to be opened only by the reader.
Alas, there are accidents: Last July and August, Calvin Klein`s bubbles burst and Escape escaped, prompting many complaints.
But Taylor`s White Diamonds-53 percent of whose launch budget was earmarked for scented strips-has been a huge hit. Indeed, Elizabeth Arden`s Parfums International Division is going in with Taylor on a new White Diamonds bath line in April.
And so the lines are drawn. ”Fragrance-free zones are imperative,”
insists Lamielle.