From A Perfumer's Point Of View

by Jean-Pierre Subrenat
It's 6:30 pm and this older lady (she just turned 84 years old the week before) is putting the finishing touches to her attire. Tonight she is going to City Hall for the monthly Council meeting. She is always looking forward to these monthly dates with her fellow citizens of the Nova Scotia Maritime capital: Halifax. She was born in Halifax and likes to feel a part of her town. Although she doesn't have much to say during the assembly - she is too shy and too proper to interrupt debates - she feels almost like it is her civil obligation to participate in the life of her town. As some people enjoy dressing to go to the Opera or to go to a show, she likes to dress for the council meetings. At her age, she doesn't go out much anymore, and the occasions to wear a pretty dress, and some of the jewelry offered by her late husband are pretty rare and the monthly Council meetings are evenings that she treasures.

That is until tonight!

In case you live in a cavern and don't read the newspapers, let me recap what happened at that special Council meeting held last March. While she was sitting pretty, listening to the various speeches, someone interrupted, asking that justice be rendered and that the person emanating toxic poisons be ejected from this room. Several agreed with that loud woman (including some quite entertaining characters wearing gas masks!!) and a mini riot started in City Hall. While our good old Grandma turned around to see who brought toxic poisons (quite dangerous and inconsiderate people, you have to admit?), she noticed two Canadian Mounties walking toward her. They got right to her chair, sniffed around like dogs looking for bad smells and said: "Yes, it's her." They helped the old lady get up, escorted her to the door and to her dismay, EJECTED her from the Council meeting at City Hall. The crowd applauded.
Her crime: with her nice dress and jewelry, she always wears a little bit of her favorite perfume! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you read correctly, she was wearing perfume. I kid you not, and in Halifax, it is now a crime! Of course, I am sure that when she got thrown out of the building, she stumbled over of a few homeless people, sleeping on the steps of City Hall in their own body fluids, reeking of wine and bad salmon (after all, we are in Nova Scotia!)…But it must be fine, because these smells are natural.
When Shaune MacKinay from The Daily News tried to contact her, the "criminal," obviously overcome with shame, said: "I don't want to talk about it, because it was really my own fault." While she might consider herself at fault, the rest of the world (except a few weird people) calls her a victim of the Halifax Hysteria!
The national press noticed the Halifax Hysteria, from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal. Many of the papers in the nation and most recently, American Spectator magazine are talking about this . Michael Fumento, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington D.C. think-tank, wrote in his article "Scents and Senselessness" in the above mentioned American Spectator: "Nowhere is the "Holy War" on scent raging as it is in Halifax." In fact, most of the city's public institutions, a number of large businesses as well as public buses now request or demand that employees be "scent-free." Even the newspaper "The Halifax Chronicle-Herald" forbids its 350 employees to use perfumes, aftershave, fragranced deodorants, shampoos, hair gels and even "strong-smelling mouthwash." Listen to the personnel manager form this oh! so-inviting-to-work-there newspaper, talking about this scent-free rule: "It's no different from a business's rule policy, either you abide by it or you don't work here." Yikes! Why don't you take a chill pill, Adolf?

The Telephone Service Center also forbids its 1,400 employees to use fragranced products as well. When employees log on their computers at work, reminders (not to use fragrances) pop up on their screens. Notes are posted in toilets, asking again not to use toiletries! No, I'm not going there! Another touching story coming from our (soon to be former) friends from Canada. In the Halifax-area (wow, am I surprised?) community of Sheet Harbour, a teacher called the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounties Police) to arrest Gary Falkeham, a 17-year-old student, not because he attempted (as too often nowadays) to shoot someone or detained the cafeteria's bad cook hostage, no. The Mounties arrested him because he violated the school's anti-scent policy by wearing Dippity Doo hair gel and Aqua Velva deodorant to class. The teacher, a "self-declared" sufferer from MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) syndrome claimed that the boy, and his scents, made her vomit, gave her headaches and other kind of miseries. She requested that the boy be charged with assault. What was the assault weapon? Dippity Doo Gel or Aqua Velva? The police are still deciding whether to press charges or not. I have to agree with Michael Fumento, who, writing about this ridiculous incident said that a 17 year old boy wearing Aqua Velva should be arrested! But the bunch of hysterical MCS sufferers are now pushing the envelope a bit too far! Let's see what Washington University Medical Professor H. James Wedner thinks about the MCS sufferers: "As with most mystery syndromes, middle-class white women are most likely to complain of it. Typically, they're well off enough that they can afford to drop out if they're allergic to their entire environment. If you're poor, you simply can't afford to have MCS syndrome." I couldn't have said it better myself!

MCS sufferers are very vocal, and try to convince the outside world (outside of their bubble) that they are victims and that we (the fragrance industry) are out to get them! We could start a collection among the written bloopers and printed propaganda, sell it to serious magazines and make more money than an unlucky contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" I will now try to entertain you (or make to you cry!) with a few quotes I have discovered in various newspapers, magazines, websites and other sources of enchantment for my sarcastic point of view! "Fragrance products worn by people a block away, adversely affect the chemically sensitive," claims Marin County's Barb Wilke. One entire block? What are the people from Marin county wearing? Skunk juice?
Ms. Betty Bridges from the Fragranced Products Information Network, a Virginia-based association against virtually everything, not only supports Halifax's no-scent policy but also claims victory! Victory for what? We don't know, but she claims it! Let's see what she said about that: "Halifax has struck fear in the heart of the fragrance industry. Halifax has been able to do what the Federal Drug Administration, the European Commission and other regulatory agencies have been unable to do." Could it be because, regulatory agencies base decisions on fact, research and results; and Halifax listens to a bunch of hysterics, and makes policies without proof of wrongdoing? Ms. Bridges and her followers (you should visit their website, its funnier than an evening with Eddie Murphy) should know that the FDA, as well as the CTFA (Cosmetic Toiletries and Fragrance Associations), the FMA (Fragrance Material Association), the IFRA (International Fragrance and Raw Material Association) and the RIFM (Research Institute for Fragrance Material) are constantly at work testing fragrance ingredients, making sure that they are safe to use. And all this, at the Fragrance industry's expense. Not at the government's expense.
Check your facts, Ms. Bridges and mostly, base your reactions and comments on facts, not mass hysteria. Ms. Bridges goes a bit further, quoting the late Julia Kendall of Marin County who claimed that: "Symptoms provoked by fragrances include: watery or dry eyes, double vision, sneezing, nasal congestion, sinusitis, tinnitus, ear pain, dizziness, vertigo, coughing, bronchitis, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing, asthma, anaphylaxis, headaches, migraine, seizure, fatigue, confusion, disorientation, incoherence, short-term memory loss, inability to concentrate, nausea, lethargy, anxiety, irritability, depression, mood swings, restlessness, rashes, hives, eczema, flushing, muscle and joint pain, muscle weakness, irregular heartbeat, hypertension, swollen lymph glands and more" MORE? What could be more than that? Death?
In his article, Michael Fumento also reports the quite frightening thoughts coming from Barb Wilke's mind, (the same Barb who said that fragrance could be toxic one block away!): "Multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Lupus and Alzheimer's are all neurological disorders. Dyslexia is a neurological dysfunction. Could any of these neurological dysfunctions be caused by exposure to neurotoxic chemicals? Symptoms are often identical to chemical hypersensitivity." Her reasoning would be almost a logical one if…MCS was something recognized by doctors, but, unfortunately for her, MCS has been widely rejected as a legitimate organic disease by most doctors and researchers across the U.S. and Canada. The American Medical Association, the American Medical Council on Scientific Affairs, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology have all rejected MCS as a legitimate disease.

In other words, the illness that's taken Halifax, and almost the entire Northern coast of California by surprise may well be a figment of these people collective imagination, in other words, a psychosomatic epidemic. A mania! Denver psychologist Herman Staudenmayer, who has had over 500 alleged MCS cases referred to him, published a paper last year about a woman who was awarded worker's compensation (that's mainly what MCS victims are after!) after she complained of sensitivity to fragrances.
"She complained of seizures, upon exposure to various fragrances, she would show behavioral signs of seizure activity, including muscle jerking, becoming disoriented, non-responsive, and giving classic signs of what she believed a seizure would look like." As she experienced that "seizure," Dr. Ronald Kramer, the article's co-author and medical director of the Colorado Neurological Institute and Epilepsy Center in Englewood, conducted a video electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure the brain patterns. Dr. Kramer and Staudenmayer report: "While she was showing overt signs of "seizure," her EEG was perfectly normal. That just doesn't happen with a real seizure." They also added that the woman was not exactly faking it. Her reaction was a "learned sensitivity." She had been led to believe she should react to fragrances and that should be her reaction. It's not worker's compensation she should receive; it's an Oscar for her performance! It is a fact that one can be allergic to a given ingredient but to be allergic to all ingredients is not quite serious. We compile about 2,500 different products to create our fragrances and the combination among these products is infinite.
So, as Michel Fumento puts it: "To be allergic to all fragrances is like being allergic to everything beginning with the letter F." How about this advice coming from someone called an "allergist" that we could qualify as a "clinical ecologist" or "environment physician," as are doctors who treat MCS often called. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted an unnamed environment physician saying: "Don't breathe in what you cannot eat" - ? - "Look for biodegradable products at you local health food store" How about compost or cow manure? Could I wear compost or cow manure? And now for the grand finale: "Avoid things that have distinct odors." That last statement will definitely take away the pleasure to wearing manure! Would it be time for me to quit the perfume industry and start a gas mask factory?

One last example of bloopers, because my head is spinning from all of these stupid and self-serving declarations: Dr. Joan Gluck, an allergist with the Florida Center for Allergy and Asthma trying to explain why some people are allergic to fragrances to reporter Lisa Sodders, from the Capital-Journal: "Many perfumes are made from plants and flowers and these can be related to allergic plants. Chrysanthemum, which is a base for many perfumes, is related to ragweed. Someone might have a tremendous problem being around perfume from the middle of August to frost, maybe in the winter, not as bad, because everything is additive. And of course, the manufacturers of perfume will not tell us what is in them." Doctor Gluck, I am flabbergasted! What planet are you from? How can someone advance such fallacy and then try to blame an entire industry for "not telling what we put in perfumes!" You don't seem to need our formulas as you reveal to everyone "chrysanthemum is a base for many perfumes." How dare you give our trade secrets? Especially since, in my career of 34 years, I have neither used nor seen chrysanthemum oil. Where did you get this information, from a perfumer on Mars? The closest ingredient that could be related to chrysanthemum is taget oil, also called marigold oil, and, believe me, it is NOT a "base for many perfumes" as you put it. It is an oil that is used very rarely and in minute amounts, because of its strength and not because it's related to ragweed! What would you do if we gave you our perfumes formulas? Distort the truth and scare the public some more? Because that is where most of the problem resides, when people like you, Betty Bridges, Barb Wilkes and all the other olfactory activists of this world scare the public. You don't have facts; you start rumors and then, contaminate the mind of the masses. Because we are, unfortunately, part of a society that gives to whiners and complainers, you will always find a politician or two ready to listen to you and defend a cause that does not exist. Because the mind is sometimes weak and the voice always powerful, the louder one speaks, the more damage one can make and that's how Mass Hysteria starts.
Michael Fumento agrees that the people from Halifax "are in the grips of a mania, not a genuine physiological response to chemicals in their environment." He also points out that a mania that has, at various times, shown up in Asia and Africa, where, in villages, one of the men believed that his penis was shrinking. After discussing this problem with the other men of the village, they all believed that their penises were shrinking and even disappearing! To my way of thinking, this is a much more serious problem than allergies to fragrances!
To the people of Halifax, and to those going there - as you cannot use any deodorants - may I suggest, to cover body odors, wear a smoked salmon under each arm…after all, we are in Nova Scotia!
To my fellow non-allergic-to-fragrances-but-allergic-to-stupidity: there is hope. As many of us realize that fragrances are made to make the world a nicer place, at least odor-wise, and not a menace to society, let's build a wall going from Halifax to southern San Francisco and then we'll contain the Mania on that part of the west coast.
After all this negativity, I would like to bring a touch of positive thinking. I would like to quote parts of a beautiful song, "Desert Rose" from the latest CD by Sting, (definitely politically incorrect, by Halifax's standards):