When Northlake`s Laura Sorrisso slipped into water laced with foaming bath oil last spring, she couldn`t have imagined the importance of her reaction.
Sorrisso`s impressions and those of nearly 300 other consumers testing products in Chicago and four other cities may help revolutionize the fragrance industry and the way American consumers think about and buy scent.
”It was relaxing,” recalls Sorrisso, 24, a line worker at Knowles Electronics in Franklin Park, about the floral odor that wafted from Avon`s Tranquil Moments bath foam and soap. ”I thought the aroma was pleasant. It smelled relaxing.”
”Relaxing” is not the way most people describe a fragrance, but executives of major cosmetics companies, backed by research scientists, are betting that consumers will soon buy aromas to achieve just such a specific feeling or mood. Fragrance will be used not only to smell good, but to feel good, too.
”Aromatherapy,” the American catch phrase for this concept, is the hottest new topic in the cosmetics industry. In promising a fragrance to reduce stress, Avon this month is joining the recently introduced Judith Jackson Aromatherapy line and Aromatherapie by Anne Roebuck. More products are on the way, if the interest expressed by fragrance giants Charles of the Ritz and Revlon is any indication.
”If we can create fragrance with certain attributes and it relaxes people and their performance increases, then we can use fragrance to increase performance,” says Dr. Craig Warren, vice president and director of organoleptic research (study of sensations) for International Flavors and Fragrances.
Warren claims experiments have proven the point, but he declines to give details because the products are as yet unpatented.
He predicts that stylish people will soon use aroma to ”increase alertness and increase vigilance.” People may carry inhalers with a scent to wake them up during a sluggish part of the workday or keep themselves alert while making a long car trip.
Shampoos, room fresheners and deodorants are all possible vehicles for such scents, as well as the bath and body products we`re seeing now.
Since the $3.5 billion American perfume business is not growing
–expensive advertising campaigns seem merely to be cutting into profits
–major cosmetics companies are looking for new products to shore up sluggish sales.
”We are selling the same product to the same people in the same old way rather than selling in new ways to new people,” says Amelia Bassin, a fragrance industry marketing consultant and columnist for Product Marketing magazine.
If consumers can be convinced that scent has a functional as well as an esthetic use, and the scent can tie with the current craze for ”natural”
ingredients and health-consciousness, fragrance companies might reach a whole new pool of customers.
Men are a big percentage of this untapped market. Construction workers who would never think of splashing on cologne before going to the job, for example, might be persuaded to try a product that would make them feel more energetic in the morning. A different product might help them relax after a stressful day.
Long accepted elsewhere
Many people throughout the world already accept that what we smell affects how we feel. Aromatherapy, using aromatic floral and herb oils in combination with massage, is an accepted health and beauty regimen in Europe and the Orient.
Rooted in folklore and folk remedies, the distillates of plants are employed in a variety of therapeutic ways from beautifying the skin to curing anxiety. Among the U.S. practitioners are natural food advocates and subscribers to holistic health.
The Jackson and Roebuck lines are variations of the European treatments tailored to the American market. Jackson, for example, insists that the
”process” of smelling the scents, absorbing the oil and massaging in specific ways are necessary for full aromatherapy results. She claims her five fragrances, with ingredients such as fennel and sandalwood, are created for particular benefits, such as calming, energizing or relieving nasal congestion.
A former public relations executive who became intrigued with aromatherapy on a business trip to London several years ago, Jackson later returned to study aromatherapy. ”I call it the beauty you can feel,” says the Connecticut-based Jackson, 57.
Author of a book called ”Scentual Touch, A Personal Guide to Aromatherapy” (Henry Holt and Co., $14.95), Jackson includes recipes for fighting everything from acne to varicose veins using herbal ingredients. Her methods for the topical application of aromatic oils, and an integral part of Jackson`s definition of aromatherapy, are massage techniques from systems as diverse as acupuncture and Swedish massage.
She and Roebuck, also European-trained and former owner of a Toronto aromatherapy salon, emphasize using pure essential plant oils, claiming synthetic duplicates will not achieve the same results, a contention with which Avon executives disagree.
Jackson`s knowledge of the ingredients combined with the current state of scientific research of the olfactory system is formidable to a typical but skeptical consumer.
Building on belief
”Whether it is subliminal or the essence of the smell, it works,” says Jackson. ”Whether what is going in is doing all this stuff or not, it runs on the belief. Very important. (Essayist and editor) Norman Cousins, who is now on the medical faculty at the University of Southern California, said that
`what we must do to build health is to have an active belief system.` ”
But it`s one thing to write a book about the curative powers of scent and quite another to market a product making the same claims.
In the United States, both cosmetics and drugs are under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration. Cosmetics are defined as ”articles to cleanse, beautify, promote attractiveness or alter appearance” and do not require government approval for sale.
Drugs, on the other hand, are ”articles intended for use in the diagnosis, treament or prevention of disease, and intended to affect the structure or any function of the body.” Any drug must have FDA approval before it can be sold.
Does ”mood alteration” push perfume dangerously close to the line of being a drug? Because the field is brand new, the FDA told The Tribune the agency will have to make a case-by-case judgment on the new aroma products.
Ron Wolfe, Avon`s vice president of research and development, says Avon makes no claims for Tranquil Moments as a cure. ”We don`t want to go to market with folklore,” Wolfe says. ”There`s an awful lot of folklore out there.”
Wolfe downplays the idea that aromatherapy products are drugs. ”It is a sensory experience, like going through a museum and seeing paintings you find restful or listening to a particular record to help you relax at the end of the day rather than a tranquilizer.”
Avon supports its claim with laboratory tests, conducted by Takasago, Japan`s largest fragrance house and supplier of raw materials to Avon. The Takasago tests analyzed the changes in brain wave patterns on several hundred people who smelled the 39-ingredient Tranquil Moments aroma. In blind testing commissioned by Avon, consumers like Laura Sorrisso tested two products–one with the fragrance and the other without. The studies ”showed a
`tranquilization` response in hundreds of participants,” according to Avon.
Proving that a particular fragrance or combination of fragrances does what it is supposed to do is tricky, given the present state of medical knowledge of the human olfactory system.
Science still looking
Do scents actually produce a biological change in the body or do they simply trigger a psychological response, a memory from childhood, for example, and are they related to ethnic cultures?
While technology to unlock the secrets of why and how aromas work is expanding in exciting directions, some scientists worry that the current commercial ”marketing is ahead of our science.”
”It is doubtful with our current research that we can make claims,”
insists Dr. Avery Gilbert, a specialist in research on odor, perception and behavior at the Monell Chemical Senses Institute in Philadelphia, one of the nation`s leading centers devoted to taste and smell.
Gilbert does not quibble with the evidence offered by Takasago and Avon as ”very good science.” The conclusions drawn from such data, however, he suggests, can go too far.
Monell is among the research centers where private companies such as Avon as well as the trade group Fragrance Foundation of America through its Fragrance Research Fund are underwriting scientific study.
Even with his reservations about the current state of knowledge, Gilbert agrees the interest by commercial companies in nudging science forward ”will only help.”
That there is any controversy at all surprises longtime advocates of aromatherapy.
Leslie Kenton, the American-born daughter of the late band leader Stan Kenton and the Britain-based health and beauty columnist for England`s Harper`s and Queen magazine, has written about and used aromatherapy for herself and her four children for years.
An adherent of the Jackson and Roebuck persuasion, she is startled when told it sounds like hocus-pocus.
”Is that right? I`m so used to it, that surprises me. It`s a term that has been used rather loosely,” she observes, shuddering at the thought of mass-produced, synthetic potions.
”As all things American,” sighs Kenton, ”they tend to jump in, be very enthusiastic, make it a fad and then move on.”
Says research director Warren: ”As we learn how to do this, we`ll evolve the field. It`s just as scary and unknown as some of the products we introduced in the 1950s. . . . I`m hopeful that nobody is doing it in a dumb way to turn off the consumer before the really good stuff is out there.” —
Avon`s aromatherapy products ($4.50 and $9) are being sold by the country`s 400,000 Avon representatives; Jackson`s line ($15 to $35) is available at Marshall Field`s Water Tower Place and selected Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman-Marcus stores; and Roebuck`s line ($10 to $26.50) is only at Henri Bendel, the upscale New York store that is a division of The Limited.
