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[Don Himmelman]

Since scents have been featured in the local news of late.......


> Subject: Wall St. Journal on Perfumes in Halifax
>
>
> Fragrance:
>   A City Smells Perfume and Holds Its Nose
>   By Larry M . Greenberg
>   07/28/1999
>   The Wall Street Journal
>   Page B1
>   (Copyright (c) 1999, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
>
>   HALIFAX, Nova Scotia -- The perfume industry's
> worst nightmare is
> unfolding here in this scenic port city on a hill.
>
>   A school sends a substitute teacher home to shower
> off her perfume
> before she can return to work. Hospitals order
> patients to towel down if
> they're too heavily scented. A church asks
> parishioners to leave their
> "fragrant offerings" at home.
>
>   The fight against perfumes and scented products is
> a small but
> impassioned one. And nowhere else has it advanced
> quite as far as in this
> seaside provincial capital, population 350,000. Most
> of Halifax's public
> institutions, and a growing number of its private
> businesses, come right
> out and ask people to abstain from using perfume.
> Some even require that
> they be "scent-free."
>
>   "Wow. They're way ahead of us," says Claudia
> Miller, associate professor
> of environmental and  occupational medicine at the
> University of Texas
> Health Science Center, in San Antonio, and
> co-author of a book on
> chemical sensitivities. Halifax "is doing something
> that's beyond what any
> other community is doing," she says.
>
>   The incidence of environmental illness and
> chemical sensitivities hasn't
> been widely studied, but  anecdotal evidence
> suggests some asthma patients
> and others do suffer respiratory reactions to
> chemicals in perfume and
> other scented products. While only a smattering of
> schools, clinics and
> other public buildings in the U.S. have acted on
> calls for scent-free
> environments, such calls have met with wider
> response in Canada. In
> Ottawa, for example, public buses ask riders to
> leave scents at home. A
> high school outside Toronto is going fragrance-free.
>
>   In comparison, Halifax, perched on the edge of the
> continent and hit by
> a steady sea breeze, has  become fixated on smells.
> At the Rebecca Cohn
> Auditorium, home to Symphony Nova Scotia, signs in
> the lobby request that
> patrons make it a fragrance-free evening.  The
> Halifax Chronicle-Herald
> newspaper prohibits its 350 employees from using
> perfume, after-shave,
> scented deodorant or shampoo -- even strong-smelling
> mouthwash -- on the
> job. Andrea Garson, the newspaper's personnel
> manager, says, "It's no
> different from a business's vacation policy.  Either
> you abide by it or
> you don't work there."
>
>   Antifragrance policies are the norm at most of the
> city's workplaces,
> says Alexander Ross, a top  manager at the Halifax
> operation of Convergys
> Corp., a Cincinnati supplier of telephone
> customer-service. Within a month
> of opening up the 1,400-employee center last fall,
> Convergys  declared it
> a scent-free environment, acting on a request from
> several employees.
> Reminders pop up on computers when employees log on,
> and warning signs are
> posted in restrooms.  Violators are sent home to
> take a shower, on unpaid
> time.
>
>   Why have Haligonians so readily embraced the
> antifragrance movement?
> There are a few theories. One is what Canadians
> generally see as their
> greater willingness to sacrifice individual rights
> for the public good --
> especially as compared with, say, Americans.
>
>   Another possibility is a frightening incident in
> 1991 that few people
> here have forgotten:  Hundreds of staff members at
> the Camp Hill Medical
> Centre fell ill from what was widely regarded as
> poor indoor air quality.
> The hospital says it doesn't know what caused their
> sickness but
> acknowledges there were problems with the
> ventilation system, including
> that it was sucking in fumes from the kitchen
> dishwasher. It has since
> repaired the system. But many of the workers remain
> sick to this day.
>
>   In the years following that episode, labor unions
> began demanding
> cleaner air in other hospitals, and soon schools,
> government buildings and
> other public places began voluntarily posting
> fragrance-free notices. The
> bans, however, haven't been enacted into law.
>
>   Still, as the city's antifragrance forces move off
> the fringes and into
> the mainstream, perfumiers are getting a glimpse of
> their worst-case
> future. So far, they don't like what they see.
>
>   "At first I thought it was a tempest in a teapot.
> I mean, they can't be
> serious, right?" says Patrick  Carroll, general
> manager of Calvin Klein
> Cosmetics (Canada) Ltd., an Oakville, Ontario,
> licensee of the fashion
> designer. "Then I started looking at our numbers.
> Our {Nova Scotia}
> business has certainly stagnated and probably
> declined, which is not the
> case for the rest of the country."
>
>   Maxwell Moulton, principal of Halifax's Clayton
> Park Jr. High School,
> says students willingly comply with a strict
> fragrance ban. "If I have two
> kids a week that come with any smells on, that's a
> busy week," he says.
> Offenders are sent home to shower.  About 80% of
> Halifax schools now have
> some form of scent-free policy, according to the
> Halifax school board.
> "You're going to have a generation that is not
> accustomed to using scented
> products," Mr. Moulton adds. "It will become quite
> natural not to buy
> them."
>
>   Retailers can already measure the effects. Marilyn
> Pellerin, fragrance
> manager for Mills Brothers, an upscale apparel store
> in the city's
> bustling historic downtown, says perfume sales have
> fallen off by about a
> third compared with five years ago. As scent-free
> policies have
> proliferated, she adds, the store has shrunk its
> perfume-selling space by
> 25%.
>
>   The fragrance industry is treading lightly to
> avoid a confrontation that
> could backfire and cause scent bans to spread. The
> Canadian Cosmetics,
> Toiletry and Fragrance Association, based in
> Toronto, is distributing
> pamphlets entitled "Enjoying Your Fragrance," which
> define a "personal
> `scent circle'" with a radius of about one arm's
> length. And it is
> lobbying public officials in Nova Scotia.
>
>   "We've been lumped together with legitimate
> hazards in the workplace"
> such as smoking, says  association spokesman Carl
> Carter. "There is no
> medical evidence to suggest that scented products
> cause disease."
> Advocates of fragrance-free policies say that is
> simply because adequate
> studies haven't been done.
>
>   Some companies are taking the offensive. The Bay
> department store, a
> unit of Hudson's Bay Co., is planning an event right
> inside a big hospital
> trauma unit in September to promote Clinique
> unscented cosmetics. Louise
> Smith, the store's manager, says nurses complained
> to her that they
> couldn't wear makeup to work. "We want to show them
> they can still wear
> makeup and feel good about themselves without
> offending anyone," she says.
>
>   Michael McLaughlin, president of Quadrant
> Cosmetics Corp., a Toronto
> distributor of perfumes  including Giorgio Beverly
> Hills and Liz
> Claiborne, says he fears other places will start
> emulating  Halifax. "If
> you stop wearing it," he says, "we stop selling it."
>
>
>
> Betty Bridges, RN
> Fragranced Products Information Network (FPIN)
> For information on health effects of fragrances,
> visit:
>  http://www.ameliaww.com/fpin/fpin.htm

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