Two Americas
11-14-2007, 07:04 PM
Found a great articile from Clayton Dach at adbusters. He is writing about perfume, but this has relevance to so much in agricultural activism and consumerism.
"Natural" has become a buzzword, and the organic movement has been reduced to defining what is and what isn't to be awarded the "organic" imprimatur according to what is deemed "natural." It would seem to be obvious that the word natural is one that has been entirely hijacked by commerical interests and harnessed for use in corporate marketing and sales campaigns, but a surpising number of people are fooled by the use of the word. There is such a strong prejudice about the word "natural," that the title of this thread will cause an immediate negative reaction for many people.
The Scent of Fear: Where a perfume meets a sneeze, we catch a glimpse of science’s edge
Adbusters
Clayton Dach
Full article here (http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/67.php?id=319#)
Early this spring, nature furnished Germany with a sight not seen for over 170 years: a bear, a wild brown bear, roaming freely in the southern state of Bavaria. Part of a program to reintroduce a wild population to the northern Italian Alps, the bear – nicknamed Bruno, but officially designated JJ1 – wandered over the border in May. Initially welcoming, the Bavarian authorities promptly soured on their guest once raided beehives and the shredded corpses of sheep were discovered dotting the countryside.
“A man-bear encounter could occur at any time,” explained State Environment Minister Werner Schnappauf to BBC reporters, “It cannot be allowed to roam freely.” And so, on June 26th, after a few weeks of failed attempts to tranquilize and capture Bruno, a group of three Bavarian hunters, on the urging of Minister Schnappauf, tracked the bear down and shot him dead.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide1.jpg
The apparent victim of a dramatic allergic reaction
Competing in a London, Canada curling tournament in March, Team Nova Scotia player Mary-Anne Arsenault was stricken with a mysterious affliction. First, she grew nauseous. Then her legs felt wobbly. As she left the ice to get her bearings, her chest tightened up and her breathing became labored. Soon, she was being whisked off to a local university hospital – the apparent victim of a dramatic allergic reaction to another player’s perfume.
“And I love perfume,” she later told a reporter with the London Free Press, “I always buy some every time I go through the duty-free. But it’s just that one – I think it’s [Dior’s] Poison – that has one ingredient, whatever it is, that gets in my airways and makes them close over.”
Arsenault recovered quickly from her symptoms and was able to return to play later that evening, accompanied by a request from tournament officials for all players to forego perfume on the ice. Though Arsenault’s scare was more public than most, such tales have become familiar in the developed world, where workplaces and municipalities are increasingly called on to address complaints that scented products are responsible for a whole host of ailments, including headaches, nausea, respiratory distress, and even debilitating immune dysfunction and neurological damage.
The rapid change in public attitudes is occurring alongside a well-documented rise (in some affluent nations, as much as four-fold) in hypersensitivity-related health problems such as asthma and serious allergic reactions. At the same time, health professionals and ecologists have been sounding alarms over a handful of everyday substances (including perflourooctanoic acid [PFOA], used in producing non-stick coatings, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers [PBDEs], a fire-retardant used in mattresses and carpets) whose worrisome tendency to accumulate in living things have drawn easy comparison to chemical villains of yesteryear such as DDT and PCBs. It is not without reason, then, that we’re entering into a sort of collective chemophobia, and fragranced products, whose presence is readily detectable yet whose contents are enigmatic, offer a conspicuous target for our misgivings.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide2.jpg
The ghostwriters of the olfactory universe
Confronted with row upon row of celebrity fragrances by the likes of Britney Spears and Antonio Banderas, you’ve probably suspected that neither Brit nor Tony have ever actually been seen hunched over vials of aroma chemicals, sweating furiously over the formulas for their signature scents. The obvious explanation is that they work with perfumers – “noses,” as they’re called – who do the hunching and the sweating for them. Less apparent is where these noses themselves perform their shadowy alchemy.
Here are five inscrutable names that most people have never heard, not even in whispers: Firmenich, Symrise, Givaudan, Quest, Takasago. And here’s a sixth that should give away the game: International Flavors and Fragrances. These six companies are the ghostwriters of the olfactory universe. Together, they provide the ingredients and the recipes for over half of what you smell, from the unglamorous functional perfumery of hairspray, toilet bowl cleaner and underarm deodorant, all the way up to the prestigious realms of fine perfumes and colognes. And since there is a lot of truth to that hoary old dictum that what you taste is largely a product of what you smell, most of them are in the business of adding flavor to what you eat as well.
Noses aside, the aroma companies also house the brains of the industry – chemists on an endless quest, electronically sniffing a petal here, a hunk of wood there, trying to detect what hitherto unknown olfactory experiences the planet still keeps in reserve. Like the R&D arms of pharmaceutical companies, they also rely heavily on combinatorial chemistry, running through a virtually endless array of molecular permutations searching for something – anything – that might embody the charmed combination of novelty, ease-of-manufacture and safety that they need to make a go of it. Realistically, with a multi-million dollar research budget and a year’s worth of efforts, each aroma company can hope for one, maybe two molecules to actually ever reach the shelves.
In order to appreciate why this is worth all of the fuss, you need to know that there are essentially three classes of fragrance materials. The first class is naturals. These are chemically complex extracts such as essential oils, teased out of flowers, seeds, roots and the like using steam, organic solvents, or even carbon dioxide under extreme pressure. Compare this to nature-identical molecules, which are synthesized (often from petroleum feedstock or agricultural and forestry wastes) but are otherwise structurally identical to molecules found in nature. (Vanillin, menthol, and limonene are all common nature-identicals whose names still bear the trace of their origins). The final class – the out-and-out synthetics – are born only in the lab.
From a perfumer’s standpoint, each of these classes serves its own vital purpose: naturals are unparalleled in their rich complexity; nature-identicals allow us to fine-tune; synthetics offer whole new experiences. Where the synthetics really get the love, however, is from the bean counters and the corporate brass. For one thing, they are usually cheaper. And, as prominent aroma industry consultant Tony Burfield explains to me, “natural aromatic materials are prone to unavailability and price volatility due to climatic and political factors, which does not suit the big Corporate Aroma Company accountants and forecasters, who prefer the relative stability of the synthetics sector.”
Crucially, patent laws pertaining to novel synthetics are generally more clear-cut than with natural and nature-identical materials. Since the attraction of offering something that no other aromachemical manufacturer can match is clear, it’s inevitable that the future of perfumery – at least from the perspective of the folks who supply the materials – is in “captive” molecules, which by definition must be synthetic. This is where fine and functional perfumery alike face their greatest image problem.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide3.jpg
Exploiting our anxieties to sell their wares
Regrettably, for every natural perfumer or self-styled aromatherapist out there who resists the temptation, there seems to be at least one other that is more than willing to exploit our anxieties to sell their wares. Californian perfumery Rich Hippie offers “wildcrafted, organic perfumes” for the wealthy love child; a 60ml bottle of their Kalachakra scent will set you back $1325. They’ll also give you all of the factual inaccuracies and vague health threats you can stomach, absolutely free.
A favorite of mine from their online shop: “Prior to World War II, all fine perfume was 100% natural and chemical free. . . . after the war, the chemical industry, which had experienced rapid growth in response to the war effort, needed new markets to keep factories running and began manufacturing ‘fragrance’ or synthetic perfume.” This is unadulterated, shameless hogwash, calculated to conjure up images of Zyklon B in an atomiser. In fact, synthetic aromachemicals first came into use in the nineteenth century, and the most famous pre-war perfume of all – 1921’s Chanel No.5 – has always been loaded to the balls with synthetic aldehydes.
By hawking their luxury goods under an ominous cloud of cancer, Rich Hippie is engaging in the worst form of marketing, the kind that combines fear with mystification. Independent or not, companies that rely on emotional blackmail and junk science do the industry, and the public in general, a massive disservice. They are also working to put themselves out of business, since municipalities and workplaces contemplating total fragrance bans don’t make special provisions for natural perfumes – rather, the axiom is “if it smells, it’s a pollutant.” The more we contribute to a general distrust of scented products, the sooner this axiom will be brought into full effect.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide4.jpg
"Natural" is not natural
Somewhere along the line, nature resolved to make a panoply of odd things that are decidedly not for internal use, things like snake venom, arsenic, mercury, box jellyfish, botulism toxin, petroleum, fire, and so on. As fascinating as this is, far more interesting is what nature secreted away inside all of the things that we don’t think twice about swallowing or breathing in. Mostly, we can go on with our lives without really suffering from the knowledge that, for example, a cup of raw apple seeds, chewed and swallowed, can release enough hydrogen cyanide gas into your system to stop you in your tracks. This ignorance just won’t do once we’ve put nature to work for us on an industrial scale.
Look up. Look down. The chemical names spanning these pages represent only a fraction of the 350 or so constituents thus far identified in rose essential oil. In high enough concentrations, many of these chemicals are potent allergens. Others are demonstrably toxic. Some can be irritating to the skin, lungs and eyes. Some are psychoactive. Look up. Look down. Nature’s chemistry set is all around you. The bacteria and the flowers and the animals are the manufacturing facilities, pumping out chemicals in enormous quantities, out into the air you breathe and the food you eat.
Yet this isn’t, strictly speaking, about nature at all. Open almost any aromatherapy manual, and you will find it rife with caveats regarding essential oils that can induce abortions and seizures, that can cause cancer. Look in the materials database of the International Fragrance Association – the industry’s voluntary regulatory body – and you will find dozens of strict recommendations for limiting concentrations of natural and nature-identical materials, all to reduce the risk of adverse reactions (not to mention litigation). What we are talking about, to be perfectly clear, is not nature, but manufacturing.
One independent perfumer – Andy Tauer, of the small, Zurich-based company Tauer Perfumes – told me why he doesn’t put too much stock in platitudes about natural materials: “Looking at the extraction processes involving boiling water or organic solvents, in a factory-like environment, I have to admit that the term ‘natural’ looses part of its attractiveness. These ‘natural’ extracts are man-made: what is left of our beloved lavender flowers after distillation and extraction of their oil is a pile of brownish junk, cooked to oblivion, by brutal men, but still called natural.”
So this question is not really about roses. It’s about what can happen when humans gather 32,000 roses and submit them to all manner of tortures for a few dozen milliliters of liquid. And the answer to the question is this: as far as chemical soups go, nature is no slouch. Especially once we get our noses in there to help her along.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide5.jpg
Chemical sensitivity is confusing terrain
What was that lurking allergen, that lone ingredient that yanked Mary-Anne Arsenault away from her curling and into Emergency? The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. Though the accused perfume baits us with the name Poison, it isn’t likely to contain any exotic chemical that is not also in hundreds upon hundreds of other consumer products. Which means, despite confident newspaper headlines like “Scent allergy KOs curler,” that Arsenault’s reaction to just that one scent is probably not allergic in nature.
In their efforts to explain sensitivity reactions, researchers come up against one major dead end. They know that certain fragrance ingredients can, at high concentrations, trigger allergic responses or otherwise cause irritation that superficially resemble allergies. Yet they also know that the doses involved in casual exposures – in other words, the amount needed for you to smell them on another person – is vanishingly minute, typically far below established safety thresholds.
So we are in the midst of an explanatory gap. Between the toxicologists, the media commentators, the asthma advocacy groups, the natural perfumers, and the dozens of helpful multiple chemical sensitivity sufferers with internet connections, there is no shortage of people who are willing to rush in to fill the gap. Quite to the contrary, there is an embarrassment of riches out there in health and safety information, pages and pages of riches, eagerly volunteered but often of dubious quality and even more dubious utility. There are the shocking studies measuring indoor air pollutants like volatile organic compounds (VOCs), defined as any carbon-based molecule that can enter the air (which, incidentally, includes virtually every molecule that humans are capable of smelling). Then there are the lists. Shit-your-pants, terrifying lists of the scores of unpronounceable chemicals – b-Phenylethyl alcohol! a-Terpineol! Benzaldehydehyde 4-hydroxy-3-methoxy! – all waiting to pounce and savage your immune system and choke the life right out of you.
You take a deep breath. You look a little closer, and you notice the lack of data on dosage or concentration. You do some more digging. You realize that half, two-thirds of these chemicals are released into the atmosphere in massive quantities by flowers and fruit and pine trees. Then you wonder what you are supposed to do with these lists.
Chemical sensitivity is confusing terrain to navigate, made no less confusing by the number of jerks who seem content to divorce environmental and public health issues from science, and yoke them instead to quasi-religious proclamations (e.g. nature = good, synthetic = bad). Still, the level of confusion is itself suggestive: it hints that we are not dealing with one disease, one cause, one solution, but rather with a densely packed knot of technological, environmental, medical, social and, yes, psychological factors.
Pamela Dalton is a researcher and cognitive psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia-based, non-profit research institute that is active in the study of chemosensory irritation, thanks in part to minority funding from the fragrance industry. When asked about current insights into some of the most common adverse reactions to scented products (including headaches, weakness, respiratory difficulties and allergy-like symptoms), she notes that “as yet, no mechanism that adequately describes the fragrance sensitivity reaction has been put forth, in my opinion. But, even if one exists, there is still a strong potential for a stress response to enhance the perception of all those symptoms . . . particularly if the individual has a conscious knowledge that they have been exposed to a substance which they believe may cause problems for them.”
Asthma exemplifies the notion of a complex condition that is influenced by any number of factors, including psychological ones. Anti-fragrance campaigners will often point to the demonstrable ability of fragrances to trigger asthma attacks; however, the list of things that can trigger sensitive asthmatics is hardly exclusive, and includes such otherwise harmless stuff as cold air, hot air, dry air, exercise, sex, excitement and fright. To this, Dalton adds that “there is clear evidence (experimental) that some proportion of asthmatics will show decreases in pulmonary function when they are told they are being exposed to a bronchoconstrictor (and it is only nebulized saline). So, cognitive factors can always play a role in the symptom response and interpretation of visceral sensations.”
In the case of headaches, Dalton points out that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that symptoms may arise as a direct result of stress responses to strong olfactory stimuli, in much the same way that a loud noise or bright lights can elicit a headache. That our bodies are readily capable of having powerful physiological reactions to mere sensations shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise to anyone who has ever gagged forcefully after walking into a particularly ripe outhouse. This isn’t to say that chemical sensitivities are “all in your head” – far from it – but it is an excellent argument for keeping your head level.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide6.jpg
An unpopular stance
Here’s where I hazard taking an unpopular stance: in lieu of tirelessly campaigning for the world to arrange itself flawlessly for their comfort and safety, people with hypersensitivities should resolve themselves to suffering a degree of inconvenience from their respective conditions. I’m allowed to argue this free from the danger of being branded an asshole because, very simply, I am one of them. Those aforementioned asthmatics that are triggered by damn near everything? That’s me – your classic, allergy-prone, over-reactive, atopic constitution, complete with wheezing, sinus problems, hives, generous amounts of phlegm, middle-ear blockages and eczema (though not usually all at once, thankfully).
For a time during my teens, my hands would swell up and itch maddeningly whenever they got chilly, an allergy-like condition called cold urticaria. Forced to make the choice between unswollen hands and a nice big slurpee, I usually picked the slurpee. But I learned early on that comfort and safety are dynamic states, determined somewhere in the confluence of personal choice and circumstances that we cannot control.
These days, I avoid my triggers whenever practical, pop my over-the-counter anti-histamine and my rather costly Merck-patented asthma pills, and dabble in dietary supplements and herbal remedies, all the while keeping my fingers crossed that none of them are killing my liver in the process. In return for my co-workers’ cooperation in not throwing dust or cat hair in my face, I similarly resist the urge to operate strobe lights or bang on pots at my desk. When the day comes that a loved one or stranger is party to one of my tragic attacks, I’ll also resist the urge to harangue them too badly for it.
The fact is, we make these sorts of decisions every day. If you want to enjoy the company of others, without frivolously pushing the limits of their tolerance, don’t lacquer yourself in cologne when riding the bus. Cover your face when you sneeze. Don’t take your dog with you to the doctor’s office. Whisper in the library. Give people allowances to live their own lives. Don’t spit on the sidewalk.
Yet if your needs are so great that no reasonable amount of restraint or precaution from the people around you proves sufficient, then you must withdraw from this world as best you can. It’s cruel and it’s unfair, but it’s your lot in life and humanity must go on without you.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide7.jpg
Almost no natural ingredients are completely safe
We can test and retest. We can hunt down the serious allergens, the acute toxins, the carcinogens, the compounds that accumulate in the soil and in the food chain and in our own bodies, mimicking our hormones and disrupting our immunity. We can find out what concentrations are probably safe, and what concentrations probably aren’t. We can make sure that the people doing the testing are not the same people who are making the chemicals. We can improve product labelling for the minor threats, and we can ban the worst offenders outright. And we should, unquestionably, do all of these things.
But we can also take our vigilance much further. We can test, test again, retest, retest again. We can take the precautionary principle to its most stringent conclusion, forbidding every chemical that poses any measurable risk, every chemical that offers a theoretical risk, and every chemical that has not already been tested and tested again.
Once we have done all of this, we will discover two things. One, that there will be no more natural ingredients at our disposal, because, in addition to the perfumers, and the accountants, and the corporate brass, the other group that loves pure synthetics is the toxicologists. This is not about bias. Even in the absence of industry pressure, they are duty-bound to scrutinize every molecule, regardless of its provenance, with the same jaundiced eye. That eye will have expectations that precious few natural materials – with their staggering variability and complexity – could ever hope to live up to.
Which brings us to the second thing that we will discover once our hunt is complete.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide8.jpg
Bruno is dead
Bruno is dead. He never had a chance to kill anybody, but he sure as hell could have.
Even in death, Bruno serves a valuable purpose. He reminds us that science will never be able to solve the problem of nature’s indifference to our well-being, whether that indifference comes to us in the form of a surly Bavarian bear or a flower laced with carcinogens. Sure, science can rescue us from a certain set of ambiguities – if this substance, in this concentration, used in this way, by this sort of person, can mangle DNA or make babies that have no limbs. What it can’t tell us is where to establish our threshold for tolerating these risks.
Nature, with its chemical soups, asks of us a brutally straightforward compromise: to live as part of this world, we must be ground down as part of this world. If we accept, then we acknowledge that we are vulnerable yet resilient creatures, built to be injured, then to heal, then to be injured again. If we refuse these difficult terms, then we may suffer slightly less, but we will have traversed the world like open wounds, dreaming of a place to convalesce. Neither nature, nor science, can shelter us from this choice.
"Natural" has become a buzzword, and the organic movement has been reduced to defining what is and what isn't to be awarded the "organic" imprimatur according to what is deemed "natural." It would seem to be obvious that the word natural is one that has been entirely hijacked by commerical interests and harnessed for use in corporate marketing and sales campaigns, but a surpising number of people are fooled by the use of the word. There is such a strong prejudice about the word "natural," that the title of this thread will cause an immediate negative reaction for many people.
The Scent of Fear: Where a perfume meets a sneeze, we catch a glimpse of science’s edge
Adbusters
Clayton Dach
Full article here (http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/67.php?id=319#)
Early this spring, nature furnished Germany with a sight not seen for over 170 years: a bear, a wild brown bear, roaming freely in the southern state of Bavaria. Part of a program to reintroduce a wild population to the northern Italian Alps, the bear – nicknamed Bruno, but officially designated JJ1 – wandered over the border in May. Initially welcoming, the Bavarian authorities promptly soured on their guest once raided beehives and the shredded corpses of sheep were discovered dotting the countryside.
“A man-bear encounter could occur at any time,” explained State Environment Minister Werner Schnappauf to BBC reporters, “It cannot be allowed to roam freely.” And so, on June 26th, after a few weeks of failed attempts to tranquilize and capture Bruno, a group of three Bavarian hunters, on the urging of Minister Schnappauf, tracked the bear down and shot him dead.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide1.jpg
The apparent victim of a dramatic allergic reaction
Competing in a London, Canada curling tournament in March, Team Nova Scotia player Mary-Anne Arsenault was stricken with a mysterious affliction. First, she grew nauseous. Then her legs felt wobbly. As she left the ice to get her bearings, her chest tightened up and her breathing became labored. Soon, she was being whisked off to a local university hospital – the apparent victim of a dramatic allergic reaction to another player’s perfume.
“And I love perfume,” she later told a reporter with the London Free Press, “I always buy some every time I go through the duty-free. But it’s just that one – I think it’s [Dior’s] Poison – that has one ingredient, whatever it is, that gets in my airways and makes them close over.”
Arsenault recovered quickly from her symptoms and was able to return to play later that evening, accompanied by a request from tournament officials for all players to forego perfume on the ice. Though Arsenault’s scare was more public than most, such tales have become familiar in the developed world, where workplaces and municipalities are increasingly called on to address complaints that scented products are responsible for a whole host of ailments, including headaches, nausea, respiratory distress, and even debilitating immune dysfunction and neurological damage.
The rapid change in public attitudes is occurring alongside a well-documented rise (in some affluent nations, as much as four-fold) in hypersensitivity-related health problems such as asthma and serious allergic reactions. At the same time, health professionals and ecologists have been sounding alarms over a handful of everyday substances (including perflourooctanoic acid [PFOA], used in producing non-stick coatings, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers [PBDEs], a fire-retardant used in mattresses and carpets) whose worrisome tendency to accumulate in living things have drawn easy comparison to chemical villains of yesteryear such as DDT and PCBs. It is not without reason, then, that we’re entering into a sort of collective chemophobia, and fragranced products, whose presence is readily detectable yet whose contents are enigmatic, offer a conspicuous target for our misgivings.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide2.jpg
The ghostwriters of the olfactory universe
Confronted with row upon row of celebrity fragrances by the likes of Britney Spears and Antonio Banderas, you’ve probably suspected that neither Brit nor Tony have ever actually been seen hunched over vials of aroma chemicals, sweating furiously over the formulas for their signature scents. The obvious explanation is that they work with perfumers – “noses,” as they’re called – who do the hunching and the sweating for them. Less apparent is where these noses themselves perform their shadowy alchemy.
Here are five inscrutable names that most people have never heard, not even in whispers: Firmenich, Symrise, Givaudan, Quest, Takasago. And here’s a sixth that should give away the game: International Flavors and Fragrances. These six companies are the ghostwriters of the olfactory universe. Together, they provide the ingredients and the recipes for over half of what you smell, from the unglamorous functional perfumery of hairspray, toilet bowl cleaner and underarm deodorant, all the way up to the prestigious realms of fine perfumes and colognes. And since there is a lot of truth to that hoary old dictum that what you taste is largely a product of what you smell, most of them are in the business of adding flavor to what you eat as well.
Noses aside, the aroma companies also house the brains of the industry – chemists on an endless quest, electronically sniffing a petal here, a hunk of wood there, trying to detect what hitherto unknown olfactory experiences the planet still keeps in reserve. Like the R&D arms of pharmaceutical companies, they also rely heavily on combinatorial chemistry, running through a virtually endless array of molecular permutations searching for something – anything – that might embody the charmed combination of novelty, ease-of-manufacture and safety that they need to make a go of it. Realistically, with a multi-million dollar research budget and a year’s worth of efforts, each aroma company can hope for one, maybe two molecules to actually ever reach the shelves.
In order to appreciate why this is worth all of the fuss, you need to know that there are essentially three classes of fragrance materials. The first class is naturals. These are chemically complex extracts such as essential oils, teased out of flowers, seeds, roots and the like using steam, organic solvents, or even carbon dioxide under extreme pressure. Compare this to nature-identical molecules, which are synthesized (often from petroleum feedstock or agricultural and forestry wastes) but are otherwise structurally identical to molecules found in nature. (Vanillin, menthol, and limonene are all common nature-identicals whose names still bear the trace of their origins). The final class – the out-and-out synthetics – are born only in the lab.
From a perfumer’s standpoint, each of these classes serves its own vital purpose: naturals are unparalleled in their rich complexity; nature-identicals allow us to fine-tune; synthetics offer whole new experiences. Where the synthetics really get the love, however, is from the bean counters and the corporate brass. For one thing, they are usually cheaper. And, as prominent aroma industry consultant Tony Burfield explains to me, “natural aromatic materials are prone to unavailability and price volatility due to climatic and political factors, which does not suit the big Corporate Aroma Company accountants and forecasters, who prefer the relative stability of the synthetics sector.”
Crucially, patent laws pertaining to novel synthetics are generally more clear-cut than with natural and nature-identical materials. Since the attraction of offering something that no other aromachemical manufacturer can match is clear, it’s inevitable that the future of perfumery – at least from the perspective of the folks who supply the materials – is in “captive” molecules, which by definition must be synthetic. This is where fine and functional perfumery alike face their greatest image problem.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide3.jpg
Exploiting our anxieties to sell their wares
Regrettably, for every natural perfumer or self-styled aromatherapist out there who resists the temptation, there seems to be at least one other that is more than willing to exploit our anxieties to sell their wares. Californian perfumery Rich Hippie offers “wildcrafted, organic perfumes” for the wealthy love child; a 60ml bottle of their Kalachakra scent will set you back $1325. They’ll also give you all of the factual inaccuracies and vague health threats you can stomach, absolutely free.
A favorite of mine from their online shop: “Prior to World War II, all fine perfume was 100% natural and chemical free. . . . after the war, the chemical industry, which had experienced rapid growth in response to the war effort, needed new markets to keep factories running and began manufacturing ‘fragrance’ or synthetic perfume.” This is unadulterated, shameless hogwash, calculated to conjure up images of Zyklon B in an atomiser. In fact, synthetic aromachemicals first came into use in the nineteenth century, and the most famous pre-war perfume of all – 1921’s Chanel No.5 – has always been loaded to the balls with synthetic aldehydes.
By hawking their luxury goods under an ominous cloud of cancer, Rich Hippie is engaging in the worst form of marketing, the kind that combines fear with mystification. Independent or not, companies that rely on emotional blackmail and junk science do the industry, and the public in general, a massive disservice. They are also working to put themselves out of business, since municipalities and workplaces contemplating total fragrance bans don’t make special provisions for natural perfumes – rather, the axiom is “if it smells, it’s a pollutant.” The more we contribute to a general distrust of scented products, the sooner this axiom will be brought into full effect.
http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/images/stories/67/scentoffear_divide4.jpg
"Natural" is not natural
Somewhere along the line, nature resolved to make a panoply of odd things that are decidedly not for internal use, things like snake venom, arsenic, mercury, box jellyfish, botulism toxin, petroleum, fire, and so on. As fascinating as this is, far more interesting is what nature secreted away inside all of the things that we don’t think twice about swallowing or breathing in. Mostly, we can go on with our lives without really suffering from the knowledge that, for example, a cup of raw apple seeds, chewed and swallowed, can release enough hydrogen cyanide gas into your system to stop you in your tracks. This ignorance just won’t do once we’ve put nature to work for us on an industrial scale.
Look up. Look down. The chemical names spanning these pages represent only a fraction of the 350 or so constituents thus far identified in rose essential oil. In high enough concentrations, many of these chemicals are potent allergens. Others are demonstrably toxic. Some can be irritating to the skin, lungs and eyes. Some are psychoactive. Look up. Look down. Nature’s chemistry set is all around you. The bacteria and the flowers and the animals are the manufacturing facilities, pumping out chemicals in enormous quantities, out into the air you breathe and the food you eat.
Yet this isn’t, strictly speaking, about nature at all. Open almost any aromatherapy manual, and you will find it rife with caveats regarding essential oils that can induce abortions and seizures, that can cause cancer. Look in the materials database of the International Fragrance Association – the industry’s voluntary regulatory body – and you will find dozens of strict recommendations for limiting concentrations of natural and nature-identical materials, all to reduce the risk of adverse reactions (not to mention litigation). What we are talking about, to be perfectly clear, is not nature, but manufacturing.
One independent perfumer – Andy Tauer, of the small, Zurich-based company Tauer Perfumes – told me why he doesn’t put too much stock in platitudes about natural materials: “Looking at the extraction processes involving boiling water or organic solvents, in a factory-like environment, I have to admit that the term ‘natural’ looses part of its attractiveness. These ‘natural’ extracts are man-made: what is left of our beloved lavender flowers after distillation and extraction of their oil is a pile of brownish junk, cooked to oblivion, by brutal men, but still called natural.”
So this question is not really about roses. It’s about what can happen when humans gather 32,000 roses and submit them to all manner of tortures for a few dozen milliliters of liquid. And the answer to the question is this: as far as chemical soups go, nature is no slouch. Especially once we get our noses in there to help her along.
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Chemical sensitivity is confusing terrain
What was that lurking allergen, that lone ingredient that yanked Mary-Anne Arsenault away from her curling and into Emergency? The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. Though the accused perfume baits us with the name Poison, it isn’t likely to contain any exotic chemical that is not also in hundreds upon hundreds of other consumer products. Which means, despite confident newspaper headlines like “Scent allergy KOs curler,” that Arsenault’s reaction to just that one scent is probably not allergic in nature.
In their efforts to explain sensitivity reactions, researchers come up against one major dead end. They know that certain fragrance ingredients can, at high concentrations, trigger allergic responses or otherwise cause irritation that superficially resemble allergies. Yet they also know that the doses involved in casual exposures – in other words, the amount needed for you to smell them on another person – is vanishingly minute, typically far below established safety thresholds.
So we are in the midst of an explanatory gap. Between the toxicologists, the media commentators, the asthma advocacy groups, the natural perfumers, and the dozens of helpful multiple chemical sensitivity sufferers with internet connections, there is no shortage of people who are willing to rush in to fill the gap. Quite to the contrary, there is an embarrassment of riches out there in health and safety information, pages and pages of riches, eagerly volunteered but often of dubious quality and even more dubious utility. There are the shocking studies measuring indoor air pollutants like volatile organic compounds (VOCs), defined as any carbon-based molecule that can enter the air (which, incidentally, includes virtually every molecule that humans are capable of smelling). Then there are the lists. Shit-your-pants, terrifying lists of the scores of unpronounceable chemicals – b-Phenylethyl alcohol! a-Terpineol! Benzaldehydehyde 4-hydroxy-3-methoxy! – all waiting to pounce and savage your immune system and choke the life right out of you.
You take a deep breath. You look a little closer, and you notice the lack of data on dosage or concentration. You do some more digging. You realize that half, two-thirds of these chemicals are released into the atmosphere in massive quantities by flowers and fruit and pine trees. Then you wonder what you are supposed to do with these lists.
Chemical sensitivity is confusing terrain to navigate, made no less confusing by the number of jerks who seem content to divorce environmental and public health issues from science, and yoke them instead to quasi-religious proclamations (e.g. nature = good, synthetic = bad). Still, the level of confusion is itself suggestive: it hints that we are not dealing with one disease, one cause, one solution, but rather with a densely packed knot of technological, environmental, medical, social and, yes, psychological factors.
Pamela Dalton is a researcher and cognitive psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia-based, non-profit research institute that is active in the study of chemosensory irritation, thanks in part to minority funding from the fragrance industry. When asked about current insights into some of the most common adverse reactions to scented products (including headaches, weakness, respiratory difficulties and allergy-like symptoms), she notes that “as yet, no mechanism that adequately describes the fragrance sensitivity reaction has been put forth, in my opinion. But, even if one exists, there is still a strong potential for a stress response to enhance the perception of all those symptoms . . . particularly if the individual has a conscious knowledge that they have been exposed to a substance which they believe may cause problems for them.”
Asthma exemplifies the notion of a complex condition that is influenced by any number of factors, including psychological ones. Anti-fragrance campaigners will often point to the demonstrable ability of fragrances to trigger asthma attacks; however, the list of things that can trigger sensitive asthmatics is hardly exclusive, and includes such otherwise harmless stuff as cold air, hot air, dry air, exercise, sex, excitement and fright. To this, Dalton adds that “there is clear evidence (experimental) that some proportion of asthmatics will show decreases in pulmonary function when they are told they are being exposed to a bronchoconstrictor (and it is only nebulized saline). So, cognitive factors can always play a role in the symptom response and interpretation of visceral sensations.”
In the case of headaches, Dalton points out that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that symptoms may arise as a direct result of stress responses to strong olfactory stimuli, in much the same way that a loud noise or bright lights can elicit a headache. That our bodies are readily capable of having powerful physiological reactions to mere sensations shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise to anyone who has ever gagged forcefully after walking into a particularly ripe outhouse. This isn’t to say that chemical sensitivities are “all in your head” – far from it – but it is an excellent argument for keeping your head level.
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An unpopular stance
Here’s where I hazard taking an unpopular stance: in lieu of tirelessly campaigning for the world to arrange itself flawlessly for their comfort and safety, people with hypersensitivities should resolve themselves to suffering a degree of inconvenience from their respective conditions. I’m allowed to argue this free from the danger of being branded an asshole because, very simply, I am one of them. Those aforementioned asthmatics that are triggered by damn near everything? That’s me – your classic, allergy-prone, over-reactive, atopic constitution, complete with wheezing, sinus problems, hives, generous amounts of phlegm, middle-ear blockages and eczema (though not usually all at once, thankfully).
For a time during my teens, my hands would swell up and itch maddeningly whenever they got chilly, an allergy-like condition called cold urticaria. Forced to make the choice between unswollen hands and a nice big slurpee, I usually picked the slurpee. But I learned early on that comfort and safety are dynamic states, determined somewhere in the confluence of personal choice and circumstances that we cannot control.
These days, I avoid my triggers whenever practical, pop my over-the-counter anti-histamine and my rather costly Merck-patented asthma pills, and dabble in dietary supplements and herbal remedies, all the while keeping my fingers crossed that none of them are killing my liver in the process. In return for my co-workers’ cooperation in not throwing dust or cat hair in my face, I similarly resist the urge to operate strobe lights or bang on pots at my desk. When the day comes that a loved one or stranger is party to one of my tragic attacks, I’ll also resist the urge to harangue them too badly for it.
The fact is, we make these sorts of decisions every day. If you want to enjoy the company of others, without frivolously pushing the limits of their tolerance, don’t lacquer yourself in cologne when riding the bus. Cover your face when you sneeze. Don’t take your dog with you to the doctor’s office. Whisper in the library. Give people allowances to live their own lives. Don’t spit on the sidewalk.
Yet if your needs are so great that no reasonable amount of restraint or precaution from the people around you proves sufficient, then you must withdraw from this world as best you can. It’s cruel and it’s unfair, but it’s your lot in life and humanity must go on without you.
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Almost no natural ingredients are completely safe
We can test and retest. We can hunt down the serious allergens, the acute toxins, the carcinogens, the compounds that accumulate in the soil and in the food chain and in our own bodies, mimicking our hormones and disrupting our immunity. We can find out what concentrations are probably safe, and what concentrations probably aren’t. We can make sure that the people doing the testing are not the same people who are making the chemicals. We can improve product labelling for the minor threats, and we can ban the worst offenders outright. And we should, unquestionably, do all of these things.
But we can also take our vigilance much further. We can test, test again, retest, retest again. We can take the precautionary principle to its most stringent conclusion, forbidding every chemical that poses any measurable risk, every chemical that offers a theoretical risk, and every chemical that has not already been tested and tested again.
Once we have done all of this, we will discover two things. One, that there will be no more natural ingredients at our disposal, because, in addition to the perfumers, and the accountants, and the corporate brass, the other group that loves pure synthetics is the toxicologists. This is not about bias. Even in the absence of industry pressure, they are duty-bound to scrutinize every molecule, regardless of its provenance, with the same jaundiced eye. That eye will have expectations that precious few natural materials – with their staggering variability and complexity – could ever hope to live up to.
Which brings us to the second thing that we will discover once our hunt is complete.
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Bruno is dead
Bruno is dead. He never had a chance to kill anybody, but he sure as hell could have.
Even in death, Bruno serves a valuable purpose. He reminds us that science will never be able to solve the problem of nature’s indifference to our well-being, whether that indifference comes to us in the form of a surly Bavarian bear or a flower laced with carcinogens. Sure, science can rescue us from a certain set of ambiguities – if this substance, in this concentration, used in this way, by this sort of person, can mangle DNA or make babies that have no limbs. What it can’t tell us is where to establish our threshold for tolerating these risks.
Nature, with its chemical soups, asks of us a brutally straightforward compromise: to live as part of this world, we must be ground down as part of this world. If we accept, then we acknowledge that we are vulnerable yet resilient creatures, built to be injured, then to heal, then to be injured again. If we refuse these difficult terms, then we may suffer slightly less, but we will have traversed the world like open wounds, dreaming of a place to convalesce. Neither nature, nor science, can shelter us from this choice.