Mucosal Vaccination: Cheaper, Faster, Easier, and BETTER!

Even with the existence of effective vaccinations, hepatitis B continues to kill more than a million people each year. Traditional injected vaccines present challenges which are particularly Read more

Sagging Real Estate Market Demands a Fresh Approach

The housing bubble days when selling your home was as simple as listing with a realtor and waiting for the offers to pour in are gone, says ReMax commitment broker Tom Manolas. Sellers who want to score in the current buyers’ market need to do more than mow the lawn and tidy up the foyer, they need a serious edge on the competition. And it should come as no surprise to Whiff afficianados that that edge might lie in appealing to the buyer’s most primitive and emotional sense. In a nutshell, How does your house smell?
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Viva Las Vegas!

What happens in Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay in Vegas, and that’s a good thing! The Spa at Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas has just partnered with leading natural perfumer Ajne to create the Demi-Blend Experience, which will guide guests through the fascinating process of creating their very own signature scent!

The Four Seasons Spa is the first in Las Vegas to offer such a service, and takes pride in the fact that the Demi-Blend Experience incorporates organic essential oils which are healthier for the patron and the planet alike.

The process begins with Ajne’s computerized Chakra test, which helps your personal trained specialist–or melanger determine which areas of your body need harmonizing. The multiple-choice test, which takes about three to five minutes to complete, asks such questions as which scents you’re naturally drawn to (such as floral or spices) as well as more personal questions relating to your stress level and your overall satisfaction with life (all answers are kept completely confidential). A computer processes your responses to determine which of your seven Chakras are most out of balance and, using this information, your melanger chooses the specific oils from the Ajne Rare & Precious Blending Bar that he or she determines will help to realign your Chakras. From this selection of oils, which may include such metaphysically pleasing names as Om and Printemps, you’ll be asked to narrow your choices to just a few which you find most pleasing. And, just as a wine connoseur knows to cleanse his pallet between each sip and swish, the professionals here keep a tray of coffee beans close at hand to keep your olfactory senses keen for each new fragrance sample. Once your melanger has determined that your choices include the proper balance of base notes, middle notes, and top notes, a sample blend will be spritzed onto your arms and given some time to react with your body’s natural chemistry (this step is extremely important, as anyone who fell in love with a perfume at the department store only to later find it disappointing can attest).

Once the fine-tuning is complete and your final mixture is blended to perfection, your melanger will bottle it up in one of Ajne’s striking handmade bottles and ask you to choose a name for your brand new personal Signature Scent!

The Demi-Blend Experience takes about an hour and a half from start to finish, and costs between $200 - $300, depending on the size bottle you choose along with any extras such as the Black Heart Flacon Dabber. All in all, a surprisingly inexpensive way to pass an enjoyable 90 minutes in Las Vegas with a guarantee that when it’s over, unlike an afternoon at the slot machines or roulette table, you’ll have something wonderful to show–and smell–for it!

A Strong Whiff of Hope for Early Cancer Detection

Recently, the Whiff-Guys sniffed into the fascinating field of Olfactory Diagnosis, a valuable diagnostic procedure in which a physician literally smells a patient’s breath for clues (a rotten apple smell, for instance, might indicate that testing for diabetes is in order, while fishy breath might point toward liver disease). Unfortunately, the limited abilities of even the most talented of human noses have severely limited the range of usefulness for the practice, and led to Read more

The New Smell of an Old Favorite

For many of us, one of the most indelible nostalgic triggers of all is the smell of Play-Doh. So widespread is this olfactory fascination that, to celebrate Play-Doh’s 50th anniversary in 2006, Demeter Fragrance Library created a limited-edition fragrance inspired by the distinctive odor of the colorful clay. This fact is not lost on the innovative entrepreneurs at The Play Clay Factory, creators of “The World’s Best Play Dough!”

Available in seven fruity fragrances, each roll of Play Clay takes deliberate aim at capturing that scent branding phenomenon which was merely a welcome side benefit for makers of the original Play-Doh. And if you’re concerned that appealing aromas like blueberry, grape, and sour apple might entice your children to munching-on rather than sculpting-with the smelly substance, no worries. Play Clay is both non-toxic and, as an added precaution, imbibed with a distinctively “yucky” taste to discourage sampling.

Olfactory Fact #82: Cinnamon Spice Makes Everyone Nice

In addition to spicing up mood and concentration, a study sponsored by Cinnabon found that the scent of cinnamon released into a busy mall caused shoppers to treat each other with more kindness.

Atlanta is making Air Travel a Breeze

Those long, often-frustrating pre-flight hours at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country, just got a lot less stressful, thanks to a soothing new scent wafting through the terminals.

“Breeze,” which uses a variety of different notes including vanilla and a dash of lavender to calm and enhance the mood of harried travelers, is being dispersed on a trial basis throughout the facility as part of the bustling airport’s new “Keep It Opening Day Fresh” campaign.

“We want to make people feel better,” says Doug Strachan, Creative Innovations Manager for the City of Atlanta Department of Aviation. “We wanted to give them an olfactory cue which suggested that the airport is opening day fresh and we want to enhance their travel experience.”

The pleasant, relaxing scent is going over so well, says Strachan, that a permanent custom fragrance is in development which will become the exclusive signature scent of Hartsfield-Jackson.

The Science of Olfactory Diagnosis

The smell of rotten apples on a patient’s breath doesn’t positively indicate diabetes, and fishy breath doesn’t positively indicate liver disease–any more than the smell of Smirnoff positively indicates alcoholism–but it can give a physician a pretty good starting point for further testing. “Olfactory diagnosis” has always been a valuable tool for physicians but, of course, the limited abilities of even the most talented human noses have Read more

The Greatest Gift to Loved Ones might be the Shirt Off Your Back

There was an almost terrible beauty to that most memorable scene in the film Brokeback Mountain, that single moment when the gruff cowboy veneer of the Heath Ledger character cracked beneath the weight of his grief as he buried his face in the plaid shirt of his dead lover, desperate to catch his scent. (I’m by no means alone in thinking so–that shirt, worn by Jake Gyllenhaal, sold on eBay in February of 2006 for $101,100.00.)

We’ve known for some time that women are inclined to seek comfort in snuggling with the clothing of a dear-but-not-near loved one. Even Nancy Reagan admitted to sleeping with one of Ronald’s shirts during his hospitalization after the 1981 assassination attempt (see Olfactory Fact #87). But it wasn’t until December of last year that we got the data on men. According to a study published in December’s issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, fictional-cowboy-Ennis is representative of a full 2/3 of men who have cuddled with the body-scented apparel of their loved ones.

121 students at the University of Pittsburgh were asked a series of questions, such as whether they’d ever deliberately smelled or slept with the clothing of another person, or given an unlaundered article of their own clothing to a loved one, for the sole purpose of evoking memories of the wearer in the mind of the sniffer. Not only had the majority of the volunteers–male and female–performed this ritual with the apparel of a romantic partner, many had also comforted themselves by smelling the clothing worn by a child or other close relative.

These results might seem bizarre, in a culture obsessed with masking body odor with deodorants and breath mints, but the study’s lead author, Melanie Shoup, has been familiar with the phenomenon for quite some time. “When I was going through high school and college, I would wear a boyfriend’s shirt to bed when I was separated from him. And when I asked my friends, they said they had done similar things.”

The explanation is aptly tucked into a succinct nutshell by Whiff-Guy C. Russell Brumfield: “When we smell, we feel.” Our sense of smell is the most direct expressway to our brains, leaving all other senses in the dust. When the other senses (sight, sound, taste, touch) reach our receptive centers, they are first routed through the interpretive reasoning centers of the left brain, needing to be identified and assimilated before circuitously making it to the emotional centers which tell us how we feel about the information. But when the olfactory bulb detects a smell—while we are eating, drinking, making love, having an emotional experience, or simply shopping for shoes—it alerts the cerebral cortex and sends a chemical message directly into the limbic system of the right brain, before any left-brain analysis can muddy the waters.

Likewise unsurprised by the results of the study is Philip R. Muskin, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, who points to the close proximity of the olfactory bulb and the limbic system (the part of the brain responsible for processing emotion) in the most ancient region of the brain, and freely admits his standing in that 2/3 ratio of men who seek comfort in the smell of absent loved ones. “I had an aunt who wore very heavy perfume,” he says. “When she passed away, her sister gave us one of her jewelry cases. Whenever you open it, the scent of her perfume just rushes out. And for an instant, it’s like she’s there.”

McCain Twittering over Pork-Pork Spending

John McCain’s increasing irritation with the $1.7 million earmark for pig odor research in Iowa has got the poor guy fuming and twittering all over the place. “One-point-seven million dollars for pig odor research!” scoffed the senator last night to Jay Leno. Like former-running mate Sarah Palin’s ridicule of such “pet projects” as “fruit fly research,” the pork-pork bill has become McCain’s signature rallying cry against the current administration’s spending habits.

But here’s the problem: Just as Palin was apparently unaware that fruit fly research is not about improving the quality of life for fruit flies (the fruit fly is considered an ideal research animal for genetic research because it develops from fertilized egg to embryo within nine days, and has provided invaluable advances into the study of such disorders as autism and birth defects), McCain seems blissfully ignorant that Iowa is not proposing an expenditure of $1.7 million to make their livestock more sexually attractive.

For residents of Iowa, where pigs outnumber human beings approximately seven-to-one, the stench of hog waste is, at best, a financial concern (in one case a jury awarded $76,400 to four families over falling property values) and, at worst, a serious health risk. A North Carolina study of people living near large swine farms concluded that “persons exposed to odors from intensive hog operations experienced ‘more tension, more depression, more anger, more fatigue and more confusion’ than a group of unexposed persons.” No less than fifty experts at a Duke University workship stated that odorous emissions from animal operations are responsible for symptoms including “eye, nose, and throat irritation, headache, nausea, hoarseness, cough, nasal congestion, palpitations, shortness of breath, stress, drowsiness, and alterations of mood.” Then there’s the study out of Iowa itself, which concluded that people living in the vicinity of pig farms suffer “toxic or inflammatory effects of the respiratory tract” including chest tightness, plugged ears, and dizziness. The fumes–a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia–are a contributing factor in conditions ranging from clinical depression to childhood asthma.

Hog odors have long been a hot issue at the Iowa State Legislature, where lawmakers rack their brains for a way to preserve Iowa residents’ quality of life without bankrupting the state’s $12-billion-a-year pork industry. Despite years of work in Iowa and elsewhere, solutions to the problem have remained elusive, though researchers have had some success using ultraviolet light to remove odors and planting trees and other vegetation to suck up the smell.

To John McCain and others who sneer at the pork-pork bill, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin (who inserted the earmark) issues an open invitation: Come to Iowa and take a whiff. “We could probably quadruple the money going into research if we got some of these people to tour areas where these large hog confinements are going up.”

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