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."
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