I was 13 when I fell in love with a perfume, my first love: Evening in Paris. An impressionable child growing up in a Wisconsin farm community, I found in those enchanting whiffs the world I craved: misty, romantic, starlit nights in the most beautiful city I could imagine.
Later I graduated to more sophisticated scents — Chanel #5, Nostalgia, Bellodgia, Windsong. At age 30, between my two marriages and at the end of my first trip to Europe with the Student International Travel Association, I wandered the streets of Paris, inhaling the heady fragrances wafting out of that city’s many open-doored parfumeries. Paris was truly a perfume heaven, a feminine city, devoted to adding beauty and pleasure to women’s lives. During my decades of office jobs, I always wore perfume. I was not fully dressed until I had spritzed myself with my latest love.
Then, this year, with a tug to my heart, I saw my first love again. In the pages of the Vermont Country Store catalog that fancies itself “Purveyers of the Practical & Hard-to-Find.” There it was, the squat, midnight blue bottle with the tall silvery cap. “We found it!” crowed the copywriters, “the most famous fragrance in the world.”
I learned its true story: “How did Evening in Paris survive the Great Depression? Savvy marketing. This beloved scent ... was sold in dime stores for 25 cents while the department store version was sold in expensive Baccarat bottles with crystal stoppers.”
I didn’t mind the deception; I wanted to pick up the phone and order it then and there. But what stayed my hand was what I had learned about perfumes in those 65 years since my first infatuation. Evening in Paris may have been made from flower petals then, but what are its ingredients today? Most modern perfumes and cosmetics are made from petroleum and coal.
In 1991 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analyzed the volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) given off by 31 “fragranced” products and sampled the air for VOCs in 15 different commercial and residential environments. Fragrances are especially volatile — their whole purpose is to get as many scent molecules into the air as possible. The results of both studies: l50 chemicals were identified in these everyday products while a total of 100 chemicals — including toluene, xylene, methylene chloride and 1,1,1-trichloroethane, all known to be toxic to animals — were found in the air samples.
Three perfumes, unidentified in the study, each contained more chemicals than any of the tested bar soaps, shampoo, hair spray, after-shave lotion, deodorants, detergents, fabric softeners, air “fresheners,” correction fluid and paint remover. Perhaps surprisingly, the air in department and clothing stores, shopping malls, potpourri shops and craft/hobby stores was found to have more chemicals than the air in the auto parts shop, tire shop, carpet store, detergent and pet food departments, health club and room with air “freshener” that was tested. Toluene was most abundant in auto parts stores and in department stores’ perfume sections. Romantic?
At age 61, after taking early retirement, I was finally correctly diagnosed and found out what was causing the killer headaches I had suffered since World War II. Not just perfumes, of course, but an unknown combination of some of the 85,000 new, synthetic chemicals put into our indoor environment and more at the rate of over a thousand a year. The vast majority of them are untested for human health effects.
I am not alone; many others are also affected by these chemicals. In the late 1990s two women had to leave their jobs because of perfume exposures, one a nurse on the East Coast, the other a government worker on the West Coast. Somehow they found each other and together pooled their resources to reveal the ingredients in one perfume, Calvin Klein’s “Eternity.” They sent an unopened bottle to an independent testing laboratory, which found 41 ingredients with long, numbered chemical names. Eight of the 41 have known toxic effects; the others “have not been thoroughly investigated.” Though the latter statement should trigger the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to slap a warning label on Eternity (and probably many other fragranced products), it has not done so.
In 1999, the Environmental Health Network of California presented a People’s Petition to the FDA to try to get it to follow its own rules and issue the warnings. Despite receiving more than 1,000 letters supporting the petition, the FDA still has not done so. As Ralph Nader wrote in 1986, “Due to some adroit lobbying by the cosmetic industry years ago, the FDA has to beg for safety rather than demand it.” It cannot require safety testing by the industry or a list of ingredients; they are considered “trade secrets.” Only a competitor with the right equipment or consumers with enough money can find out the ingredients. The rest of us are in the dark.
In 1999, my husband and I met with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) to tell her about the petition. We took with us a poignant letter from a Pekin, Ill. man saying, “Perfumed products, such as candles, fabric softeners and cleaning products give [my wife] migraine headaches and make it difficult for her to breathe ... We are unable to go to church, the theater or even to a shopping mall because of the perfumed products used by the owners and visitors of such places.” A year later Rep. Schakowsky introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives a bill aptly called SNIFF (Safe Notification and Information for Fragrances Act). This Act would declare “misbranded” any fragranced cosmetic containing a known allergen or toxin that was not labeled as such; it would then have to be removed from the market.
Having been once reintroduced into the House, where it has languished in a subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, SNIFF now awaits rewording to expand it to cover fragranced cleaning products. About a third of raw fragrance materials go into such products — as a trip down any supermarket’s detergent aisle will confirm to your nose and your eyes.
I still look longingly at the Vermont Country Store catalog ad, with its young couple embracing under the stars on the Pont Neuf. Will I pick up the phone? How much do I want a whiff from the past? I may yet succumb.
Lynn Lawson turned her health — and her life — around when she discovered the source of her illness. Lawson, who lives in Evanston, Ill., is author of Staying Well in a Toxic World.
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