Scents Of Place.

Can ambient aromas lull or arouse or seduce you into behaving a certain way? Jeffrey Steingarten explores the art of olfactory manipulation.

Have you ever counted the number of artificial smells you're exposed to from the moment you wake up in the morning? I have, and the answer is sixteen. There's the detergent on my pillowcase and sheets, the soap used to wash my bathrobe at a different laundry, Fantastik and tile cleaner in the bathroom, the body soap and shampoo I keep in the shower, perfumed face soap on the sink (plus several other aromatic soaps put there by my wife), glass cleaner for the mirror, my spray deodorant (or, more accurately, reodorant), the eucalyptic shaving cream I've used since college, two contrasting flavors of minty toothpaste, Kleenex and toilet tissue, and the cinnamonic dental floss (when I'm being good). I wonder if my starched shirts have an aroma of their own.

There is a diffuse nebula of aromatic molecules floating above the shelf on which my wife keeps her little collection of perfumes. You'd expect that. But why is everything else given an artificial smell? Why isn't anything allowed to smell of itself? I've been told that many of these products would smell unpleasantly chemical if they hadn't been scented. But that accounts for only a tiny fraction of the reason my bedroom and bath smell like a Paris bordello. (I've never been to a bordello in Paris, or even smelled one through a window on the street, but I believe this is a widely accepted metaphor for a garishly scented establishment whose perfume is meant to excite the senses but fails to do so because of its vulgarity.) Doesn't this olfactory overload destroy our ability to smell the real thing? To smell nature, even?

I wonder how the legal but tightly regulated bordellos in Nevada have been aromatized. I may need to make a special trip to find out. Much of Las Vegas is certainly fragrance forward. It was eighteen months ago, during a two-week research trip to Las Vegas to evaluate the latest crop of fine restaurants there, that I discovered an amazing new industrythough perhaps new only to me. I was staying at the Wynn hotel, and after enjoying several excellent meals, I ventured out through the desert heat of 111A[degrees] F to JoA'l Robuchon's gastronomic restaurant at the MGM Grand. As I opened one of the hotel's many front doors, I was engulfed by a Niagara of manufactured air, as cool as an autumn evening in the Himalayas but perfumed with a banal and artificial floral odor. I suddenly realized that the Wynn hotel had also been scented. I much preferred the Wynn's fragrance, either because it was objectively finer or because I had already become acclimated to it, and somehow enslaved. After polishing off a truly moving dinner at Robuchon's, I felt an odd urgency to return to the Wynn. Only then could I relax again. Had the Wynn's artificial aroma manipulated me so that if the remainder of my evening's entertainment consisted of losing money, I would lose it at the Wynn? Might it contain a vaporous opiate?

That's when I knew I had discovered the existence of an entire industry, that somebody out there has been hired to perfume the entire metropolis of Las Vegas. I noticed that the Wynn's fragrance seemed limited to the public spaces, mainly on the first floor. Las Vegas hotels have no interest in encouraging people to stay in their rooms. That's probably the only place in the city where it's not easy to spend lots of money. I wonder if they've considered piping the smell of rotten eggs, dilute and nearly imperceptible, into every guest room, beginning at, say, 3:00 P.M., in order to propel the guests to shops and slots.

Doesn't this olfactory overload destroy our ability to smell the real thing? To smell nature, even?

Back at VOGUE Central in Manhattan, by sheer coincidence, my favorite editor told me a story about fragrance. Her excitement was so palpable that I couldn't resist it. We'll call her Giselle. She had met a perfumer who specializes in ambient scents. These can be dispersed into a room by incorporating them in candles, by spraying them around, by wicking them into the air, and, as I would discover, by considerably more sophisticated and technological means. The perfumer had offered to create a scent entirely for her, a household scent that would express her tastes, her appearance, her personality, her spirither very being. They had already gone through one or two trial scents. Was I interested in meeting the guy? Here was a chance for me to find out more about the industry I thought I had discovered. And so, some weeks later, I walked through the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel, past a collection of candles giving off an overwhelming and not very pleasant odor, and up an elevator to the roof, where a fine June day had been under way for several hours.