Distilling Between Scent and Sensibility

By Audrey Grayson, ABC News Medical Unit

Every day of my life, I am swarmed with advertisements for products that promise to make me look younger, feel younger, reduce my fine lines and wrinkles, shrink my thighs or help me lose 10 pounds instantly. I hear these promises so often, it’s all become white noise.

That is until I came across a new claim I had never heard before: “Ageless Fantasy perfume can make you smell eight years younger!”

For $120 a bottle.

New York perfumer Harvey Prince released the new  Ageless Fantasy  scent in August, and he is promoting it as "the world’s first anti-age perfume."

Kumar Ramani, the CEO of Ageless Fantasy Inc., says these claims are based on hard scientific evidence.  The basic idea behind the product, he says, is that  smell can elicit emotions and  some of our earliest memories.

“The odor-detecting ability [of our brain] is extremely acute and shapes our social interaction in a way we aren’t consciously aware of,” Ramani explained. “There’s enough proof out there that the sense of smell can trigger our emotions.”

So how does understanding this fact allow a fragrance maker to bottle the essence of youth?

According to Ramani, it all started with the idea that there is such a thing as an “old lady” scent.

The idea of “old lady” scent is not new to me. As soon as he mentioned it, I recalled a multitude of elevator rides wherein I was trapped with an older woman wearing what can only be described as the heavy, suffocating scent of “old lady perfume.”

Ramani said perfume makers have actually nailed down the essence of “old lady perfume” to the scent of … rose.

“Something occurred to me about the rose scent when we were discussing it with the fragrance industry, and they were saying rose is known as an older person smell, and the perfumes based on the rose scent always end up in the hands of older people,” Ramani said. “So if rose smell is an old lady smell, then what is the opposite of rose? What smells like a young lady?”

Ramani turned to soft science for his answer.

The scent of “Ageless Fantasy” came about following a semiscientific study to see if men could identify which scents they associated with younger women while they were blindfolded.

The “study” — and I use this term loosely — conducted by the Smell and Taste Research Foundation in Chicago involved 75 blindfolded men who were presented with different scents and asked to estimate the age of the woman who would wear such a perfume.

From a purely scientific standpoint, a 75-member sampling of men does not constitute a serious clinical study. But  using this research, the Harvey Prince perfume company was able to come up with a scent combination that supposedly reeks of female youth: a mixture of pink grapefruit, mango, pomegranate, jasmine and musk.

At face value, I have two issues of concern with this research.

One: Unfortunately, in the real world, men will be basing their evaluation of me not just on the perfume I’m wearing, but what my face looks like, how I’m dressed, what kind of body language I use and maybe even the color of my hair. So if I look like I’m 35 years old, dress like I’m 35 years old and act like I’m 35 years old, I hardly believe that my youthful scent will be enough to convince a man that I’m younger than I really am.

Two: If scent is really so strongly associated with personal memories and experiences, then wouldn’t it also be true that each and every scent affects  each person differently? How is it possible that there could be one scent that smells “youthful” to everyone?

Despite my natural skepticism, I decided to try the perfume for myself and see if it had any effect at all.

I must admit that upon first sniff, the perfume did actually smell young to me — like Clinique Happy (a scent I  wore often in middle school) but less citrus-y, more fruity. I smelled good, that I knew, but younger?

Three days went by without anyone noticing my new signature scent. Then, last Saturday, something finally happened.

I was in the car with an old girlfriend of mine when she turned to me abruptly and said: “Are you using a new shampoo or something? You smell like the Victoria’s Secret shampoo I used to buy when I was in middle school.”

While this may not have been the reaction to the perfume that the manufacturers were looking for, it was way better proof of concept for me than any other “study” they could have pointed me to.