another take on home fragrance

http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
ScentStories Up Your Nose
It plugs into the wall and plays "scent CDs" and features Shania Twain,
somehow. Hail, Satan
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
The Rule of Gluttony goes like this: When a given society's needs become so
ridiculously oversatisfied and oversatiated and just plain obscenely stuffed
like a Bush daughter on Bud Light, it begins to invent utterly useless
landfill crap no one really needs and that actually turns out to be
dangerous to its health.
Enter the new Febreze ScentStories thing, an adorably insidious 40–buck
appliance you actually plug into your wall and stick on a side table next to
the fake flowers and the cat–shaped fringe lamp and then insert any number
of $6 CD–like disks each containing five preprogrammed synthetic scents
that, at the push of a button, will then "play" in sequence, just like a
music CD –– only, you know, not.
Yay. Rejoice. Weep with a renewed sense of hope for humankind, because if
there's one thing we in America desperately need, it's another goddamn
appliance to do something a simple candle will do 10 times better for a
fraction of the cost and a sliver of the insidiousness and none of the
noxious petrochemical landfill.
You know Febreze. You have seen the ads, even if you haven't. Febreze is
that frightening Procter & Gamble air freshener whose commercials feature
perky sexually denuded khaki–pantsed housewives and cutesy overweight dads
running around the house with a can or three of the heavily scented aerosol
and spraying huge fogs of it into every room in some ecstatic fit of
orgiastic bliss, and then immediately inhaling the misty cloud as deeply as
possible into their happily toxified American lungs and smiling like they
just discovered heroin and Cheez–Whiz and anal sex, all at once.
What happened? What vile marketing decision was made, and by whom, that said
we must now progress from static mute little tabletop chemical–bomb air
fresheners to more sinister, electronically activated Glade plug–in thingies
with silly little built–in fans to full–fledged toaster–size appliances that
require huge amounts of plastic and massive marketing campaigns and full AC
power and interchangeable chemical–soaked disks?
This is the marketing strategy: each disc is apparently designed to somehow
lift you out of your sanitized tract–home suburban
kids–'n'–dogs–'n'–minivans dystopia and transport you straight to the Misty
Mountains or the sultry Bahamas or the Brazilian rain forest or whatever,
and, according to the Prozacian pastels–'n'–blue–sky ScentStories Web site,
it all has something to do with Shania Twain, somehow, inexplicably, because
there she is, her photo splashed on the pages for no apparent reason
whatsoever and smelling very much like mediocrity and commercial bloat and
fast saccharine death, and if her hollow endorsement's not a surefire sign
of the apocalypse, baby, nothing is.
And, of course, it's all carefully marketed directly at gullible and
slightly narcotized women, housewives and soccer moms and chronic Banana
Republic catalog shoppers who dream of escaping their husbands and their
suburban stasis and their white luxury carpeting, with its perfectly
symmetrical vacuum–cleaner track marks, and running off to the tropics and
lying on a hammock or strolling on the beach or hiking in the mountains and
numbing their senses to the point of sweet–smelling comatose bliss.
Which of course makes you wonder why P&G just doesn't cut to the marketing
chase and be honest about the whole thing and release more apropos scent
adventures, like Desperate Affair in a Cheap Motel Room, or Whatever
Happened to My Dreams of Opening a Small Business, or Mommy's Valium/Gin
Headrush Chocolate Cake. What, too bitter? Naw.
Because then you may also think, hey wait, why aren't there similar scent
bombs marketed to men? Why isn't Black & Decker hocking up a similar gizmo
and creating discs like I Like to Lick My SUV, or Hey Baby Dig My Pleated
Dockers or Sometimes I Wish I Was a Female Mountain Gorilla? Honesty in
advertising is all I ask.
Saturation has been reached. Every new household product is now just a silly
mutation, a gross plasticized landfill–clogging exaggeration of something
simple and functional that came before, brooms to blenders to bread machines
to the Swiffer WetJet to Scrubbing BubblesT Fresh BrushT Toilet Cleaning
System. You're choking on it.
And it is now no longer a race for which product can offer your life more
ease and convenience, what gizmo will reduce stress and calm your exhausted
body and actually pretend to be innocuous and fresher and cleaner. Rather,
it appears to be a mad race for which product will cause what part of your
increasingly toxified American body what virulent strain of cancer first.
Dibs on the lungs! screams the ScentStories appliance. Dibs on the heart!
screams that double–cheese McMuffin. Dibs on the brain! screams your cell
phone. Dibs on the bloodstream! claim any number of major pharmaceuticals.
Dibs on your bone marrow! claims the case of Diet Coke. Dibs on your very
soul! screams your television.
See, there is this line. There is this boundary separating logic and common
sense and acceptable karmic/environmental damage from utterly laughable and
debilitating pain, and it comes into play as we recognize how there are
gizmos that are incredibly fun and that add a whole new dimension to the
coolness of life and that make your days more interesting and your nights
more juicy and your vibrator more waterproof and that can carry 20,000 of
your favorite songs on one little machine the size of a deck of cards.
And for the existence of those devices, well, we make some sort of deal with
the devil. We know they're toxic and hurtful and will last 5 million years
in a landfill, but we make the trade–off, claiming the value they add is
worth the effort and if we're careful and maybe just a little more conscious
maybe we can minimize the damage and the karmic toll and, besides, 20,000
songs! Dude!
There are bearable and acceptable trade–offs and there are epically bad and
deleterious trade–offs, and then there are trade–offs that just make you sad
and ill and that you just know with every fiber of your being are simply
useless and small minded and point up everything that's wrong with the
American mind–set and that infect your home with synthetic scents that
poison your dog.
Look at it this way: much like white zinfandel or "Cathy" cartoons or the
George W. Bush presidency, ScentStories could vanish tomorrow and no
sentient being anywhere on the planet would miss it, ever. And that, verily,
is the scent of true perspective.
––
http://www.sorryeverybody.com/gallery/1/
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"stellaglo" <stella...@adelphia.net> wrote in
news:WImdnaGdfIyzAzrcRVn–...@adelphia.com:
<snips>
LOL
Excellent article! Thanks for posting it.
––
Poetic Badgers
"Snow.. snow, that can't be good for suede, can it?" –Jerry Seinfeld

"Poetic Badgers" <poeticbadg...@spammenot> wrote in message
news:Xns95BD4A40770BApoeticbadg...@129.250.170.88...
i'm glad you liked it. those scentstory things are scary. in fact, all those
chemical scent things are scary to me. give me freah air any day.
––
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Martin Luther King, Jr.