FRAGRANCE MARKETING: THE SWEET SMELL OF MONEY.

Byline: Kristin Eddy Cox News Service

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas.

Baking gingerbread and roast turkey, pine needles, peppermint and melting candle wax are surer clues than a calendar to what time of year it is. But while holiday scents provide a context for our memories, pushing fragrance has become a big business year-round.

Evidence of the marketing trend is everywhere - from the perfume strips in magazines and the healthy sales of room deodorants and car fresheners, to coffee-scented candles in home stores and jasmine body oils in spas.

The home fragrance industry alone - room sprays and candles, for instance - pulled in $350 million annually in the early 1990s; this year, the figure hit $1 billion.

``I think we're getting more intentional odors interacting with us than ever before,'' says Dr. Alan Hirsch, director of the Smell and Taste Treatment Research Foundation in Chicago.

What's driving the trend?

One reason is the growth of the aromatherapy industry, he says. Another is that the technology to create perfume strips has become cheap enough to mass-market in magazine ads. Sales of cologne for men are up 5 percent from the 1980s. And retailers are investigating the relationship between pleasant odors and shopping habits.

``In the past, when one talked about the shopping theater, it was about lighting and window displays,'' Hirsch says. ``But odors have such a strong impact. It's been demonstrated that people linger longer in a site with a mixed floral smell.''

It's not just a shopping trend.

``People are trying to control their environments, and one way they do that is with smell,'' says Annette Green, president of the Fragrance Foundation and Olfactory Research Fund, twin educational and research centers in New York. Home-style scents, such as vanilla, chocolate and natural fragrances from cedar to lavender to rosemary, are the hot market. These scents have simple associations that people find comforting. The way we choose to perfume our surroundings has always been subject to trends.

In the first half of this century, intense, exotic perfumes, such as Shalimar and Evening in Paris, were the fashion. Perfumers took fragrance from haute to street level in the 1960s, when patchouli and musk ``came out of the hippie revolution,'' Green says. ``It was the first time ideas for perfume came out of the streets instead of the (fashion) salons. In the '80s, fragrances were very dynamic and strong; in the '90s, it's toned down.''

But the science of scent-making has moved far beyond beauty products. The connection among smell, emotion, eating habits and health is being studied now more than ever before, researchers say.

Historically, the nose has gotten less attention from medical researchers than eyes and ears, partly because we rely less on smell for survival than other creatures. Humans can detect from 1,000 to 10,000 different smells, but we're laggards in this respect; a dog can be ``up to a thousand times more sensitive to smell than a person,'' says Daniel Kurtz, director of the Smell and Taste Disorders Clinic in Syracuse, N.Y.

Think being able to smell is no big asset? It's a real problem for those who can't.

``They describe feeling isolated from others,'' says Hirsch. ``They can't relate, because smell is such an integral part of the holidays. We have very specific memories; the Fourth of July is fireworks, other holidays are food. And when you can't smell, everything tastes like plastic.''

At the other extreme are people so sensitive to odor that life is miserable.

``There is a segment of the population that is really distressed by the smells,'' says Kurtz. Common industrial chemicals, found in carpeting, wallpaper and paint, can be unpleasant to the point that these people can't work.

Others suffer from ``phantosmia,'' or imaginary smells, in which innocuous fragrances smell like chemicals or garbage, says Dr. Robert Henkin of the Taste and Smell Clinic in Washington. ``Not only have they lost the ability to get pleasure from smells, but it sickens them.''

Even ``fragrance-free'' products have an overlooked ingredient: fragrance. Manufacturers add a compound to toiletries such as soap and deodorant that masks the chemical smells of the other ingredients.

``If they didn't put some fragrance in it, it would smell so terrible you wouldn't want to use it,'' explains Hirsch. ``Nothing is really odorless.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) While holiday scents feed our memories, pushing fragrance has become a year-round business.

(2) Angel perfume in a star-shaped bottle has the sweet smell of vanilla and chocolate. It's available at Bloomingdale's and other department stores.