Scents and Sensibility

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Signature smells, like Sony's or Westin's, can cost between $5,000 and $25,000, depending on how complicated they are to design. Companies also pay monthly subscription fees to rent fan machines that disperse the scents into the air. Smaller retailers can buy simple smells--sage and pomegranate, rosemary eucalyptus, white ginger--off the rack for $100 a month, including fan rental. And ScentAir is expanding its repertoire by cooking up smells that are meant not to charm but to repel: last month it re-created the smell of burning electrical wire for a military simulation; earlier, it had dreamed up dinosaur dung for a children's museum.

The firm is taking its smell sense even closer to consumers and hoping to cash in on the $8.3 billion Americans already spend annually on air fresheners, candles and scented plug-ins. In August, ScentAir began offering a small home version of its smell machine for $30 a month. It comes with scent choices like eucalyptus mint, citrus musk and lavender with ylang-ylang, a derivative of a south Asian evergreen tree said to have aromatherapeutic benefits. "By comparison," says Van Epps, "plug-ins scream Grandma's bathroom aerosol."