KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD AND MIXING ORCHIDS WITH PERFUME

We’re back from Portland, so I’ve been dealing with the demands of my university job, an internet connection that was down most of yesterday, and the beginnings of panic about not being prepared for the Seattle Fragrance Salon on May 5.

The good news is that we survived the first orchid show in which we also displayed perfumes and, most importantly, survived driving in Portland. As soon as we crossed the bridge into the city, we saw a car with a bumper sticker that said “Keep Portland Weird”. It’s weird, all right, but probably not in the fun and funky way the bumper sticker people meant it. What’s weird is trying to navigate in a city where almost every street is one-way, the direction is randomly assorted rather than alternating, and there are very few functional signs indicating that streets are one-way. The standard “one way/do not enter” signs used at intersections elsewhere seem to be unheard of in Portland.

Whenever I’d visited Portland before, it was on the train from Seattle, then on public transportation around town. The times that we drove, we parked the car as soon as we arrived and took public transportation. That was simple. You just get on a bus or a tram and it takes you where you want to go. Easy enough.

Driving around Portland in a car jam-packed full of orchid plants, looking for an unfamiliar address, was a very different experience. The worst incident was when we turned onto an unmarked 4-lane street that looked as if it should be 2-way and found ourselves heading straight for an oncoming tram. I suppose people do this all the time because the tram driver and other oncoming cars saw us and slowed down to avoid a head-on collision, allowing us to not so gracefully find our way off of that street.

The orchid show was at a venue in the Convention Center-Rose Garden stadium district, a weird combination of hotels, motels, fast-food and stop-and-rob chains, an inordinate number of Starbucks (standing at one point we could see three!), and public buildings of all sizes. The good thing was that our hotel was only two blocks from the show venue. Setting up, we were a little uneasy about how perfume would be received at what is essentially an agricultural show. It was reassuring to see that some vendors were also selling bromeliads, begonias, and other non-orchid plants, and that there were framed orchid photographs and a few orchid-theme tchotchkes for sale as well.

Before the public even came in we had exhibitors and organizers coming over to smell the perfumes. In the rush of packing I had forgotten to bring sniff glasses, so we made do with disposable coffee cups from the hotel. They actually worked quite well, providing just the right blue-collar touch to the display.  I had also forgotten to bring the Just Orchids discovery sets that I had set out the night before, but we did manage to bring a lot of individual small sprays and some soaps. By the end of the show we had sold out of the orchid-line sprays and had made a dent in the Devil Scents!

It was a very good show, both in terms of perfumes and in terms of orchids. From now on, the perfumes are coming to orchid shows. In Seattle, some orchids will come with me to the fragrance salon, to serve as props and to be given away at the end. I’m starting to really appreciate the crossover between the two domains. 

[Portland landmark photos from Wikimedia]

MICROMANAGEMENT ON A RAMPAGE

Every time I read the news I see some new and ever-more egregious attempt to micromanage people’s use of perfume. Apparently there’s talk of IFRA banning just about every natural and synthetic fragrant substance known to man, as reported here (and elsewhere).

According to this article and other sources, the city of Portland Oregon wants to severely restrict or ban all of their employees from wearing any sort of fragrance. The argument by both IFRA on a large scale and Portland city government on a small scale is that “someone might be allergic to it”. Very true. Someone might be allergic to just about anything that exists in the world.

Think about the scope for allergies - the Portland mayor’s microscopic skin flakes that float around city hall, the trees and flowers (shudder!) that grow in city parks, formaldehyde and other fumes from carpet and building materials, seagull feathers, the soap and sanitizer in all of the bathrooms throughout the city, the peanuts in a candy bar, the honey in the neighborhood granola shop, the milk in a latte (I know that milk-latte is redundant, but it’s the local terminology), prescription drugs, the plastic components in a smart phone, the nickel in a piece of cheap jewelry, the wool in a suit at the most expensive men’s store, the stuff in a kid’s “flame-retardant” pajamas, pet cats and dogs ….

(lets ban dogs! Yeah!!!), the wheat flour in a cookie, the corn meal in a tamale, the pink slime in a hot dog, the grass in everyone’s lawns. Yeah! !!! Let’s ban lawns – how about that, city of Portland? And why don’t you ban roses and the Portland Rose Festival while you’re at it? Then your nickname could be The City of No Roses and you could have a bare earth festival – oh, sorry -someone might be allergic to bare earth. It will have to be the Portland No Festival. The list could go on forever.

At least one person might be allergic to just about anything on this earth if you were to look long and hard enough. Maybe IFRA and the EU should come up with a modest proposal to just ban people – then there wouldn’t be a problem with potential allergies. Come to think of it, there wouldn’t be a problem with the economy, either.

If I have one perfume-related wish for the New Year, it is that IFRA and all other regulatory bodies stop trying to micromanage the manufacture and use of fragrances by severely restricting or banning materials that have been used safely for millenia and turn their energy to something important in the overall scheme of things. The earth is going to hell in a handbasket and all people can worry about is whether someone might be allergic to miniscule amounts of a material that doesn’t have a rich, powerful lobby promoting its use. 

[Sneeze and Portland golf course photos adapted from Wikimedia. No dogs sign adapted from one that's commercially available and used on many lawns]