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Photo courtesy of Wateford.Patch.com

Policies limiting or banning the use of fragrance is a growing policy trend that we’ve been following closely. Today Waterford, Conn, joins Portland, Oreg, and Detroit, Mich, in asking people to refrain from wearing perfume or cologne into Town Hall, according to Waterford’s Patch.com. Robert M. Nye, the Town Clerk, posted this new policy near the entrance to his office. Nye cites growing concerns over allergic reactions in some people as the reason for the new policy.

Portland Rose expo held in the mall

Thousands of roses compete for Queen

Only 26 roses compete for Most Fragrant

Parke tends all the fragrant roses

Sniffing the competition

Richard Parke\'s Fragrant Cloud wins Most Fragrant

Flowers from left to right: Marie Shriver, Fragrant Cloud (1st place Most Fragrant), and Nocture

Many category winners but only one queen

Portland, OR – In a mall in Northeast Portland sits an indoor ice rink about the size of a basketball court. When I walked in there was no ice but instead dozens of long tables draped in white cloth supporting what I’d journeyed to see: roses. Specifically, there were over 4,000 roses whose growers, mainly members of the Portland Rose Society, were vying for bragging rights that comes with winning “Queen”, the top honor awarded each festival to the best bloom.

I headed straight for the table marked “Most Fragrant Rose Class 43″ – the only competition within the expo voted for by the public and not a panel of expert growers. Standing in front of an enchanting collection of scents, I met an older man, Richard Parke, whose gnarled hands and tanned skin by Northwest standards hinted at his passion for gardening. He later told me that his yard is filled with over 500 varieties of roses. Parke was filling a small green water pitcher and used it top up the water in the vases of the cut roses on display.

“The fragrance doesn’t last unless you feed them, and there is still a few more hours to go before voting closes,” Parke explained.

Parke and his wife, Janis, entered three roses into this year’s Most Fragrant competition: Marie Shriver, a stunning white bloom that swept last year’s honor; Fragrant Cloud, a resonant, joyful fuschia bloom whose notes sung like a chapel choir; and Nocturne, a seductive red bloom and 1948 American Award winner that seemed like sure thing.

Portland’s Rose Festival is the longest-running celebration of roses in the country, spanning a full three weeks. The Rose Expo competition is just one of hundreds of events held city wide, culminating with the Rose Parade. The festival is so huge that Richard Jarvis, public relations manage of the Portland Rose Festival Foundation, started planning it 18 months ago.

I sniffed around the table at the other entrants. Poetic names identified each rose’s variety: Aromatherapy,  New Day, Secret, Sentimental and Distant Drum. A couple approached the table and started to sniff Distant Drum, a striped pink and white bloom. “Pepperoni!” shouted the man wearing a green polo shirt and nerdy-chic glasses. His wife wife bobbed blond air and capri pants leaned in, sniffed and mumbled, “Hm, more like smoky clouds.” I took a whiff and got draft rootbeer without the frosty mug.

I was baffled. I asked more visitors to sniff Distant Drum and report what it smelled like. Noses flared and answers varied widely: hot licorice, sweet peppers, a campfire. I learned that this total lack of agreement is what makes the Class 43 competition unique and challenging: people perceive aromas and then attach different values to what they smell. Olfactory recall varies widely in people and correlates with mental training, akin to interior designers learning to distinguish between 50 shades of blue.

“With Queen, you know what the judges are looking for, there’s a set of strict criteria, but with Most Fragrant it’s a total crap shoot. You have to guess what the public likes and that changes every year,” sighed Parke.

Later that day his bloom Fragrant Cloud took first place in class 43. It wasn’t what he expected; he thought for sure that Nocturne would take the prize. Shaking his head, Parke went back to tending the roses. I took one more sniff for the road.

Scented entertainment has been a dream for decades, and formally flopped in 1960 with the release in movie theaters of AromaRama and Scent-O-Vision. But the dream has lived on and may now find its way to TV.

A collaboration between materials science researchers at the University of California San Diego and Samsung has shown that it’s possible to create a small device that mounts to the TV and squirts small amounts of hot aroma oil out to the 30-centimenter range, according to their article published in this month’s edition of the chemistry research journal Angewandte Chemie. That distance is enough for a coffee company or a perfume maker to advertise their products directly to your brain. But the scientists have yet to create the prototype, according to the article on FastCompany.com

On February 11 the Japanese company, Scent Sciences Corporation, released its version of Smell-O-Vision for video games. The prototype device shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV, plugs into a USB port and releases up to 20 aromas, including pine, ocean and smoke. The company was looking for investors and developers at the trade show and says the device will be released by the end of 2011, according to TechPinger.com