NYT Syndicate

A fragrance called green tea blows through the corridors of Sonesta hotels worldwide courtesy of Air Esscentials, a 10-year-old company in Miami that sells scent-diffusing systems. Green tea lemongrass, another Air Esscentials creation, is the aroma of choice at Morgans Hotels worldwide.
Now, those very same smells are also perfuming the living rooms and bedrooms of many private residences.
Hotels, resorts and casinos, as well as retailers like Victoria's Secret and Thomas Pink, depend on ambient scents to strengthen brand identity ” as well as to get customers to linger and spend. Piping in those fragrances has long been the principal business of Air Esscentials, Aroma360, ScentAir and their rivals in what is known as the air care business.
But increasingly, these companies are finding a new revenue stream in the home market. (In other words, pull out those plug-ins.)
"Our company grew rapidly because when we would put a scent into a Sonesta hotel or a Ritz-Carlton or a Melia resort, guests would go up to the front desk and ask how they could get it," said Spence Levy, president of Air Esscentials."The home market has grown 35 percent a year for us every year since we started in 2007."
Drugstores and other retailers are fully stocked with low-cost home fragrances, from room sprays to candles and wall plug-ins. Now, thanks to Air Esscentials and other such firms, there are options on the higher end: compact yet high-powered diffusers that will infuse scent throughout a room for hours or days at a time.
Examples include Aera, a $200 device the size of a paperback book that its parent company, Prolitec, says can perfume a room of up to 2,000 square feet, with fragrance levels adjustable through an app. Each fragrance capsule costs $50 and, according to Aera's website, will last about 60 days if it is placed in"a 450-square-foot room, on an average setting running for 24 hours per day."
Jeanette Wolfe, a holistic health educator, is a big fan of such devices and a big believer in the power of scent to increase energy and"drop you into a calm place," as she put it.
She used to rely on old-fashioned methods to perfume her Victorian home in Princeton, New Jersey: dried flowers and squares of muslin that were infused with essential oils and placed in the air vents."But it wasn't as strong or clear or efficient a scent as I wanted," Wolfe said.
The home fragrance market is a $6.4 billion business at the retail level, according to a 2016 study by Kline, a market research and consulting firm in New Jersey.
More than just a way of eliminating odour (we're talking about you, Fido and Frisky), home fragrance has lately become a means of self-expression."It's an element of design, like the colours on the wall or the furniture ” it's a way for people to communicate who they are," said Richard Weening, chief executive of Prolitec, the Milwaukee-based commercial air care company that recently introduced Aera.
"I do not think I've met an individual who doesn't respond to scents," Wolfe said.
Actually, some do not respond well. Consider the people who are allergic to perfumes or just don't like them. The 'fragrance free' movement, which uses the tagline"think before you stink," has tried for years to beat back the use of fragrances in public places, in deference to the scent-sensitive.
Still, there are many who consider lemon-infused air to be a luxury, maybe even a necessity."The general principle is: People like places that smell good, and they don't like places that smell bad," said Weening of Prolitec.
To hear him tell it, the conventional tools deployed for making a place smell good ” candles, sprays, wax melts, reed diffusers, and so-called liquid electricals like plug-ins ” leave something to be desired. The scents are heavy, inconsistent and, in his view, maybe just a bit unrefined."It's that New York taxicab smell," Weening said.
Two years ago, Dimitri Gailit, the chief executive of AromaTech, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, noticed that his company was fielding calls from commercial clients who wanted their residences to smell as inviting as their stores.
"So we decided to make every one of our products available for home use," he said.
The devices are sold through the company's website and Amazon. The company's cold air diffusion process breaks down aroma oils and essential oils and disperses them in the form of dry vapour.
Depending on the device, customers can digitally adjust the intensity of the vapour as well as the hours that it is dispersed. Control of the diffusers via an app is in the planning stages.
"There are people who are buying our machines for aromatherapy," Gailit said,"and then there are customers who want to create a certain ambience in their home, like when they're having a party.
Customers have responded, Gailit said:"Since we introduced our consumer line, we have significantly increased our business."
Weening said he had the same experience since Aera hit the market."We're way ahead of where we expected to be with sales," he said."People are buying multiple machines."