Kate Grenville says fragrance has become an environmental tsunami. Photo/Darren James
When I was little, my mother had a tiny, precious bottle of perfume on her dressing table and on special occasions she'd put a dab behind her ears.
Later, old enough to have my own special occasions, I also had my favourite perfume. I loved the bottles: those sensuous shapes.
This loving introduction opens Australian author Kate Grenville's non-fiction book The Case Against Fragrance, published earlier this year. So what went wrong?
It turns out not to have been a quickie divorce, but rather a growing awareness of a link between fragrance and her headaches and bouts of 'foggy brain'. By her 30s - Grenville is 67 this year - she'd stopped dabbing perfume on her skin because it caused an immediate headache but then began to realise the effect of things such as shampoo, cosmetics, detergent and laundry powder.
"It's very difficult to avoid," she says of fragrance, "and it's very difficult to avoid getting it on your skin. And then there are the fragrances you inhale - air-fresheners, room diffusers, scented candles. We've gone from a little spritz of luxury for a special moment to an environmental tsunami of fragrance."
The spread of fragrance is partly down to clever marketing and partly to the development of chemicals that mimic natural scents at a fraction of the price. "The reality is that very few perfumes contain botanicals, or plant-based scents.
Most are 100 per cent synthetic because they're easier to obtain and hundreds, if not thousands, of times cheaper to produce."
While on tour to promote her 2015 book about her mother, One Life, Grenville found herself going out at night to buy packaging tape to seal her hotel door room, trying to keep out scent from reed diffusers in the corridor. "That was when I knew something was actually wrong."
Grenville was startled to discover that one in three people suffer from fragrance-induced illness, ranging from asthma and fatigue to physical collapse. "That figure knocked me sideways," she says. "This is a mainstream public health problem."
She hopes a solution will parallel the history of cigarette smoking. "Forty years ago you could smoke anywhere - even on planes. But gradually, as the health effects became clear governments stepped in and people became aware smoking was bad for them."
Recently moved to Melbourne from her life-long home of Sydney, Grenville no longer shops in department stores because climate-control systems pick up fragrance-laden air from the perfume section and spread it round the building, "and then there's the ghastly thing called ambient scent that's used in public buildings which I don't have any choice about inhaling it".
The award-winning author of The Secret River trilogy of historical novels was horrified to discover labelling laws allow manufacturers to hide the chemicals they use under the generic term 'fragrance'.
"Labelling laws are otherwise very strict - imagine what would happen to a food producer if they used a blanket term - and yet fragrance falls under laws like our Trades Secret Act which allows a cocktail of chemicals to be concealed. It seems quite extraordinary."
Grenville has been surprised at the positive response to her book. "I thought three men and a dog would read it, but I've had a flood of mail along the lines of 'finally someone is talking about this and now we have a resource to show others'."
the details Kate Grenville appears at the Tauranga Arts Festival on October 21 and 22, tickets from Baycourt and Ticketek. TECT cardholder discounts available until October 6 (Baycourt only). See the full festival programme at taurangafestival.co.nz