Natural perfume or artificial perfume?
The use of perfume dates back to earliest times. The ancient Egyptians perfumed the bricks used to build their houses and temples, and wore perfumed fat in their hair.
These days, consumer demand for perfumed products is intense. In the home, from washing-up liquid to paper tissues, soap to shoe polish, fragrance is the common ingredient. Artificial leather is perfumed to make it smell like the real thing, and in Japan, some companies spray perfume through building’s air-conditioning system at key times of the working day.
To meet the demands of the perfume industry, scientific developments have made the companies use substitutes for some natural ingredients. Scientists have also discovered that natural and artificial materials are highly complementary and are acceptable to the consumer. Even the most expensive perfumes are in fact compounds of both natural and artificial ingredients. The French perfume manufacturers were among the first to blend artificial compound when they made the famous perfume Chanel No. 5 in 1923.
Producing natural oils is very expensive. For example, 1000 kilos of jasmine flowers make just one kilo of extract. Using artificial fragrance has reduced the costs of manufacture overall, although the chemical operations involved can be very time-consuming and costly-sixteen or seventeen chemical separations may be needed to produce the right result.
Nevertheless, the use of complex chemical to reproduce fragrance is likely to increase, as the artificial ingredients as well as natural oils gives perfume manufacturers more control over the production process, which is why many classic perfumes owe their characteristic top notes to fruits of science not nature.
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As we get older there are certain gifts standing out in our memories for a variety of reasons.
One gift I was given and treasured most was a doll named Patsy. She wasn’t originally mine but was my younger sister’s Christmas gift, but on holding Patsy I immediately fell in love with her and couldn’t bear to part with het. Luckily, my sister was quite happy to exchange dolls. From then on Patsy was my baby and I continued to love her dearly and would have died for her.
Another gift I offered my Mom has been shining in my mind. On a Saturday, I was on my way to the local cinema when I happened to glimpse(一瞥) at the window of the gift shop at the corner of our street. There were lovely gloves, pretty flowered handkerchiefs, and rose patterned teacups and saucers, all in pretty boxes. Seeing all these lovely gifts reminded me that it would soon be Mother’s Day and my mother’s birthday. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could give my mother something really special, something I’d bought myself? So I stepped inside the shop and admired a dressing table set, which was a green cut glass with ornamental tray(装饰托盘) and several matching pieces. I was sure my mother would love it.
The lady must have seen my disappointment when she told me the price. But she had a suggestion which immediately lifted my spirits. She pulled out a large notebook and wrote my name in it and the gift I wanted to buy, and in return I paid her a penny from my pocket money. It meant no sweets that day but I didn’t care. At the age of nine, I’d made my very first lay-by(分期付款)…and felt like a grown up. From then on, every Saturday I dropped in at the shop on schedule and paid a penny, which the lady dutifully recorded in her notebook.
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The day before Mother’s Day I paid the last two pence.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Too excited to wait till Sunday, I excitedly presented the gift to my mother.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Is renting clothes greener than buying them?
Clothing rental is a hot new industry and retailers are demanding to get on board in hopes of attracting green shoppers. But is renting fashion actually more environmentally-friendly than buying it, and if so, how much more? Journalist and author Elizabeth Cline investigated this question and concluded that it’s not as sustainable as it seems.
Take shipping, for example, which has to go two ways if an item is rented — receiving and returning. Cline writes that consumer transportation has the second largest carbon footprint of our collective fashion habit after manufacturing. She writes, “An item ordered online and then returned can send out 20 kilograms of carbon each way, and increases up to 50 kilograms for rush shipping. By comparison, the carbon impact of a pair of jeans purchased from a physical store and washed and worn at home is 33.4 kilograms, according to a 2015 study by Levi’s.”
Then there’s the burden of washing, which has to happen for every item when it’s returned, regardless of whether or not it was worn. For most rental services, this usually means dry cleaning, a high impact and polluting process. All the rental services that Cline looked into have replaced perchloroethylene (氯乙烯), a carcinogenic (致癌的) air pollutant that is still used by 70 percent of US dry cleaners, with hydrocarbon alternatives, although these aren’t great either.
Lastly, Cline fears that rental services will increase our appetite for fast fashion, simply because it’s so easily accessible. There’s something called “share washing” that makes people engage in more wasteful behaviors precisely because a product or service is shared and thus is regarded as more eco-friendly. Uber is one example of this, advertised as “a way to share rides and limit car ownership.” and yet “it has been proven to discourage walking, bicycling, and public transportation use.”
Renting clothes is still preferable to buying them cheap and throwing them in the dustbin after a few wears, but we shouldn’t let the availability of these services make us too satisfied. There’s an even better step—and that’s wearing what is already in the closet.
