Would Parisians turn up their noses at Jersey’s claim to fragrance business preeminence?
They might. But they’d be wrong, even about their own history. Talk all you want about Paris and London but the work always gets done somewhere else. Take Roure, the French company I used to work for. It’s an elegant fragrance firm dating back to the nineteenth century. They created classic perfumes like L’Air du Temps and Opium. Yet the main plant was located in an industrial suburb of Paris called Argenteuil. In many ways, Argenteuil resembles Bayonne. What was New Jersey’s contribution to the development of Smell-O-Vision? Back in 1959, two rivals tried to bring smell to the movies. Michael Todd, Jr.—son of the flamboyant Broadway producer and Cinerama pioneer and stepson of Elizabeth Taylor—had a technically sophisticated system called Smell-O-Vision. It delivered precisely timed odor through tubes on the backs of seats in the theater. The company that produced their smells was Alpine Aromatics in Piscataway. It’s still there today. Their rival was AromaRama, bankrolled by New Jers
