Dr. Allen Hersh designs smells for businesses. He says that it doesn’t take a whole lot of smell to affect you. Store owners can lure you to the candy aisle, even if you don’t realize your are smelling candy. This idea scares a lot of people. Groups that protect the rights of shoppers are upset. They say the stores are using a kind of brainwashing which they call "smell-washing". "It’s pretty dishonest," says Mark Silbergeld.(1)_________________________. The scientists hired to design the scents disagree. "There’s soft background music. There’s special lighting. There’re all sorts of bells being used," says Dr. Hersh, "why not smells?" "One reason why not," says Silbergeld, "is that some people are allergic to certain scents pumped into products or stores." But there is a whole other side to this debate, "do the smells really work?" So far, there is little proof one way or the other. But Dr. Hersh has run some interesting experiments. In one of Hersh’s experiments, (2)_____________________. Later, another group shopped in the same store, but with no flower odor. Dr. Hersh found that (3)_______________________, but Hersh found out something even stranger. "Whether the volunteers like the flower scent or not didn’t matter," Hersh says, "Some reported that they hated the smell, but they still were more likely to buy the shoes in the scented room."
