AP:

A trip through New York City’s crowded subway system usually offers a pungent mix of industrial and bodily aromas.

But inside a stretch of the Grand Central station this holiday season, the air smells of vanilla and fresh pine.

(…mixed with industrial and bodily aromas…)

The scent is part of a novel advertising campaign for Bath & Body Works, which is pumping the fragrance into the 42nd Street shuttle train platform through November.

I eventually identified the feeling I got from this story as unease, because I do not want this form of advertising to become more common.

Think about it: the enticing aroma from your local pizzeria, but artificially extended in a ten-block radius. Playgrounds and the streets near schools smelling like candy. New-car smell around every car billboard and dealership. Movie posters that smell like ozone, or gun oil, or musk. The sour reek of political attack ads. Calming, or invigorating, or unsettling fragrances for more subtle mood manipulation. Layer on layer on layer of cheap scents, in every public space…

Hell no.

And that’s before we even get to the inevitable codification of scent-related IP. Imagine some conglomerate having a trademark on the smell of coffee, or clean linen, or fresh bread, and then suing over natural sources of that smell…