Although the economy is impacting home fragrance sales, suppliers remain focused on bringing innovation to the market, supported by high service levels.

Marvin Perkins, chief marketing of cer of Secret Scentsations Inc., maintains that the category has a number of positives going for it even in a down economy. “Consumers are looking for simple, inexpensive ways to feel good, and most home fragrance products have lowenough price points to be affordable,” he says.

Secret Scentsations meets that need, he adds, with Bed Bouquet, a unique product that gives home linens a fresh scent without sprays or powders. By simply cutting away the edges of a 3-inch by 5-inch Bed Bouquet unit and attaching it to the mattress surface beneath the sheets, consumers can enjoy freshly scented linens for up to 30 days.

Another player in the home fragrance business, Genieco Inc., is pursuing growth by adding to its portfolio of traditional products. Last winter the company acquired the home fragrance products of Willert Home Products Inc., transforming Genieco from a pure incense and candle company to a more comprehensive fragrance supplier with  otpourri, refresher oils, sachets and liquid potpourri, according to president Dana Morrison. “We are now capable of  lling out a complete 4-foot planogram and managing  it for our retail customers,” he says.

Your mom might have sent you off to sleep with the teasing caution: “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” In any case, like the majority of old sayings, there is a specific bit of fact in this one. Back in the old days prior to present mattresses and box springs, beds were filled with natural substances like leaves and straw.

The bed was placed on a natural fiber mat of sturdy ropes stretched out on a frame higher than the floor. The ropes were drawn “taut” at night to guarantee a non-sagging, more comfortable slumber. All sorts of critters entered these natural beds, including rats, mice, and even bed bugs. Bed bugs can not fly, so to prevent them, the bed posts were frequently positioned inside a can of kerosene to stop the insects from crawling up and biting. That’s why we say: don’t let the bedbugs bite!

Bed bugs have been on the newscasts once more recently because of a noticeable rise in the abundance of these irritating bugs. Even though they cause no precise disease danger, they can bring about great irritation for those who are unlucky enough to be sleeping with them. Similar to mosquitoes, they survive on human blood and will absolutely bite if given the chance. The bites are an irritation and will produce bothersome itching. A few unlucky folks will suffer an additional acute allergic reaction like swelling, and they will have to get medical help right away.

Bed bugs measure only approximately 5mm and are hard to see with the naked eye, particularly because they’re nocturnal and do not frequently move around in the light. As well as living on beds, they can settle almost anyplace else in a house where there’s a dark and cozy place to hide. If they’re in your beds, you might detect tiny spots on the sheets: a few will be red from blood, whereas others will be brown from the bed bugs’ excrement.

A more dependable method to expose bedbugs rapidly is to engage an exterminator who uses the a good detection dog. This specially trained dog can to sniff out the incidence of bed bugs and termites in a matter of minutes, regardless of where they may be hiding, making far-reaching searches and home interference in effect unwarranted.

To eliminate bedbug invasions once it is identified, particular insecticides are utilized which will eradicate the bugs while conserving the well being and health of individuals and pets. Bed linen has to be washed in hot water at once or thrown away completely.

Through improvements in modern detection and pest control technologies, there’s no good reason why anybody ought to suffer by having the bedbugs bite any longer.

Aromatherapy is an anecdotal method for modifying sleep and mood. However, whether olfactory exposure to essential oils affects night-time objective sleep remains untested. Previous studies also demonstrate superior olfactory abilities in women. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of an olfactory stimulus on subsequent sleep and assessed gender differences in such effects.

Thirty-one young healthy sleepers (16 men and 15 women, aged 18 to 30 yr, mean+/-SD, 20.5+/-2.4 yr) completed 3 consecutive overnight sessions in a sleep laboratory: one adaptation, one stimulus, and one control night (the latter 2 nights in counterbalanced order).

Subjects received an intermittent presentation (first 2 min of each 10 min interval) of an olfactory (lavender oil) or a control (distilled water) stimulus between 23:10 and 23:40 h. Standard polysomnographic sleep and self-rated sleepiness and mood data were collected.

Lavender increased the percentage of deep or slow-wave sleep (SWS) in men and women. All subjects reported higher vigor the morning after lavender exposure, corroborating the restorative SWS increase. Lavender also increased stage 2 (light) sleep, and decreased rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and the amount of time to reach wake after first falling asleep (wake after sleep onset latency) in women, with opposite effects in men.

Thus, lavender serves as a mild sedative and has practical applications as a novel, nonphotic method for promoting deep sleep in young men and women and for producing gender-dependent sleep effects.