Pumpkin not just on the porch

Forget the pie. Forget the jack-o-lantern. If you want your pumpkin this year, you can start in the shower.

Fall scents, and in particular pumpkin - caramel pumpkin or cinnamon spice pumpkin or just plain orange pumpkin - have jumped from the food aisle to personal care in a big way.

"Most people think of pumpkin and they think of family and coziness and family security," said Terry Molnar, executive director of the New York-based Sense of Smell Institute, the educational arm of the Fragrance Foundation. "It's just a feel-good fragrance that's associated with Halloween and Thanksgiving and when it's chilly out."

Apparently, that feel-good feeling is now in serious demand. When the beauty product company Lush announced an online sale this fall of its first pumpkin spice soap - complete with pumpkin pulp - 125 pounds sold out in four hours.

The warm, familiar scent clearly connected with customers - as fragrances often evoke very specific memories. For Lush spokeswoman Jennifer Graybeal, pumpkin reminds her of her childhood carving pumpkins and baking and eating the seeds.

For Steve Duross, cofounder of Duross & Langell body products in Center City, fall is about his mom baking apple pie after apple pie, filled from the apple tree in her backyard.

His pumpkin soap, made in the store, includes fresh pumpkin as well as rolled oats and a little clove, cinnamon and nutmeg. (Duross promises you won't smell like pie all day.) The scent is so popular that the store recently held a pumpkin soap-making day, complete with apple cider.

Although the pumpkin soap is popular from late August through November, customers eventually like to move on to other seasonal scents.

"Christmas is milk and honey, cranberry and our Beaujolais Nouveau - it's a wine-scented soap," he said. "Once they're released, people use them up and then come January, they're onto the new thing."

The same is true in the spa world. Rachael Cutrufello, owner of the Pierre and Carlo European Salon & Spa in Center City, Glen Mills and Wyncote, developed the pumpkin pedicure and facial scrub about eight years ago when she was looking for something new to offer customers in the fall. The service includes a pumpkin-based exfoliant and a creamy vanilla shea butter.

"With the pumpkin scrub, we do the candles and the aromatherapy in the spa, and it gets people talking," she said. "People will walk by and stop and say, 'What's that smell, and what are you doing with it?' And then they want the service."

Pumpkin scent doesn't just bring up memories of food. A study by the Smell and Taste Treatment Research Foundation in Chicago found that the combined odor of lavender and pumpkin pie increased penile blood flow in volunteers by 40 percent. The least arousing: chocolate, pink grapefruit and cranberry.

Segue to pumpkin perfumes. There's a pumpkin pie scent by Demeter Fragrances as well as an entire line of sweet cinnamon pumpkin products - including a body splash - at Bath and Body Works.

But when companies go to develop new fragrances, it's not usually the sexual connection that makes a winner - it's the emotional one, said Robin White, director of education and events for Philosophy cosmetics. The company is known for its unusual scents, including strawberry milkshake, cinnamon buns and black licorice - a scent, by the way, that ranked second on the sexy scale for men.

The company has 12 "classic" year-round flavors and an additional eight to 12 seasonal ones, including (you guessed it) pumpkin spice shower gel and pumpkin lip shine.

The company does take requests, White said. A recent one was for "country fair flavors" including hot buttered popcorn, cotton candy, and candy corn.

Of course, one person's family memories may trigger another's disaster.

Amy Fredericksen is a candle market buyer for Pier I Imports, which sells a line of scented candles and home fragrances from harvest spice cake to gourmet apple pie.

"Some person might walk in and say 'I hate that fragrance.' It's very emotional to people," said Fredericksen, who noted that people pick candles first on scent, then on color.

"Smell evokes a memory, whether good or bad."