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The market for luxury baby products is
on the rise, with sales of premium products for kids age 0 to 2 up 8.6 percent from 2000 to 2012, and projected to increase another 7.6 percent by 2016. While items like the $1500 Bugaboo stroller, the $300+ Tiffany rattle, and the price-available-on-request Hermes rocking horse may just be cause for an eye roll and a snort, the latest premium baby trend - baby perfumes - is slightly more concerning.
In the last year or so several baby perfumes have made their way to market, ranging from the $6-a-bottle
Johnson& Johnson offering to the $58-a-bottle
Bulgari eau de toilette. There's a
Burberry option as well, and
Dolce & Gabbana recently became the latest brand to launch a fragrance aimed at babies, claiming that its honey, citrus and musk scent will "accentuate" the naturally lovely smell of babies.
Plenty of media outlets have already commented on the
ridiculousness of the trend and voiced concern over the
marketing of luxury baby goods, but there's more to it than that.
Fragrance typically contains a cocktail of various chemicals that can be problematic for children, particularly babies. And because of a nifty U.S. regulatory loophole, the manufacturers of fragrances - even those made for babies - do not have to disclose the ingredients of their products; they can invoke trade secret legislation that dates back to the days when old-school alchemists mixed flower extracts and essential oils to develop unique fragrances and there weren't high-tech labs around to reverse engineer any fragrance a company decided it wanted to duplicate.