Sandalwood-Scented Spaniels? PETA Says Absolutely Not.

Empty the bath and fire the groomer — for $108 (and a mild ethical dilemma) your dog can smell of sandalwood and success.

In a video last Thursday, Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) announced “Fefé,” the “first fragrance mist for dogs,” designed with Domenico Dolce’s eponymous poodle in mind. “It’s a tender and embracing fragrance crafted for a playful beauty routine,” gushed Dolce’s website. “It’s an olfactory masterpiece.”

Fefé’s scent is three-fold, with notes of musk, sandalwood and ylang-ylang, a tropical tree oft-called the “Queen of Perfumes.” Water is its first ingredient, and it pairs with a slew of fragrances and oils, including castor, citrus peel and cedar. The complete concoction is poured into a 100mL, forest green glass bottle, to which Dolce affixes a “24-carat gold-plated paw.” D&G includes a luxe dog collar with every purchase, a classy measure to ensure participating pups receive the dog-park respect their hundred-dollar perfume demands.

Since their press release last week, Dolce’s focus has been on ethics. From their first advertisement — essentially a love letter to the real-life Fefé — the fashion house has coated itself in disclaimers: “No animals were mistreated during the making of this campaign,” read Wednesday’s Twitter post. “Their safety was fully protected.”

In the lab, Dolce & Gabbana has aimed for accountability. Aside from their mandatory animal safety certification, Bureau Veritas Italia confirmed that Dolce had been compliant with the “Safe Pet Cosmetics protocol.” The brainchild of Milan’s Voluntary Program for Safe Pet Cosmetics, that protocol is optional, and it requires participating brands to hold animal products to the same standards as human consumables. In a translated mission statement, the organization declared its aim to promote a “degree of safety of cosmetic products for animals comparable to what is claimed for man.“ That includes multiple rounds of rigorous testing, which Fefé apparently passed with flying colors. Of the dog owners Dolce polled in their in-field tests, 100% agreed that the fragrance was “gentle and well-accepted by their pets.”

But the real concern among experts isn’t the makeup of Dolce’s perfume. While the fragrance might not be toxic, any overpowering odor has the ability to inhibit a canine’s acute sense of smell.

In a recent study, researchers determined that dogs could preempt knowledge of epileptic seizures using only their olfaction. Earlier research indicated that they were capable of detecting odors present at a concentration of 1 part per trillion — a single drop in 20 Olympic swimming pools. Asked for comment, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk explained that dogs “have hundreds of millions more receptors in their nostrils and can smell 10,000 to 100,000 times better than humans.” While spraying dogs with Fefé might not hurt them, it risks overwhelming them and drowning out their critically important sense of smell. Perfume can “interfere with their ability to detect other smells in their environment or communicate with other animals they encounter,” explained Newkirk.

That sentiment was echoed by Federico Coccía, a premier Roman veterinarian. “The sense of smell for dogs is fundamental. They live in a world of smells,” Coccía explained in a Wednesday morning interview with the AP. Besides masking the scents of friends and threats, the vet explained that fragrances could obscure the tell-tale smells of diseases, including those used by humans to diagnose dogs. In a longer interview with ABC, Coccía discussed “the case of sebaceous dermatitis,” in which odor is a critical component of diagnosis. “The smell of breath, the smell of earwax are disguised by the perfume,” he expounded. “So, it could be a problem even for us vets.”