Fancy New Products
To Freshen Your Air

It was somewhere in the midst of the sixth of the CD scent discs called "Strolling Through the Garden" -- as "Making a Bouquet" shifted to "Beside the Honeysuckle" -- that Ed finally had to abandon my house.

"I couldn't stand it, I threw all my clothes in the wash and took a shower," my too-sweet-smelling assistant wrote in an e-mail to me soon after exiting early from one of our evenings of testing out a quartet of new air fresheners hitting the market.

The scent-producing CD, recently launched by Procter & Gamble Co. as an extension of its Febreze brand, is one of a variety of new takes on the old-fashioned air freshener. The goal of these products is to gently spread the fragrances into the home via electric or battery-powered fans. They all are drastically different from the can of sickly sweet-smelling stuff your grandmother pulled out to strafe the room, or the solid sticks you stuck up in various stinky spots, or the air fresheners using oils that you plugged into the electrical socket.

Scentstories Price: $35 ($6 for refill discs) Comment: The nasal narrative is a compelling idea, but does the player need to be this big?

It's all part of a surge of new home-fragrance products, as manufacturers in a mature industry try to come up with ways to fine-tune their products. And, partly because these units require copious refills, the aim also is to make more money while doing so.

Except for some still awfully artificial scents in some of the devices and other minor quibbles, these devices do work much more efficiently than the ones they are trying to shove off the supermarket shelves.

Oust Price: $8 ($4 for refills) Comment: Sturdy, portable and powerful, as well as cheap--what's not to like?

Scentstories is the Procter & Gamble device. It plays a disc of five related scents, much as one might a new Norah Jones CD. In fact, it's the languid mood evoked by the sexy singer that the consumer-products company is going for with its series of trademarked scented tales, including "Wandering Barefoot on the Shore," "Relaxing in a Hammock" and "Exploring a Mountain Trail." It seems that you no longer can just spray and then pray that you have overwhelmed the scent of fried fish or wet dog. Now, you apparently need a copyrighted nasal narrative while doing so.

The much-marketed Scentstories unit, which costs $35, looks exactly like the small CD player it is attempting to mimic. After plugging it in, you can insert a round, flat, plastic disc ($6 each) into the unit and close the top. Little triangular thumbnails of scents embedded in the disc are heated up as they pass over a heating element, which uses a tiny fan to send out the fragrance. Each scent plays for 30 minutes before advancing to the next chapter. You can fast-forward if you tire of a smell and also adjust the intensity. Each disc lasts for about 20 plays.

A Walk Through the Mountains

As we explored the mountain trail, for example, our olfactory exertion took us by a winding creek (wet grass), beside wildflowers (um, wildflowers), through the mountains (cedarish), high in a mountain pass (pine) and by tall firs (even more pine). In general, the CD scent player was easy to use, the discs inserted smoothly, and the scents were strong without being overwhelming or artificially cloying. While a few were a bit too sweet-smelling, such as the mulled cranberry cider, holiday pies and freshly baked cookies from the "Celebrate the Holidays" disc, most of the odors were pretty accurate.

Mobil'Air Price: $7 ($2 for refills) Comment: It feels a little cheap and the scents remind you of a public restroom, but its tiny fan is both cute and mighty.

Our one quibble with the Scentstories unit was its large size (about that of an iron), which will take up space on a crowded countertop; we hesitate to add yet another peripheral device to the house.

Small size is the plus of the other three units we tested, two from S.C. Johnson & Sons Inc. and one from the Canadian owners of the Air Wick brand, Reckitt Benckiser PLC. All three are nice alternatives to current plug-in air fresheners and can be more easily turned off or moved.

Air Wick's Mobil'Air, which the company calls an electric portable diffuser, is the size of a small orange. You simply take off the top and insert a small tube of scent that has batteries attached to it already. Once popped into the unit, which costs about $7 ($2 for refills), a tiny fan spins and sends the scent outward. You easily can move the Mobil'Air, although you need to watch out for spilling, and the whole thing feels a bit cheap. The bottle of scent lasts 75 days with the fan off. But at its maximum setting, it operates for one minute on and two minutes off, quickly filling up a room. While that works well enough, the problem is that both scents we tested, Crisp Breeze and Country Berries, smelled more like scents that cover up various odors at a rest-stop bathroom.

Both Ed and I preferred the scents of S.C. Johnson, which is selling both the Glade brand Wisp and Oust Fan air fresheners. While still a bit sweet up close, the fragrances are less intrusive, because they are dispersed more slowly into the room. Both worked well, the Wisp being more fun and compact.

Watching the Wisp

Wisp Price: $8 ($4 for refills) Comment: The sight of the puff of scent is hypnotic, but how do you turn it off?

The Glade Wisp unit (with refills for $8 and $4) is interesting to look at, with its compact plastic egg shape. Powered by a battery, it automatically puffs an actual wisp of visible scent from its blowhole on top. Ed and I actually found the wisping mildly hypnotic. While we liked the small size, we didn't like the fact that you had to take the scent out to get it to stop -- especially after even the minimum setting resulted in wisps still being emitted. The company claims that a bottle of scent lasts 60 days.

The Oust fan was a better choice for the same price and performance as the Wisp, with a stronger fan and solid plastic casing that ran in a cycle of five minutes on, 15 minutes off. The Oust was turned off easily, and its cartridge of scent was easy to put in and take out, which made it the most useful, because it could be moved effortlessly from room to room.

Of course, whether people such as Ed -- who can only take so much fragrance -- will like that is a different scent story altogether.

Email your comments to rjeditor@dowjones.com.