Beauty Products Fresh From the Produce Section

From carrot and lettuce to baby peas, manufacturers of personal-care products have been hitting the garden patch for leafy inspiration.

Wild lettuce soap? Carrot skin cream? Celery cologne? Tomato skin toner? Avocado hair conditioner? They’re all out there.

“Fragrances that have food ingredients are very popular now. It’s not a direct smell but a suggestion of food--a subtle association,” said Annette Green, president of the Fragrance Foundation in New York. “They’re very different.”

Traditionally fruit, floral and spice notes dominated beauty counters, but the veggie idea was inevitable, said Roxanne Quimby, president of Burt’s Bees, which made its first vegetable-scented beauty product in 1995.

“We’re in a highly competitive field. Everything’s been done; everything under the sun is out there,” Quimby said. “So we moved on to the next logical step, which is vegetables.”

Burt’s, which is found in many boutiques and even garden centers, has complexion soaps in tomato (actually a fruit), carrot and lettuce varieties as well as Garden Tomato Toner and Carrot See Complexion Mist.

The products not only have unusual scents but also are loaded with essential vitamins and antioxidants such as vitamins A, B, C and E that can help skin that is sensitive or sun-damaged, the company says.

“You know how great you feel after having eaten a wonderful salad with lots of raw vegetables?” Quimby said. “Sometimes your skin looks forward to that too.”

Demeter Fragrances, which recently won a Fragrance Foundation award for its “Snow” perfume, now is selling colognes in scents including celery, basil, cucumber, parsley, sweet pea and green tomato. There’s even a scent that smells like olive tree blossoms.

The products are “fresh and light,” said Christopher Gable of Demeter. There’s also a sense of nostalgia to them and a sense of the everyday. And they’re also very familiar and uncomplicated: something people can easily relate to. They’re a lot easier for people to understand than Tommy or Ralph or Calvin or whatever is being pushed in their face at any given moment.”

Companies such as Origins and Body Shop have been inspired by the organic food movement, said Kate Greene, director of marketing/fine fragrance for Takasago International Corp. The company, based in Rockleigh, N.J., develops scent “accords”--finished fragrances and essential oils--that are used in designer perfumes. Its trademark Intenscents collection of organic accords was developed three years ago and has grown to about 20 scents, including carrot, cucumber, Italian parsley and its newest, Japanese yuzu (a citrus).

“The essence of fruit and vegetables takes people somewhere. In some cases their grandfather’s garden or their mother’s stove,” Greene said. “The scents basically capture what is fresh and good for you--the healthy feeling that vegetables evoke.”