The implication of the ads is clear: You stink. Not just your armpits—your entire body, head to toe, absolutely reeks. In your default state, you’re basically a gallon of milk accidentally left in a hot car. Never mind that an overwhelming percentage of the sweat glands on the human body don’t actually produce body odor. According to the now-ubiquitous advertisements, whole-body deodorant is meant to be sprayed everywhere: your neck and your chest, your back and your calves—even, as some overtly sexual ads suggest, down your pants.
The message, apparently, has resonated with many Americans. Last year, the president of Unilever U.S.A. told The Wall Street Journal that whole-body deodorant was “a breakout innovation of the year.” Lume, a whole-body deodorant launched in 2017, reported more than $320 million in sales in 2023. The product’s popularity is in line with the rise in the fragrance market overall; perfumes and their ilk are the fastest-growing category in the beauty sector, according to the market-research firm Circana.
This newfound olfactory anxiety could be, in part, a delayed effect of the coronavirus pandemic. Cari Casteel, a University of Buffalo professor who is working on a history of deodorant, told me that humans quickly become accustomed to routine scents—but that after a smell disappears, we regain sensitivity to it. She theorized that lockdown deacclimated some people to the normal odor of their fellow human, and that when we came back together, what had previously been inconspicuous background odor suddenly seemed very prominent. “It’s like when you leave your home and then come back,” she told me, “and you’re like Oh my God, the garbage smells so terrible.”
If hyperawareness of other people’s odor has led to hyperanxiety about our own odor, it is the latest addition to a long and growing list of American worries. Surveys have found that U.S. adults have become steadily more anxious in recent years, fretting over issues including climate change, identity theft, and the economy. In such stressful circumstances, Casteel told me, slathering on deodorant may give some people a much-needed feeling of control. During the Great Depression, advertisers were able to use the distress of joblessness to sell hygiene products. “You can’t control your employment or your financial stability, but you can control how you present yourself,” Casteel said. “And the way that you can present yourself as not failing during a recession is to maintain an image of cleanliness.”
What many perceive as unpleasant body odor is caused by the interaction of bacteria on the skin and bodily fluids such as sweat. Deodorant typically works by killing much of those bacteria, and putting fragrance on top of what remains; its sibling, antiperspirant, works by reducing sweat in the first place. Although each brand of whole-body deodorant is slightly different—some act more like perfumes; others aim to reduce wetness or odor-causing bacteria—the core premise tends to be the same: Whole-body deodorant is supposed to be a solution to a whole-body problem, taking a product that was once confined to the armpits and expanding its range to the entire dermis.
But clearing the smellscape may have unintended consequences. The way that humans naturally smell is likely more important than most people realize, Tristram Wyatt, an Oxford biology professor and an expert on pheromones, told me. When we alter or eliminate our body odor, we’re tinkering with a primal medium of communication that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, for purposes that, by and large, are still a mystery even to olfactory scientists. “Who knows,” Wyatt said, “what we’re blocking off when we completely deodorize ourselves.”
Anxiety has always been crucial to the marketing of deodorant and antiperspirants. One of the first mass-market chemical versions to hit the market, in the early 20th century, was called Odorono (“Odor oh no”). It was a bright-red paste that burned armpits and stained clothing; predictably, it wasn’t an instant hit. But after market research found that two-thirds of potential female customers believed they simply didn’t need deodorant, Odorono’s advertisements set to undermine that confidence. One early ad featured two women talking about a third, saying, “Of course she’s unconscious of it … but she does suffer frightfully from perspiration.” It’s a clever strategy, to imply you have a problem you don’t suspect and can’t detect. The fearmongering worked; sales more than doubled the next year—and the strategy set a precedent for the way that American companies have advertised since. In Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, the authors describe a 1931 advertisement that linked Depression-era job worries to hygiene in comically unsubtle terms. Copy for Lifebuoy soap plainly stated: “Don’t risk your job by offending with B.O.”
If today’s deodorant ads are more subtle, it might be because so many people have thoroughly internalized the propaganda. On TikTok, some odor-averse people talk about conflating the smell of deodorant with body odor; others insist that you must apply five swipes of deodorant to each pit, a sentiment that commenters found reasonable: “People just do one or two,” one said, “and it’s never enough.” A recently deleted TikTok that had racked up more than 200,000 likes detailed one young woman’s daily routine of three separate deodorants; she added, unnecessarily, “I’m extremely paranoid about smelling bad.” Taken together, these videos offer a snapshot of a population that regards their olfactory existence with near-cosmic horror.
Americans are particularly susceptible to these neuroses. Belle Tuten, a history professor at Juniata College in Pennsylvania who has studied the cultural connotations of smell, told me that how people react to odors is “100 percent cultural.” At least one study has found, for example, that younger children will not recoil from rancid odors that provoke disgust in older children and adults, which suggests that these responses might be learned. Sense experts describe cultures as either “smell seeking” or “smell averse”; examples of the former include the Kaum-Irebe tribe from New Guinea and the Yanomamö from the Amazon, in which it is common to touch the other person and then smell your fingers. In ancient India, the traditional greeting was to smell the other person’s head. Many Americans, whose society is built atop a rich vein of puritanical squeamishness, are so smell-averse that some sense experts consider olfaction a “suppressed” sense within the culture. That suppression gained momentum in the 19th century; both Darwin and Freud argued that olfaction was the lowest sense, left over from our time as beasts that walked on all fours, nose to the ground. According to this worldview, anyone who placed any particular value on the sense of smell was ruled as much by instinct as by reason.
Although their interpretations of smell were tainted by Victorian prejudices, they’d intuited something essentially true about smell’s power. Much of its effectiveness as a biological signal comes from its ability to bypass conscious thought. Casteel told me that the human brain registers somebody’s scent before it registers their appearance. That may be one reason many people are so desperate to suppress their scent. In Wyatt’s book Pheromones and Animal Behavior, he writes: “The idea that odours might affect our emotions or subconscious, and is not entirely under our control is scary to modern sensibilities.”
Humans are supposed to exude odor. Our bodies’ natural scent is not an accidental by-product of uncleanliness; we have specialized sweat glands placed strategically around our body—in the armpits and groin, for instance—whose function is to give us our characteristic bouquet. In fact, according to the zoologist D. Michael Stoddart’s book The Scented Ape, humans have the most odor-producing glands of any higher primate, perhaps an alarming fact to anyone who’s ever visited the gorilla exhibit at the zoo. What people tend to think of as body odor, Wyatt told me, comes from “the breakdown of bacteria living on the rainforest of your underarm hair,” the texture and density of which is key to cultivating BO. This is partly why the smell experts I spoke with all dismissed whole-body odor—and thus the need for whole-body deodorant—as unscientific nonsense: The majority of the body does not have this type of hair, or these types of sweat glands, and is thus unlikely to prompt what Wyatt called the “fermentation” of bacteria and sweat that produces pungency.
But while scientists understand human odor on a chemical level, they haven’t entirely decoded its ultimate purpose on an evolutionary one. A primary function seems to be olfactory identification. Research has shown that children can identify their relatives by smell, suggesting familiarity plays a role in how we perceive others’ scents. And our smell seems to convey clues about our health. In studies, subjects found the smell of individuals whose immune systems had been activated to be more “aversive” than the smell of healthy individuals; in premodern times, doctors often diagnosed illnesses in part by using their nose.
Working backward from these facts, one starts to discern the outlines of a deodorizer’s manifesto: If your body odor marks you as a stranger—or if you’re in less-than-ideal health—then you might deodorize to protect yourself from the unconscious biases of others. That is, you might decide that you’ll be less alienating to others if you reek of Axe than if you go au naturel.
But the line between self-protection and self-repression is thin. One of the other known elements of body odor is pheromonal, which is to say, in many cases, sexual. The link of scent to desire, some scientists have posited, may be that we’re able to detect genetic compatibility through our noses, a form of communication that can translate to healthier offspring and easier pregnancies. Some experts have theorized that the purpose of kissing is to sample the other person’s smell. It’s an idea that has proliferated throughout history: The Kama Sutra consistently elevates smell over appearance when determining beauty; Napoleon famously (and maybe apocryphally) wrote Josephine a letter saying, “I’ll be there in a week; don’t wash.” One might be tempted to attribute this request to the general’s quirks, but he could have been on to something universal. Wyatt told me that some human sex pheromones may have evolved to be a product of that “fermentation” in our pits, hinting at a potential overlap between bad BO and good. I’m not sure I’d buy any of this if not for a seismic olfactory experience I once had during a haircut appointment, in which the tank-topped salon assistant, while leaning over me to wash and condition my hair, placed her bare armpit a fraction of an inch from my nose. By the time she wrapped the towel around my clean hair, I felt like I’d been shot in the face with the pheromone cannon.
Americans tend to minimize how valuable this pheromonal aspect of smell is, Tuten told me in an email. “We’re willing for example to talk about how good babies smell,” she said, “but not necessarily about how good/comforting our partner smells.” This is where generalized odor anxiety intersects with the aforementioned puritanical squeamishness. Much of American culture thrives on the idea of sex—romantasy that may or may not be AI-generated, the discreetly enhanced and filtered bodies of fitness influencers—but can seem averse to the visceral reality of it. Pheromones, with their subconscious immediacy, represent the unruly, more fleshly aspect of sex that makes many people squirm and recoil, even if they’re involuntarily titillated. Deodorizing, then, could allow one to insulate oneself (and, just as important, others) from the potential messiness of true arousal.
Is there a price to be paid for suppressing nature? Casteel suspects that long before whole-body deodorant arrived on the market, many people were using existing products in unsafe ways; in rare cases, people have died from inadvertently inhaling the gases of aerosol deodorants. Milder but more widespread effects aren’t outside the realm of possibility. Wyatt told me that many anosmics, or people who’ve lost their sense of smell, report feeling depressed and alienated from their loved ones after losing their olfactory capacity. But because smell has been such a neglected field—Wyatt notes that, of the sciences of the senses, it was the last one for which research won a Nobel Prize—knowledge of it is still very limited. When I asked Wyatt what the consequences could be of scrambling our odor profiles, or if there even are any, he was resigned: “We don’t know.”
On a fundamental level, a fear of odor is fear of the unknown. As much as full-body deodorizing seems to be about exercising control, it’s more basically about minimizing risk. In anxious times, professional or social outcomes can feel as if they really could hinge on something as minor as forgetting to Febreze yourself. But opting out of risk also means opting out of possibility. When so many of today’s complaints—the loneliness of young people, the torturous dating market, the loosening of community bonds—come down to interpersonal alienation, the idea of American culture returning to a primal, highly evolved signal of kinship and compatibility is tantalizing. To tap into it, though, we’d have to chance the co-worker’s wrinkled nose, the stranger’s move to a more-distant bus seat, the acquaintance glancing around the bar and asking, “Is there a wet horse in here?” We’d have to embrace risk instead of avoiding it. As researchers concluded in a 1997 study on smell and compatibility, “No one smells good to everybody, it depends on who is sniffing whom.” Hyperdeodorizing means you probably won’t offend anyone’s olfactory sensibilities. But you may also be rendering yourself a nonentity, not smelling bad and not smelling good, self-exiled to an antiseptic netherworld where everybody smells the same.
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