Put Down That Axe!Maybe we don't have to worry about global warming or Iran or sun flares. Maybe we all will be dead in 10 days anyway, if my sons keep it up. They just discovered Axe. So forgive me if this column sounds as if it was written in a fog. It was. It is. Gosh, will this stuff ever dissipate? I work from home, and it's as if my head got stuck in a cloud of Brillo. My once sweet-smelling boys — and, OK, lately boy-smelling boys, ages 12 and 14 — are now industrial disinfectant-smelling boys. Any and all of the other smells of the world — Lilacs! Bacon! Broken toilets! — have disappeared. I miss them. How clearly I remember the day about a decade ago when my husband and I were walking around town and noticed an odd billboard. It showed a refrigerator full of whipped cream dispensers, and the caption was something like this: "Thanks to Axe, he'll have to get more in the morning." My husband, bless his soul, thought it was an ad for ice cream. I felt smutty for even thinking what I was thinking. Which turns out to be the entire Axe advertising strategy: Give a wink and make us think that way. (Which explains the brand's current ad campaign: "Clean your balls.") The Axe revolution had begun. It was a revolution that many a military strategist — and mom — figured never could be won. It was the revolution that would take ordinary boys, who never minded smelling like insoles before, and turn them into deodorant-loving, nay, deodorant-ADDICTED fellows, pretty much by promising them instant studliness. Once a gal whiffed Axe, she would be oblivious to everything else about the boy wearing it. The endless Chuck Norris jokes.
Using the "girls love the overpowering smell of deodorant" approach, Axe became not only a category leader but also a category creator. It was like suddenly marketing eye shadow for dogs or bras for birds; this thing that no one ever had any need or desire for became suddenly de rigueur. Forget the old rites of passage — getting a paper route, having a bar mitzvah, deleting a sext; mainlining Axe became the new milestone. Which would have been fine, if it just didn't smell like Janitor In A Drum. Yes, that same janitor who climbed in back around 1979, poor guy. What's worse, the very gender it is supposed to impress — mine — turns out to have big problems with it. A study conducted last year at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia exposed men and women to a sample of male sweat, and both sexes detected it, no problem. Then the researchers (and whoever said science is glamorous?) "masked" the sweat smell with different deodorants. Men were fooled by the deodorant 19 out of 32 times. Women were fooled exactly twice. Said the lead researcher, Charles Wysocki, "It is ... difficult to block women's perception of sweat odors." Bottom line? Females are left smelling sweat AND the janitor stuck in the drum AND Pop-Tart breath — but only until the boys reach college. Then comes the Old Spice Guy smell. Counting the hours... Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now" and "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
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