Into the Whiff...

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

Let me start today’s post with a confession:  I am a single woman with no children, and I own a bottle of Axe men’s bodywash.  And of all the things I own, that’s the one thing that everyone who comes into my apartment never fails to comment on.  I mean, I live in an apartment that’s the size of a coffee cup, and I own 140 clocks.  I have a birthing chair in my bedroom, and a confessional next to my fainting couch.  But all anyone ever asks is, “What’s with the Axe?” 

Now, I find various things in my bathtub from time to time—some cat toys, a Barbie Doll head, a spatula—that can’t be easily explained away other than to say that, you know, things turn up. It’s all part of the big mystery of life.  And there are other things that really are just shower-related purchasing mistakes.  There is, for example, a bottle of volumizing shampoo in my shower, and while there’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting a little volume sometimes, it’s a big mistake if you already have thick hair.  I used it once and went from being someone with a fairly short haircut to looking like the Bride of Frankenstein.  The only upside is that I was instantly eight inches taller.  It didn’t just volumize my hair; it enlarged it.  The only smart thing I did was not put it all over my head—I would’ve come out looking like a float in the Macy’s Day Parade.  And I would’ve had a beard.  So, yes, buying that was a mistake. But the Axe was completely on purpose, and I think that’s what throws people.

So, why do I own men’s bodywash?  Well, to put it bluntly, I like the way it smells.  And I know, I could easily avoid the strange reaction people seem to have to my having it just by saying that I bought it by accident.  But I didn’t.  I’m that person who goes to the store, flips open the caps, and smells the soap.  I spray the room fresheners.  I squeeze the toilet paper.  I want grocery shopping to be a scratch-and-sniff, give-it-a-test-drive kind of experience, and if I’d been a little more vigilant about that and had stopped to wash my hair while I was at the store, I probably wouldn’t have a bottle of volumizing shampoo rotting away in the corner of my shower.

Of course, some of the room fresheners do have a scratch-and-sniff thing on them, and I appreciate that.  But I can’t quite get past how they explain what those products do.  Last time I saw an ad for one on TV, it said the product surrounded and eliminated “odor molecules.”  What the hell is an “odor molecule?”  Who’s making these ads up?  The people from Star Trek?  What’s next?  A college degree program that only takes 20 minutes because all you have to do is show up for an injection of “smartness molecules”?  Of course, you could argue that steroid use in sports is exactly this kind of situation, but it’s a little more complex than that.  It’s not like they can just shoot a guy full of “home-run molecules”  and have done with it.

Then again, if those air fresheners actually can seek out and destroy odor molecules, it’s even more scary because then room spray becomes like a new form of life capable of understanding what smell is and deciding for itself whether or not something smells bad. It’s like the Terminator saga, only on a really, really tiny scale. “What are you doing, honey?”  “Oh nothing, just unleashing some judgmental biotechnology all over our couch.”  I mean, what happens if your room freshener doesn’t think you smell good?  Does it just eat you alive?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that kind of pressure in my life.  I don’t need to wake up every morning and worry that I don’t smell good enough for my room freshener to let me live.

Anyway, the thing is that owning a bottle of men’s bodywash makes perfect sense to me. Yes, I know that Axe is for men, but it seems like an awfully inconvenient thing to have to keep a man around just so I can smell the Phoenix scent.  After all, it’s not like I could just park some guy in the corner, cover him in bodywash, and be done with it.  I’d have to feed him and let him use the computer sometimes.  He’d probably get lonely and try to engage me in conversation occasionally, and there’s no doubt he’d eventually start complaining about what I was watching on TV. He might smell good, but the whole situation would just be annoying, and it seems like having a gooey, soap-covered man in my house is an awful lot of trouble to go to when I could just buy a bottle of Axe for myself and smell it whenever I wanted to.

Actually, I read an article not too long ago that talked about the relationship between scent and sexual attraction, and it said that how someone smells is a significant factor in mate selection.  So, I guess men’s bodywash is supposed to attract women.  And I guess it works.  After all, it attracted me. I love Axe.  But if sexual attraction really is based in part on scent, then they should just make a cologne that smells like a low-interest mortgage and a paid-off car loan.  For the younger set, someone could invent a fragrance that smells like a new credit card.  I mean, seriously, from what I’ve seen of life, it’s the sweet scent of financial stability that ultimately attracts people to each other.

For those of us who don’t care that much about money (mostly because we don’t have any), I think other scents are more attracting. For me personally, my top three sexual attraction scents would be bacon, hazelnut coffee, and Christmas trees.  So, I guess until I meet someone who always smells like a holiday brunch, I’m going to remain single.

The thing is that scent isn’t restricted just to our bodies because, at least most of the time, we’re wearing clothes, and that’s where things get really tricky because the names of detergent and dryer sheet fragrances are almost as nonsensical as the existence of odor molecules.  I mean, what scent is “fresh linen” anyway?  My fresh linen smells like mountain scent dryer sheets.  And even the name of those dryer sheets is misleading.  I’m from Colorado, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the mountains.  And I don’t recall ever having taken a deep breath while looking out over a beautiful mountain valley and thinking to myself, “Gee, it smells just like a dryer sheet.”  For the most part, the mountains smell like pine trees, unless you’re really close to a river, in which case they have kind of a funky odor that, trust me, no one would want to immortalize in a fabric softener.

I think the only laundry detergent that actually manages to completely triumph in the logic of fragrance is Gain.  And that’s because Gain ads just refer to “the smell of Gain.”   Gain makes no fragrance claims except that it smells just like itself.  It’s a completely self-referential laundry detergent, and there’s just something about that that I find immensely comforting.  It’s a kind of logic that you just can’t argue with.  It doesn’t smell like a mountain spring.  It doesn’t smell like fresh mown hay. It just smells like Gain.  It’s positively tautological, and I love that.

The idea that some scents are supposed to be for men while others are for women, though, is an interesting kind of double-edged sword.  On one hand, I don’t like the idea that I can’t just smell like whatever I want to smell like.  I mean, this is America, and I’m pretty sure I have the right to fragrance freedom.  It’s in the Constitution, isn’t it?  On the other hand, I discovered about a year ago that there’s a strange advantage to buying into the idea that some scents are supposed to be for men while others are for women. 

I was getting ready to go to a party, and I had run out of gently relaxing, super-moisturizing, anti-aging, feel-like-a-natural-woman shower creme.  So, I just grabbed the Axe and used that.  On the way over to the festivities, I noticed that I was driving faster and with considerably less care for the safety of others than usual, and at one point, I flipped off a pedestrian for no reason at all.  Once I got there, I revved my engine and performed a super-human parallel parking maneuver at 30 miles an hour.  I had no idea what had gotten into me.  Anyway, I was standing out on the porch, and as I raised up my cup to take a drink, I smelled my hand.  It smelled like a man’s hand.  Then I turned to the woman next to me and said, “Smell my hand” (yeah, it was that kind of a party).  She took a whiff and said, “You smell like a guy.”  And damn if I hadn’t just completely turned into one.  I went around for the rest of the night slapping people on the back and crushing various objects with my bare hands.  I felt not only worthy of but absolutely entitled to a higher paying job and more respect from my peers.  I could tell dirty jokes without blushing and summon a fart at will. It was like magic, and all in all, except for the almost irresistible urge to publicly scratch myself in inappropriate places, it was a wonderful experience.  And as I was using my car to just push someone else’s out of the way so I could get a better parking spot when I got home, I realized something:  men’s bodywash is mojo in a bottle.  It’s the most amazing stuff on earth.

So, that’s what’s with the Axe, Dear Readers.  I like the way it smells, but there’s more to it than that.  As a woman, I can be pretty strong, but as a man, I am literally unstoppable.  I mean, once I’ve slipped into fragrance drag, there’s just no holding me back.  And that’s not really such a bad thing because every now and then, I need to be slightly braver than I actually am.  I think the trick to navigating the wide world of scent is just realizing that there is no real logic to it and that the most important thing is to be able to smell like whoever you need to be in any given moment.  And if you can’t whip that up all on your own, that’s OK because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my experiences, it’s that sometimes, courage really does come in a bottle.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.