Americans Thought They Smelled Fine Until Marketers Convinced Them Otherwise
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Anecdotally, deodorant was a rite of passage for me as a teenage boy. As an adult with an office job, I find a lot of the time I don't need it (just like it turns out to be not a great idea to wash my hair every day). Additionally, I feel increasingly leery about rubbing aluminum under my arms every day. Do I smell? I don't think so. Am I headed for an office intervention? God I hope not.
Then don't use antiperspirants. Regular deodorants don't have aluminum zirconium in them, and in the U.S (I'm not sure about non-U.S regulations) deodorants that do have aluminum in them must declare it as an "active ingredient".
http://www.fda.gov/Cosmetics/CosmeticLabelingLabelClaims/Cos...
And, as you mention, in hotter climes and where people do manual labor and take public transportation it is very noticeable if people opt not to use deodorant. It's like entering a stable on a hot day.
Marketers basically invented a pretty pit for people to throw their money in, and made them self conscious of their natural bodies in the process. It's had an almost entirely negative influence on the world.
Garbage in New York is unsanitary, attracts pests, and causes disease. Human body odor does not. They are not comparable.
You just don't realize that you are in cultural and subjective bubble and you don't have objective keys to the world of smells.
If you travel around, you will realize that people have different smells and some of them are really strong. When you get used to them, they stop bothering you.
Sure we are. Productivity is reduced if we're distracted by stench. Why argue for making life less pleasant? Bathing and mitigating foul odor should be encouraged.
When you take humans out of their natural environment, can you really argue that features of the human body are "natural" and thus in some way inviolable?
Garbage in New York... attracts pests. Human body odor does not.
Good to know. Flies must be attracted to something other than body odor & sweat then. Perhaps... body heat?
Stop anthropomorphizing nature; it gets angry when you do that.
well, mosquitos (which carry disease) are attracted to carbon dioxide.
As a species, one of the these we enjoy is the ability to use our intellect to improve naturally occurring things about ourselves. Just because something is natural does not mean it is perfect.
No, but just about every hipster in Allston-Brighton does. Walk into any indie record shop in the Boston area and there'll be at least one 20-year-old with a beard to make Santa jealous.
New York smells much better than it did 150 years ago, when there was no organized sanitation service and decomposing food and horses lay in the streets. There were an estimated 25,000 horses in the city. Each horse produced 30-50 pounds of manure a day. Clouds of pulverized horse manure particles blew into the air and the unbearable stench spread everywhere. There were no electric fans available to move the air, and the humidity made people sweat profusely.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/28/nyregion/heat-...
Isn't that kind of the definition of "not a real problem"?
The fact that people forgot about it and get used to it pronto, as you already admitted above.
Also, who said people found the smell of a sweaty human unpleasant in first contant (before olfactory fatigue)?
This pressuposes an essential "badness" of the smell, regardless of if someone perceives it as bad or not. Where would this "badness" essense lie?
Because smells are not hardwired [1], we are nurtured into being distasteful of the scent of sweat. One nice example of this that I like is that you can find infants happily playing in faeces without being disgusted by it, it doesn't bother them the sligthest.
[1] http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Nurture-plays...
The less anything smells, the better.
For example, smell can alert you (of gas, of glycerin vs. water in a can, food burning during cooking, etc.). Further, it's not only that food doesn't taste as good, you either have to force yourself to eat (enough), or you eat too much, because the experience is more shallow than you were used too and you try to compensate.
Here's the objective fact: when you sweat a lot, molecules corresponding to pheromones in your skin and bacteria that live on it (particularly in enclosed areas like armpits) waft into the air around you and enter the noses of nearby people. This triggers nerve impulses that travel to the brain and give the sensation of "smell".
Here's the subjective fact: you smell bad.
People often lift their subjective impressions to the level of objective facts, because they have no other experience to compare it to. But the brain is remarkably plastic, and people continually underestimate how much their subjective experience of something can change through exposure and perspective shifts.
Here's another objective fact: when researchers have exposed subjects to smell for a long period of time (usually hours is enough) and then MRI'd their brain, the neural pathways related to smell cease to fire. Prolonged exposure deadens the experience; the brain is no longer interested in smells that are no longer novel. Subjectively, the subject ceases to smell the offensive odor at all.
And from an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense: smell is our early warning system for situations that might present danger or opportunity (eg. bacterial contamination, an aggressive rival, a desirable mate), but if we don't act immediately on that information, there's no purpose in continuing to smell the odor. Presumably we are unable to act otherwise, and continuing to fire those nerves just overloads the brain when it could better use that processing power elsewhere.
So both you and the article are right. You do smell natives who don't use deodorant - when you first encounter them. But if you lived shoulder to shoulder with them for years, as people did before deodorant was invented, you would cease to smell them, and it would cease to become a problem.
The way marketers work is to highlight the instances where it is a problem, so they enter your consciousness, and then reoccur in your consciousness whenever the stimulus occurs. Instead of "I stink, but I can't do anything about it, so why worry about it?" you think "I stink. I should put on some deodorant."
I've got lots more to say about how this affects adoption of products and cultural values (basically: you cannot get people to adopt a radically different innovation without relying on or creating some insecurity. If you can't create insecurity, you have to wait for everyone who was secure with the lack of your product to die off), but this comment is already pretty long...
But once you get back home it becomes obvious how smelly everything from the boat really is.
Smell is a sense. If you "don't realize it", it might as well not exist.
>If you've ever been to a part of the world where deodorant use is less common, you know its not a marketing-manufactured problem.
Nope -- that only holds were people don't bathe frequently.
I would put that differently: "bad" is subjective -- if you don't notice/think that a smell is bad, then it isn't bad, whether the smell exists or not.
I also know this to be false from personal experience, unless you are using an unusual definition of "few". (Certainly, there are some smells that you stop noticing at all, and the rest are noticed less, after a few minutes.)
According to Freakonomics:[3] Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as both a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn't a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis"— a then obscure medical term for bad breath. Listerine's new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate's rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?" one maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered such a catastrophe. But Listerine changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis." In just seven years, the company's revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.
from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listerine#History
The same thing will happen with whitened teeth. The more people have it, the more those that don't have it will stand out, until we all need to do it.
Welcome to the arms race that social life.
How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad
The article is about how the problem of smell was invented by the people who held the solution.
My understanding is that sodas were mostly introduced as mostly phoney patent medicines.. in other words they claimed to (but did not) solve problems that we no longer use them to solve. They didn't actually solve anything and their use today doesn't really have anything to do with solutions to any problem.
You can't really compare food with nonfoods in this area. Food and sustenance products come embedded with a need - survival. You have to drink/eat something, why not drink/eat my product?
Put another way: If "not smelling like a horse" was not a legitimate problem because marketers created it, then "not having something sugary and carbonated" was similarly not a legitimate problem, because marketers created it.
Did you read the article?
If "people smell like horses" is illegitimate because it is manufactured, then why isn't "I am unsatisfied with this wide array of beverages that are not simultaneously sugary and carbonated"?
Either both are illegitimate because they are "manufactured", or both are legitimate.
Did you read my comment?
Smelling nice was. It's different.
Now we all believe it tastes plain because we've been drinking Coke for all our lives.
I don't believe a word I just said, but a lot of people apparently will.
There's still echoes of this left in modern-day asian culture. Particularly authentic asian restaurants will still look at you funny if you ask for iced water with your meal. Traditionally, it's either hot tea or hot sake.
As someone with the habit of burning my mouth with hot beverages, this drives me bonkers.
Didn't people historically drink alcoholic beverages because of alcohol's antiseptic properties? (Oddly enough, I can't find much reference to this hypothesis in Wikipedia.)
Soda appears to fulfill the need for cold, sugary, flavoured drinks.
I'm not saying that soda took the job of "drink that is safer than water". I'm merely pointing out that people did not migrate from water to soda. They went from beer to soda.
-- both of them convinced masses of people that they needed a consumer product that nobody previously thought they had any need for.
There are ethics-of-marketting implications there worth discussing, but the OP doesn't really get into them, and they don't differ depending on whether you 'go negative or positive', these were really both essentially the same 'path to success'.
Fresh sweat on a recently showered body generally does not smell bad. A guy who applies Right Guard for three days instead of showering does. (Deodorant is odorant anyway.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_cul...