The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [100]
Freshening cloths and other feminine hygiene products have little interest for Sissel Tolaas, but she admits that living in an un—deodorized body is unsettling. “What is the body without the smell of mango? You don’t know,” she says. “And before mango, it was lemon, and before that, rose. People are so used to fictions, that reality is difficult to react to. And people are afraid of smelling like themselves, because that means being naked. It’s dangerous today, to go out without any external smell.” When it feels right, by all means wear an external smell, but be conscious of the effect you’re trying to produce. (Tolaas, for example, created an aroma that resembles the metallic smell of money to see if it would make the wearer more successful in business, which it did.) For women today, with increasingly powerful positions in society, she thinks the innocuous florals and baby powders of hygiene products and perfumes are silly: “No sweet rose. That’s over.”
THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
Some of the research techniques used by Alberto-Culver when testing the effectiveness of FDS sound more like material for a Monty Python or early Woody Allen sketch than credible product tests. To determine the effectiveness of the new spray, the company recruited housewives as research subjects and told them to report to the Institute for Applied Pharmaceutical Research in Yeadon, Pennsylvania.
There the subject removed her clothes, covering the top part of the body, and allowed a “judge” to apply a nosepiece to her vulva. The judge smelled the subject’s vulva at intervals over a four-day period, during which the subject bathed with soap and water alone, and then bathed with soap and water before applying FDS. (The subject, who could return home during the intervals but not have intercourse, was paid $150 for the four-day period. The judge, who also smelled subjects for underarm odour, could make up to $1,000 a week.)
The results of the testing justified Alberto-Culver’s optimism. Six hours after applying FDS, the subjects were judged 74 to 78 per cent more odour-free than after bathing with plain soap and water; after twelve hours they were 53 to 59 per cent more odour-free and after twenty-four hours, 38 to 40 per cent more odour-free.
The future of fragrance, as Tolaas sees it, would begin with a ground or base of your own unique body smell. Then, “you could choose different molecules to add to it. Maybe you’d have one perfume for sex, one for business, whatever.” Our natural smell reminds us of our animality, something we usually prefer to forget, but Tolaas doesn’t. “The more body smell you have, the more you relate to sex and the more others relate to you sexually,” she says. “Animals do that; look at them.” It’s true that increasing numbers of companies advertise pheromones in fragrances and gels to enhance sexual appeal, but we prefer our animality as sanitized as possible: it’s unthinkable that these substances would be accompanied by the body odours that attend them in nature.
We have come to expect that the people we encounter walking down city streets or sitting on subways are showered, mouthwashed and deodorized as much as possible, with the goal of eradicating all natural smells. Then, onto their odourless bodies, they import carefully chosen scents. These people are listening to their own private musical repertoire on their iPods, messaging people on their BlackBerries or talking on their cell phones. The illusion that they exist in their own individual, hygienically sealed bubbles is so strong that, paradoxically, they forget the presence of others and talk loudly of private matters on their cell phones.
The building of these individual bubbles has been a long process. The cultural critic Ivan Illich believed that the French revolution, when the idea circulated that every man deserved