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Americans Thought They Smelled Fine Until Marketers Convinced Them Otherwise

rayiner 13y ago
Probably more accurate title: Americans didn't realize they smelled bad until marketers pointed out otherwise. 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. The fact that people get used to it (like people get used to the garbage smell in New York) doesn't mean it isn't a real problem.
- rayiner 13y ago
  ITT: massive amounts of naturalistic fallacy.
- spiek 13y ago
  Well, they smelled like something (the article references men thinking that their smell was "manly" - I admit I still secretly think that), it's just that whatever they smelled like didn't have a negative connotation. Marketing convinced them that it was a bad thing and that they needed to fix it. 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.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's possible that my gag reflex to a strong whiff of body odor is entirely a creation of marketing. Or, maybe modern technology frees us from some of the baser indignities of life, and marketing offers a way to inform people that there is a better way.
    - apalmer 13y ago
      If you grew up without deodorant being available, you probably would not have a gag reflex to strong body odor. Now there are always exceptions, some people have excessive body odor, and probably anyone who hasnt bathed in a couple weeks would be smelly... but pretty sure if you were used to it then the smell of the average human who took a bath within the last 24 hours but has natural body odor probably would NOT (edit) cause gagging...
  - fsck--off 13y ago
    > Additionally, I feel increasingly leery about rubbing aluminum under my arms every day. 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/CosmeticLabelingManual/ucm126438.htm http://www.fda.gov/Cosmetics/CosmeticLabelingLabelClaims/Cos...
- mc32 13y ago
  It's not just americans either -in some parts of southern europe and middle east, it's not only used, it's overused. Also, its use is more pronounced among some populations but less amongst others in the US. 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.
- drcube 13y ago
  It kind of does. No one is hurt by bad smells, and at the very worst, you have to deal with a few unpleasant moments before your senses recalibrate, and then you don't notice the odor anymore. And when everybody smells more or less the same, nobody has to feel inferior. 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.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Garbage in New York is well contained in plastic backs and doesn't cause disease. The most offensive part of it is the smell, and it is comparable.
  - tincholio 13y ago
    Dude, I have met (in France, yay stereotypes!) some people whose smell would make you retch. One guy in particular was in the next office, and I kid you not, you could tell how long ago he had arrived by the stench in the hallway. I can't even imagine how the guy he shared his office with managed to do any work...
    - hannibal5 13y ago
      You might react so badly to his smell if you were not conditioned othervice. 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.
  - bluthru 13y ago
    >No one is hurt by bad smells 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.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
- everyone 13y ago
  It is not a problem. Humans smell a certain way. This is one example of illogical and wasteful consumer driven society creating a need for more pointless crap to make and needlessly further deplete our resources.
  - jwoah12 13y ago
    Humans also grow hair a certain way. Do you similarly agree that shaving razors are illogical? 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.
    - bitwize 13y ago
      Humans also grow hair a certain way. Do you similarly agree that shaving razors are illogical? 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.
- gamache 13y ago
  And over the years, other Good Samaritans helpfully pointed out that we're fat, ugly, pimply, and not so fresh. How did we get along??
  - aa0 13y ago
    Don't forget diseased. Big pharma wants to lend a hand too.
- apalmer 13y ago
  Ahhh man... you got a chicken and egg problem.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    "Chicken and egg problems" are called "feedback loops" in the adultland and are actually well understood...
- fsck--off 13y ago
  > The fact that people get used to it (like people get used to the garbage smell in New York) doesn't mean it isn't a real problem. 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-struck-july-1852.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/28/nyregion/heat-...
- neutronicus 13y ago
  > The fact that people get used to it ... doesn't mean it isn't a real problem. Isn't that kind of the definition of "not a real problem"?
  - mynewwork 13y ago
    Not at all. Humans are incredibly good at adapting. People in war zones get used to violence, people in high-corruption societies get used to giving bribes, etc. Clearly those are still real problems.
  - Goronmon 13y ago
    Isn't just about every improvement ever made to our way of life improving upon some situation that we were previously "used to" in some way?
- llamataboot 13y ago
  How can something "smell bad" before it is culturally declared as such? Maybe some smells like rotting food and corpses are hardwired to be unpleasant, but probably not the smell of sweating bodies.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    What makes you think the smell of sweating bodies can't be hardwired to smell unpleasant? It's the result of bacterial activity. Can your nose tell the difference between the bacterial activity in this case, and in more harmful cases?
    - llamataboot 13y ago
      Anecdotally, absolutely. I don't find body odor to smell bad, nor do many people I know, and being a bit of a hippie, know a lot of people that don't wear deodorant. Given that there's no advantage to avoiding healthy sweating bodies the way there is to avoiding rotting meat, I think that evolutionary pressures are quite different. Objectively, much (most?) of the world doesn't find body odor particularly unattractive. Most of the world finds rotting flesh and feces to smell terrible.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >What makes you think the smell of sweating bodies can't be hardwired to smell unpleasant? The fact that people forgot about it and get used to it pronto, as you already admitted above.
      - wanderr 13y ago
        Olfactory fatigue works for all kinds of stenches, it doesn't mean they aren't unpleasant.
        coldtea 13y ago
        Not really. Some stenches bother you less due to it, but they still bother you. 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?
- ojbyrne 13y ago
  Personally I dislike body odor less than someone wearing an overpowering amount of cologne. Not that I am a huge fan of body odor.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I'd be okay with disabling my ability to smell entirely. Smell seems to be a sense that is almost entirely used only for unpleasant or irrelevant things. Sure, food wouldn't taste as good, but it wouldn't hurt me to eat less anyway... The less anything smells, the better.
    - lysium 13y ago
      I know people who cannot smell (anymore) and they are not happy with it at all. Be careful for what you wish. :-) 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.
    - aleyan 13y ago
      Smell is a safety feature. It helps you avoid rotting food, rotting bodies, things contaminated with feces, unexpected chemicals, smoke and fire conditions.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    That one is hard to call. Horrifying body odor is much more unbearable from the point of view of the senses; overpowering cologne on the other hand makes me feel like I can't breathe. Two different experiences.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  Well, sort of. I think a lot of the distinction between yours' and the articles' title comes from confusion over objective vs. subjective experiences. 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...
  - mpyne 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nilved 13y ago
  It's not a real problem, it's a manufactured problem. People didn't get used to smelling bad, they never considered their smell to be bad.
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    Whomever invented deodorant must have thought someone smelled bad.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Probably more accurate title: Americans didn't realize they smelled bad until marketers pointed out otherwise 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.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Smell is a sense. If you "don't realize it", it might as well not exist. 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.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      No, it works like GP described - whether something smells bad or pleasant, if you're near it long enough (few minutes tops), you stop to perceive it. The brain just ignores the signal.
      - dragonwriter 13y ago
        While that description's been made in other subthreads, I don't see anything in the post you point to that said anything like that. 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.)
- kin3tic 13y ago
  This seems to be a real problem with you, you have very little ability to empathize, put yourself in other peoples' shoes, or imagine anyone's situation other than your own as the "default" or right one. It's a matter of perspective. Do you think it's really a problem for a bunch of people that all smell alike, that are all used to the smell, to not care? They probably think you have the problem for needing to pay people to artificially make yourself smell better. Especially since it's basically just a self-enforced social contract. "I don't want to smell bad, because it's a taboo and everyone else will make me feel bad". Your snotty reply to yourself only emphasizes my point.
orky56 13y ago
Goes back further than this. Listerine "invented" halitosis. 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listerine#History
VMG 13y ago
It's not about inventing problems, it's about competitive advantage. If everybody agreed that we didn't need to cut our hair, we would get used to it also, but having a hairstyle simply looks better. 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.
VMG 13y ago
It's not about inventing problems, it's about competitive advantage. If everybody agreed that we didn't need to cut our hair, we would get used to it also, but having a hairstyle simply looks better. 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.
jrochkind1 13y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the implication that the 'positive' campaign of Febreeze was somehow more ethical or polite than the 'negative' one for deodorant -- -- 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'.
WalterSear 13y ago
Well, someone had to tell them.
gohrt 13y ago
Americans didn't think they needed soda, laptop computers, brightly colored clothing, air conditioning, cars, ...until marketers convinced them otherwise.
- diminoten 13y ago
  Soda, laptops, clothes, air condition, and cars all solve problems that existed before they did (maybe less so the colored clothing). The article is about how the problem of smell was invented by the people who held the solution.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    What problem did soda solve? 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.
    - diminoten 13y ago
      The "what do I drink that'll taste better than water?" problem.
      - rayiner 13y ago
        Isn't that a manufactured phenomenon?
        diminoten 13y ago
        I mean, frankly, that's a somewhat arguable point. It might be, but it wasn't, I don't think, consciously sold in the "devious" manner deodorant was sold. Soda wasn't invented first, and then people started drinking things other than water after being told they need to. Soda was sold as, "here try this, it's pretty good!" 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?
brymaster 13y ago
Article he's talking about and previous HN discussion from a year ago: How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355706
gamache 13y ago
In my experience, when someone reeks, it's usually because they don't bathe daily or they don't wash their clothes enough. 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.)
ianstallings 13y ago
I don't wear it just to smell good, I wear modern anti-perspirant because I'd rather not have sweat stains when I arrive at work if possible. So marketers, thank you. You've made my life better.
malandrew 13y ago
This same type of thing happened with oral herpes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_cul...

Probably more accurate title: Americans didn't realize they smelled bad until marketers pointed out otherwise. 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. The fact that people get used to it (like people get used to the garbage smell in New York) doesn't mean it isn't a real problem.

rayiner 13y ago
ITT: massive amounts of naturalistic fallacy.
spiek 13y ago
Well, they smelled like something (the article references men thinking that their smell was "manly" - I admit I still secretly think that), it's just that whatever they smelled like didn't have a negative connotation. Marketing convinced them that it was a bad thing and that they needed to fix it. 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.
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's possible that my gag reflex to a strong whiff of body odor is entirely a creation of marketing. Or, maybe modern technology frees us from some of the baser indignities of life, and marketing offers a way to inform people that there is a better way.
  - apalmer 13y ago
    If you grew up without deodorant being available, you probably would not have a gag reflex to strong body odor. Now there are always exceptions, some people have excessive body odor, and probably anyone who hasnt bathed in a couple weeks would be smelly... but pretty sure if you were used to it then the smell of the average human who took a bath within the last 24 hours but has natural body odor probably would NOT (edit) cause gagging...
- fsck--off 13y ago
  > Additionally, I feel increasingly leery about rubbing aluminum under my arms every day. 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/CosmeticLabelingManual/ucm126438.htm http://www.fda.gov/Cosmetics/CosmeticLabelingLabelClaims/Cos...
mc32 13y ago
It's not just americans either -in some parts of southern europe and middle east, it's not only used, it's overused. Also, its use is more pronounced among some populations but less amongst others in the US. 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.
drcube 13y ago
It kind of does. No one is hurt by bad smells, and at the very worst, you have to deal with a few unpleasant moments before your senses recalibrate, and then you don't notice the odor anymore. And when everybody smells more or less the same, nobody has to feel inferior. 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.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Garbage in New York is well contained in plastic backs and doesn't cause disease. The most offensive part of it is the smell, and it is comparable.
- tincholio 13y ago
  Dude, I have met (in France, yay stereotypes!) some people whose smell would make you retch. One guy in particular was in the next office, and I kid you not, you could tell how long ago he had arrived by the stench in the hallway. I can't even imagine how the guy he shared his office with managed to do any work...
  - hannibal5 13y ago
    You might react so badly to his smell if you were not conditioned othervice. 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.
- bluthru 13y ago
  >No one is hurt by bad smells 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.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
everyone 13y ago
It is not a problem. Humans smell a certain way. This is one example of illogical and wasteful consumer driven society creating a need for more pointless crap to make and needlessly further deplete our resources.
- jwoah12 13y ago
  Humans also grow hair a certain way. Do you similarly agree that shaving razors are illogical? 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.
  - bitwize 13y ago
    Humans also grow hair a certain way. Do you similarly agree that shaving razors are illogical? 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.
gamache 13y ago
And over the years, other Good Samaritans helpfully pointed out that we're fat, ugly, pimply, and not so fresh. How did we get along??
- aa0 13y ago
  Don't forget diseased. Big pharma wants to lend a hand too.
apalmer 13y ago
Ahhh man... you got a chicken and egg problem.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  "Chicken and egg problems" are called "feedback loops" in the adultland and are actually well understood...
fsck--off 13y ago
> The fact that people get used to it (like people get used to the garbage smell in New York) doesn't mean it isn't a real problem. 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-struck-july-1852.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/28/nyregion/heat-...
neutronicus 13y ago
> The fact that people get used to it ... doesn't mean it isn't a real problem. Isn't that kind of the definition of "not a real problem"?
- mynewwork 13y ago
  Not at all. Humans are incredibly good at adapting. People in war zones get used to violence, people in high-corruption societies get used to giving bribes, etc. Clearly those are still real problems.
- Goronmon 13y ago
  Isn't just about every improvement ever made to our way of life improving upon some situation that we were previously "used to" in some way?
llamataboot 13y ago
How can something "smell bad" before it is culturally declared as such? Maybe some smells like rotting food and corpses are hardwired to be unpleasant, but probably not the smell of sweating bodies.
- rayiner 13y ago
  What makes you think the smell of sweating bodies can't be hardwired to smell unpleasant? It's the result of bacterial activity. Can your nose tell the difference between the bacterial activity in this case, and in more harmful cases?
  - llamataboot 13y ago
    Anecdotally, absolutely. I don't find body odor to smell bad, nor do many people I know, and being a bit of a hippie, know a lot of people that don't wear deodorant. Given that there's no advantage to avoiding healthy sweating bodies the way there is to avoiding rotting meat, I think that evolutionary pressures are quite different. Objectively, much (most?) of the world doesn't find body odor particularly unattractive. Most of the world finds rotting flesh and feces to smell terrible.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >What makes you think the smell of sweating bodies can't be hardwired to smell unpleasant? The fact that people forgot about it and get used to it pronto, as you already admitted above.
    - wanderr 13y ago
      Olfactory fatigue works for all kinds of stenches, it doesn't mean they aren't unpleasant.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        Not really. Some stenches bother you less due to it, but they still bother you. 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?
ojbyrne 13y ago
Personally I dislike body odor less than someone wearing an overpowering amount of cologne. Not that I am a huge fan of body odor.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I'd be okay with disabling my ability to smell entirely. Smell seems to be a sense that is almost entirely used only for unpleasant or irrelevant things. Sure, food wouldn't taste as good, but it wouldn't hurt me to eat less anyway... The less anything smells, the better.
  - lysium 13y ago
    I know people who cannot smell (anymore) and they are not happy with it at all. Be careful for what you wish. :-) 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.
  - aleyan 13y ago
    Smell is a safety feature. It helps you avoid rotting food, rotting bodies, things contaminated with feces, unexpected chemicals, smoke and fire conditions.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  That one is hard to call. Horrifying body odor is much more unbearable from the point of view of the senses; overpowering cologne on the other hand makes me feel like I can't breathe. Two different experiences.
nostrademons 13y ago
Well, sort of. I think a lot of the distinction between yours' and the articles' title comes from confusion over objective vs. subjective experiences. 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...
- mpyne 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nilved 13y ago
It's not a real problem, it's a manufactured problem. People didn't get used to smelling bad, they never considered their smell to be bad.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  Whomever invented deodorant must have thought someone smelled bad.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 13y ago
>Probably more accurate title: Americans didn't realize they smelled bad until marketers pointed out otherwise 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.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Smell is a sense. If you "don't realize it", it might as well not exist. 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.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    No, it works like GP described - whether something smells bad or pleasant, if you're near it long enough (few minutes tops), you stop to perceive it. The brain just ignores the signal.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      While that description's been made in other subthreads, I don't see anything in the post you point to that said anything like that. 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.)
kin3tic 13y ago
This seems to be a real problem with you, you have very little ability to empathize, put yourself in other peoples' shoes, or imagine anyone's situation other than your own as the "default" or right one. It's a matter of perspective. Do you think it's really a problem for a bunch of people that all smell alike, that are all used to the smell, to not care? They probably think you have the problem for needing to pay people to artificially make yourself smell better. Especially since it's basically just a self-enforced social contract. "I don't want to smell bad, because it's a taboo and everyone else will make me feel bad". Your snotty reply to yourself only emphasizes my point.

orky56 13y ago

Goes back further than this. Listerine "invented" halitosis. 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listerine#History

VMG 13y ago

It's not about inventing problems, it's about competitive advantage. If everybody agreed that we didn't need to cut our hair, we would get used to it also, but having a hairstyle simply looks better. 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.

VMG 13y ago

jrochkind1 13y ago

I'm not sure I agree with the implication that the 'positive' campaign of Febreeze was somehow more ethical or polite than the 'negative' one for deodorant -- -- 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'.

WalterSear 13y ago

Well, someone had to tell them.

gohrt 13y ago

Americans didn't think they needed soda, laptop computers, brightly colored clothing, air conditioning, cars, ...until marketers convinced them otherwise.

diminoten 13y ago
Soda, laptops, clothes, air condition, and cars all solve problems that existed before they did (maybe less so the colored clothing). The article is about how the problem of smell was invented by the people who held the solution.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  What problem did soda solve? 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.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    The "what do I drink that'll taste better than water?" problem.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Isn't that a manufactured phenomenon?
      - diminoten 13y ago
        I mean, frankly, that's a somewhat arguable point. It might be, but it wasn't, I don't think, consciously sold in the "devious" manner deodorant was sold. Soda wasn't invented first, and then people started drinking things other than water after being told they need to. Soda was sold as, "here try this, it's pretty good!" 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?

brymaster 13y ago

Article he's talking about and previous HN discussion from a year ago: How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355706

gamache 13y ago

In my experience, when someone reeks, it's usually because they don't bathe daily or they don't wash their clothes enough. 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.)

ianstallings 13y ago

I don't wear it just to smell good, I wear modern anti-perspirant because I'd rather not have sweat stains when I arrive at work if possible. So marketers, thank you. You've made my life better.

malandrew 13y ago

This same type of thing happened with oral herpes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_cul...