The majority of people do this because we have been taught that this is the correct way to be hygienic and keep from offending others with their smell. This is what my mother taught me, perhaps a bit too much, because she would call me out in rather a mean way about it. And for many years, I believed it. In addition to being taught by my mother, we are constantly bombarded with ads telling us to be “sure” as opposed to “unsure” (anyone remember those commmercials?) and selling us the bullshit of the unattainable cliche of a glamorous life depicted in fragrance ads, which only serves to remind us how inherently flawed we are so we’ll run out and buy whatever crap they’re selling. And man did I buy into it!
I am a particularly pungent person, and would therefore bathe in deodorants, perfumes, sprays, all to make myself smell better. None of those things ever really worked, and I would frequently need to rotate deodorants when one would stop being as effective. I’ve been doing this since I was a pre-teen and well into early adulthood.
At a certain point, 2 things happened that changed my stance on this matter. The first was that I realized that the body odor of people I was attracted to smelled good to me. Thanks to a Desmond Morris special that aired on the discovery channel, I learned about pheromones and their key role in human attraction. I learned that the smell of male pheromone helps regulate female hormones. I found these things fascinating and began questioning why we cover up these smells. Then I remembered how badly I smell. Then I remember that time a person came into the art store I worked at and completely stunk up the store (she didn’t smell unshoewered, just like she made the conscious decision never to wear deodorant).
The second thing was that at some point during my early 20s, I developed a sensitivity to certain fragrances. My earliest memory of this was when I worked at AT&T and they put a new employee(an older woman) in the cubicle next to me. Her perfume smelled very old, and very strong. It’s not so much the scent that offended me, but the fact that it gave me a migraine almost instantly. My co-worker’s husband worked in a lab that made fragrances and made me aware of all the disgusting things that were used to make older fragrances, so I’d put 2 and 2 together and rationalized that it was old lady perfume I had an intolerance to.Scented Room Sprays Manufacturers
Over the years, my intolerance became worse and worse, to the point where I had to throw away 3/4 of the perfumes I once loved because even they now gave me migraines. The glade plug-ins I used throughout college were now a source of terrible pain. Febreeze now became my biggest enemy. As of now, I use mostly essential oils as perfume, and use fragrance-free detergents. I sometimes carry my own hand soap around because most places have soap that gives me a headache.
Due to these 2 things, I sincerely wish more people would embrace natural smells. By far a perfume or deodorant or axe body spray will offend me infinitely more than someone’s armpit -related body odor.
That being said, I do not enjoy nor do I condone body odor that is the result of several days of not taking a bath. There is a difference between someone’s natural scent and the odor that occurs after multiple days of not showering. Things like feet, anuses, genitals, belly buttons, behind the ears, and the scalp tend to get particularly pungent. To conflate the two would be wrong and inaccurate.
