I recently posted about a new product for men - Balla Powder. It seems today that no one can be fresh enough.
Why is it that the places that people today depilate and dowse with chemicals are such smell traps? Is it really in our best interests to get rid of these smells? Not every one agrees.
"I'll be arriving in Paris tomorrow evening," Napoleon wrote to Josephine. "Don't wash."
Napoleon wasn't the only connoisseur of a strong sniff. In France, armpits were once known as "spice boxes." A Victorian courtesan made a fortune by selling handkerchiefs kept between her bed sheets. And some Austrian girls still wear slices of apples under their arms to create fragrant gifts for their suitors.
Lyall Watson's new book, "Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell," is a witty journey into the mysterious land of scent. Whether we prefer the aroma of the unwashed or of the spray bottle, Watson argues, smell is the most provocative, sensual and misunderstood of the senses.
It's not that I don't like people to be clean or smell nice. Nor did Josephine.
Josephine introduced the young General Napoleon to bathing and perfumes. Napoleon's favorite scent was Eau de Cologne, a citrusy scented preparation in an alcohol base. Napoleon Bonaparte used eight quarts of cologne for rubdowns every month
I am just wondering if it is best to hide all traces of who we really are?
I am not alone in questioning our fetish for clean. NPR had a great interview with Katherine Ashenburg who wrote a hook called the Dirt on Cean. Here is an extract.
While ads for men told them they would not advance at the office without soap and deodorant, women fretted that no one would want to have sex with them unless their bodies were impeccably clean. No doubt that's why the second-most-frequent question I heard during the writing of this book — almost always from women — was a rhetorical "How could they bear to have sex with each other?"
In fact, there's no evidence that the birthrate ever fell because people were too smelly for copulation. And although modern people have a hard time accepting it, at least in public, the relationship between sex and odourless cleanliness is neither constant nor predictable. The ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to be clean, but both sexes anointed their genitals with perfumes designed to deepen and exaggerate their natural aroma. Most ancient civilizations matter-of-factly acknowledged that, in the right circumstances, a gamy, earthy body odour can be a powerful aphrodisiac. Napoleon and Josephine were fastidious for their time in that they both took a long, hot, daily bath. But Napoleon wrote Josephine from a campaign, "I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don't wash."
Early in my reading about the history of cleanliness, I began talking one day at a lunch about some of the extremes, in both directions, that I was discovering. Another guest, a journalist, was astonished. "I just assume everyone is like me," she said, "showering every single day, no more, no less." Her assumption, even about educated North Americans like her, is not true, but most people are loath to admit that they deviate from the norm.
As I went on reading about cleanliness, people began taking me aside and confessing things: several didn't use deodorant, just washed with soap and water; some didn't shower or bathe daily. Two writers told me separately that they had a washing superstition: as the end of a long project neared, they stopped washing their hair and didn't shampoo until it was finished. One woman confided that her husband of some twenty years takes long showers at least three times a day: she would love, she said wistfully, to know what he "really" smells like, as opposed to deodorant soap.
I am much more in the Napoleon camp. Put away the razors. Ditch the Brazilians. Lose the chemicals. Bring back the real you.
