Down With Deo!

A teenager is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma sprayed with a noxious cloud of Axe deodorant.

Maybe I should just say “deo,” because that is how these companies choose to describe their products, no doubt armed with market data that many of their targeted customers lack the attention span or reading skills to grasp the full word.

Since the time Churchill remarked on the weirdness of Russia, it morphed into the Soviet Union and subsequently disintegrated with barely a whimper. The enigma of teenagers remains uncipherable.

I’m sure all of us parents of adolescent and teenage boys have data that could well join us together as subjects of a significant national study that attempts to shed light on a matter that perplexes us:

How is it that the bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste in our sons’ bathrooms don’t seem to diminish despite their purported use? But the Axe deodorant is drained in less than a month.

How is it that a bottle of shampoo that has been standing on the counter for almost a year still feels full, but tubes and jars of hair gel have flown off the same counter and replaced many times?

I have to admit those Axe ads are masterfully manipulative. They have boys aspiring to puberty, and boys who never got over it, spraying themselves. And not just a modest squirt. No-o. They have to mist it up and down and around their bodies so they can walk around like stinkbombs that have women gagging instead of reaching to rip their bodices.

How is it that boys who can crack trigonometry and pooh-pooh their little sisters' worship of Cinderella have trouble disbelieving an ad that tells them that fumigating themselves with cheap perfume masquerading as pheromones will make every female who catches a whiff become a panting slave? Okay, I'm willing to admit that even if they do disbelieve the propaganda, they're still taking no chances.

When I was a teenager, you couldn’t really buy deodorant, at least not any that was made in India. You showered twice a day in the summer and coated yourself with talcum powder to absorb the sweaty sheen on your body. Soap and water were the best beauty products you could count on, we were told. And that made sense: we didn’t have much more than soap and water. Even shampoo was a luxury product until the late 1970s.

Now that soap is cheaper than ever and available in so many brands that you can fill an entire aisle in a store, it suddenly isn’t so cool any more. Even friends who grew up with Rexona think nothing of spending ridiculous amounts of money buying soap from specialty boutiques in malls, where the soap is displayed and weighed (and priced) like premium confectionery.

Nowadays you can wash hands with a drop of alcohol gel and no water (yup! it is supposedly more potent against the H1N1 virus than soap and water). You can stroll like the Pied Piper and be trailed by an army of sexually ravenous females because they’ve just breathed a whiff of your irresistible deo spray. So hey, what moron needs soap?

I demand that soap -- sensible, old-fashioned soap -- gets its due. Hey, teenagers: soap is an underdog. Stand up for it. Don't fall for the propaganda of greedy corporations who are just selling you canned air and depleting the ozone layer faster than you want to deplete girls. And have mercy on your gagging parents.