Body odour is the scent of freedom
Disgust towards body odour has been linked to authoritarian intent. That makes sweating and smelling an act of resistance—especially for women.
Written by Libby Langhorn / Edited by Jack McGovan
Germany’s beloved asparagus season has reached its zenith in Berlin, and—phallic adverts aside—I’m all for the celebration of seasonal fruit and veg. However, the mercury hitting 30 degrees in Berlin means that something less salubrious is ripening: the armpit onion. Fellow denizens of public transport will no doubt know of what I speak. You’re crammed onto a full train at rush hour, then a fellow commuter raises their arm and triggers your gag reflex.
As someone cursed with a highly sensitive sense of smell who is fastidious about their own hygiene, I have long despaired the armpit onion. How fortuitous then, that a new range of products is being advertised here in Germany that goes above and beyond dealing with underarm odours: full-body deodorant. As you might expect, these products seem to be targeted mostly at women, even though anecdotal evidence suggests men might need it more.
Not to give too much of an insight into my social media algorithm, but I can hardly go online without being bombarded with new full-body deodorant ads. Industry market research reflects this rise, with the market for full-body deodorant creams alone expected to grow by around 80 million dollars in the next 6 years. In 2025, the vice president of the New-York based Society of Cosmetic Chemists described how full-body deodorants were a clear new trend.
Ads for Dove, Secret, Native, and others all follow a gendered and embodied formula. In one example, accompanied by images of female bodies with flowers blooming from every crevice, a voice tells us that we can smell great all over. An advert for a similar product shows a young woman addressing the camera. “I love looking after my baby,” she said, “I just have one problem—I sweat”.
Jack McGovan
Despite the byzantine web of social media advertising deciding that I am the ideal consumer for this kind of thing, I am actually the inverse, far more likely to resort to vigilante deodorising of others than my own body. This new prominence of full-body deodorants, however, hints at more insidious changes taking place in Western society, ones that seek to exert control over gendered bodies.
Fascism is in ascendance in both our politics and our culture, and the suppression of women’s rights and control over their bodies is—as it has been in the past—essential for fascist regimes to take root. Full-body deodorant may seem like simply a benign new product, but the everyday objects around us are never just things. They are shaped by and created within a political, social, and cultural context; they embody whole systems of meaning and power.
Full-body deodorant promises to get rid of the unwanted smells produced by a woman’s body—but unwanted by whom? Researchers found a link between authoritarian inclinations and disgust towards body odour; in one study, those who showed more pronounced disgust were more likely to hold right-wing social views and to vote for Donald Trump. Our social orientations are related to our sensory tolerance towards others, with bodies designated unclean to be separated and excised from the body politic.
Jack McGovan
This is part of a broader intensification of focus on female-hygiene most visible on social media: the Hygiene Olympics, PerfumeTok, and endless ASMR-coded shorts of 10-step shower routines. The underlying messages are the same. If you don’t perform cleanliness this way, you are Not Clean; if you do not purchase these products, you cannot participate in the performance; but if you do purchase these products, you can ascend to a level of higher-value womanhood, delineated by 50 euro body oil and 280 euro small-batch perfume.
This is only one aspect of gendered bodies being encouraged to minimise themselves, to take up less space. Extreme thinness is resurging in popularity. Female celebrities appear ever frailer, ever smaller. This is not the case for male bodies; all bodies, it seems, are not made equal in the pastimes they deserve to enjoy. It is no coincidence that in Rexona’s full-body deodorant ad from two months ago, women are shown at the gym performing high-intensity workouts, while men leisurely prepare themselves for their day and visit the beach. Men are fine to exist as they are, while women are expected to burn calories—reducing and improving themselves.
The suppression of uncontrolled biological processes should worry us all. Promises of liberation from existence as a sweating, excreting creature are lies sold to oppress and separate us. If we can be convinced that smelling after a gym session is wrong, what else can we be convinced to believe? Submitting to such pressures means giving up so much of our own agency that we would be left unable to put up resistance to the next stages of dehumanisation planned by tech oligarchs and their champions in politics.
All of this is to say that my opinion of the armpit onion has changed. Taking steps to keep your body healthy and tolerable to be around is an act of care for both you and your fellow beings, but self-care should not equal self-erasure. Please don’t sit on the bus worrying that the backs of your knees don’t smell like lavender and camomile. Under a world order that would have most of us removed from public life, to sweat is to resist and to stink is to be free.
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