How body odor became a corporate moneymaker

Why exactly is it so important to smell good?

In recent centuries, a confluence of factors—including widespread acceptance of germ theory, increased urban density, and the rise of corporate culture—has brought greater awareness to and disdain for odor and other normal human characteristics.

Once belonging primarily to the upper class, body perfuming and other grooming habits have become a near-ubiquitous part of life in the modern western world. Today the personal hygiene industry is worth more than half a trillion dollars—and growing.

But while unusually strong or changes in body odor can be a sign of health problems, they're also a natural part of our human biology, according to Johan Lundström, a psychology professor and chemosensory expert at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Our scents can vary in strength and nature, depending on a host of factors including environmental conditions, bacteria that live on the skin, as well as genetics, diet, and health, he says.

So, where did our body odor standards come from? Experts trace the evolution of modern-day grooming rituals and what these practices say about us.

Associating body odor with social class

Humans have experimented with fragrances for millennia: from the thick ointments of ancient Egypt to the expensive essences of the Roman Empire. “People’s understanding in the past is that scent ([like] perfume, vinegar, incense, smoke) pushed out dangerous smells ([like] plague, rotting substances, marsh gas),” says University of Pennsylvania gender and race historian Kathleen Brown. Even as “people took steps to make themselves smell better,” she says, they still “expected other humans to smell a bit.”

In the 17th century west, much more effort and focus went into cleaning clothes than the body, according to Brown. An upper class Frenchman might have distinguished himself with white linen shirts, which would be laundered and changed often. But, she adds, he would bathe infrequently and wouldn’t judge a lower-class laborer for being unwashed or smelly.

“Filthy, dirty aristocrats were kind of the norm,” says Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.

Perceptions of odor soon changed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, bathing became more common, forging a new association between body odor and negative things, like poverty and disease. “As the more educated people in the upper classes began to wash, they became aware that the working classes and their servants smelled,” Ashenburg says.

More diligent bathing and body care became a way for the elite to reinforce their status. “It seems very strange to us now, but thinking that the poor smelled bad was a relatively new prejudice,” she adds.

The rise of public institutions like schools, asylums, hospitals, and offices also contributed to a more sanitized aesthetic, according to Brown. In the 19th century, people developed a “heightened awareness of smell, of concerns for health, in especially crowded spaces.”

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These fears arose in part from widespread beliefs about the dangers of bad scents. Bad smells were originally thought to contain agents of disease, according to Virginia Smith, a historian and author of Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. The so-called “miasma theory,” prevalent until the late 19th century, held that illnesses like cholera and the plague were caused by inhaling noxious vapors.

In the coming decades, the germ theory of disease eventually replaced miasma theory, though concerns about cleanliness—and negative associations with smell—remained. As immigrant populations (particularly in the U.S.) boomed and indoor plumbing became more accessible, health officials began to build and promote public bathhouses for mass sanitation.

Social pressure creates booming business

No longer merely the domain of the elite, washing and deodorizing were quickly becoming standards of cleanliness for a broader society. Brown describes a growing desire among “those with greater access to indoor plumbing, clean laundry, education, and white collar jobs” to distinguish themselves from the “bodily appearance and smells of [manual] laborers.”

At the turn of the 20th century, these cultural shifts began to intersect with corporate interests. An advertising strategy created in the U.S. called “whisper copy” subtly scared people into buying products that promised not just to mask but actually prevent odors.

Advertisers “played on these anxieties about smell, respectability, appearance, and class position to sell body soap, laundry detergent, germ-killing potions  [like] (Lysol), etc.,” Brown says. British soap company Lifebuoy, for instance, popularized the term “body odor,” advertising their soap as an antidote. Odorono (or, Odor! Oh no!), an early antiperspirant manufacturer, warned women that they would scare away romantic prospects with unwanted underarm odor—and promised to keep them smelling “sweet.” 

Breath and body hair, too, became areas of concern. In the U.S., shorter skirts, see-through stockings, and loose-fitting sports and leisurewear grew in popularity, revealing parts of women’s bodies that had previously been hidden and generating interest in removing body hair. As with body odor, 1930s-era advertising tried to “get women to feel terrible about the hair on their legs,” Ashenburg says.

From the explosion of razor innovation to the demonization of bad breath by mouthwash brands, the 1950s in America marked what Smith describes as “a high point of hygiene ideology.”

The advertising worked, according to Brown. Mothers and wives quickly became instruments in the codification of their own “hard-to-achieve standards of care for the bodies in their households.”

Hygiene practices in today’s world

Intolerance to body hair and odor is high in the U.S., which Smith attributes to the nation’s history as young, innovative, and socially competitive. “America invented the roll-on antiperspirant, teeth whitening, tongue scraping, cosmetic dentistry,” she says. 

Shaving and deodorizing have since become nearly universal in Europe, though the trends took longer to entrench overseas, Ashenburg says. Thanks to clever marketing and widespread exportation of goods, personal hygiene routines are “probably less culturally distinct now than they've ever been before,” she adds. However, experts argue that some variation continues to exist, most notably between rural and urban areas. 

“I think the more metropolitan and the more corporate [a community is], the more heightened that effort to distance ourselves from what some people might perceive as a kind of animalistic, fleshy body,” Brown says. The proliferation of corporate culture, with its relatively rigid aesthetic standards, has turned metropolitan areas into what she calls “hubs of extreme discipline of the body.”

While disgust towards body odor is a natural response, Lundström says that our severe intolerance is largely a product of modern social conditioning. “One of the worst things you can be in society is smelly,” he says. “There’s a huge stigma around it.”