Do You Stink?
DESCRIPTION:
Whole-body deodorants market insecurity in the age of self-optimisation – why body odour is becoming a flaw and who profits from it.
Introduction
Deodorant used to be simple. Roll or spray under your armpits. Done. But now, your groin, your feet, and skin folds, even your buttocks, are declared “problem areas”. Welcome to the age of whole-body deodorants: the new extreme of body care, where the body is no longer just washed and dressed – it is shaped, regulated and silently monetised.
But this is no longer simply about cleanliness. It is about control. About the slow, invisible transformation of the self into something that must be maintained —, and more importantly – bought.
What appears to be a harmless market development is, in reality, a new form of gentle disciplining. A form of psychological control. Whole-body deodorants do not target the bacteria under your arms – but your fear of how others might see you, and the gap between this external view and your self-perception. These products do not eliminate discomfort, but reinforce it, give it a name, and promise you salvation in a branded bottle – all at once.
If there is anything that whole-body deodorants sell more effectively than odour control, it is the fantasy of seamless acceptance – to be considered someone whose body never “bodies”, is never embarrassing, never emits odours, never contradicts the carefully constructed social image.
The result is an ideological shift that disguises itself as self-care: the pathologisation of the basic functions of the human body in service of new markets and total conformity. And the costs are not just financial – they are existential.
What this post is about:
why “freshness everywhere” is not a solution but a symptom of late-capitalist self-optimisation,
how marketing turns physicality into a social burden,
what body odour actually means – and why it is treated as a flaw,
how influencers have replaced social norms and parents as internal triggers of shame, and
why embracing bodily functions might be the quietest – and most radical – form of resistance.
From the Enlightenment to Bourgeois Virtues: The Birth of Self-Discipline
The history of compulsive self-perfection does not begin with Instagram or influencer marketing, but is rooted deep in the European Enlightenment. With the end of birth privileges and the rise of the bourgeoisie, social status was no longer legitimised by origin, but by individual achievement and virtue. Philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith promoted values like diligence, self-discipline, order, and cleanliness as new bourgeois virtues.
These virtues were not only economically, but also morally charged: cleanliness and self-control were considered respectable and virtuous. And body care became the visible sign of this self-control and social belonging. Control over one’s own body – and thus over odours – became a symbol of the ability to govern oneself and to succeed in the new society.
The Pathologisation of the Natural: Hygiene as Social Discipline
With the 19th century and the spread of science, the understanding of hygiene fundamentally changed. The discovery of germs and urbanisation meant that cleanliness was no longer only a sign of virtue, but also of health and modernity. Body odour, once accepted as normal and at most masked with perfume, increasingly became a flaw and a sign of backwardness or even pathological moral degeneration.
The emerging hygiene industry cleverly exploited these new fears: deodorants and soaps were marketed as remedies against social exclusion and as prerequisites for professional and private success. Advertising has always deliberately played on shame and insecurity to boost sales – a mechanism that still works today.
From Bourgeois Self-Control to Neoliberal Self-Optimisation
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the pressure to self-optimise intensified even further. The neoliberal consumer society has taken the logic of self-improvement and self-marketing to the extreme: the body is no longer just a sign of virtue, but a project. It must constantly be improved, monitored, and showcased.
The ideals of the Enlightenment – self-discipline, control, optimisation – are now translated by the consumer industry into products that promise to eliminate every “imperfection”. Whole-body deodorants are the latest example: they turn every skin fold into a potential problem zone and suggest that only flawless freshness guarantees social acceptance.
Myths and Power in Everyday Life
In everyday life, we encounter countless things, images, and practices that seem self-evident: advertising on billboards, breakfast rituals, the language in the news. But how do these self-evident truths arise? Who decides what counts as “normal” – and why?
Two of the most influential thinkers in cultural and social science, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, have dealt extensively with precisely these questions. While Barthes, in his famous “Myths of Everyday Life”, shows how everyday phenomena become carriers of ideology, Foucault examines, with his concept of the dispositif, how power and knowledge structure our thinking and actions. Both approaches offer a critical view of what we take to be natural or self-evident – and make visible how social order, power and meaning are anchored in the everyday.
Foucault’s Dispositif: The Body as an Object of Control
Michel Foucault understands the term dispositif (French: dispositif, often translated as “apparatus” in English) to mean a network of institutional, physical and administrative mechanisms as well as structures of knowledge that serve to exercise, steer, and maintain power within a society. A dispositif includes not only laws or institutions, but also a network of diverse elements – things, statements, institutions, laws, scientific claims, moral prescriptions, behaviours, etc. – that are interconnected and together create the conditions for the exercise of power. Foucault stresses that the dispositif is dynamic: the relationships between the elements are not rigid, but change over the course of history. In this way, it can be understood how power, knowledge, and the self are interwoven in society.
Modern body care – from showering multiple times a day to whole-body deodorant – is part of such a dispositif, which not only disciplines from outside, but also encourages self-monitoring and self-regulation.
Power no longer acts only through prohibitions, but through the constant call to self-optimisation. Fear of not being enough becomes the engine of consumption. Control over one’s own body becomes a prerequisite for social belonging – and a commodity that must be bought over and over again.
Barthes’ “Myths of Everyday Life”: How the Everyday Becomes Ideology
Roland Barthes’ “Myths of Everyday Life” (Mythologies, 1957) is a key work of cultural criticism and semiotics. Barthes shows how seemingly banal everyday objects, practices and media messages become carriers of ideology. His approach is based on the distinction between two levels of meaning:
Denotation: the immediate, literal meaning of a sign (e.g. a deodorant as a product for odour control).
Connotation/Myth: the second, culturally and ideologically charged meaning ascribed to the sign (e.g. deodorant as a symbol of social acceptance, purity, modernity, or self-control).
Barthes understands myth as a “second order of signification”: everyday things are infused with social values and norms so that these appear “natural”. Advertising and consumer products are, for Barthes, prime examples of how ideology seeps into everyday life and disguises itself as common sense.
Even the earliest soap and detergent advertising referred to a mythical triad of purity, science, and virtue. In all these cases, the artificial and cultural is presented as true nature – thereby stabilising social power relations.
The Pathologisation of the Natural as Myth
And especially in the area of body care and hygiene, Barthes’ approach becomes particularly clear: advertising for deodorants, soaps, or intimate care products constructs the unspoken claim that natural bodily functions such as sweating, odour or excretions are not only unaesthetic, but socially dangerous and morally questionable. The solution is provided at the same time: the product that promises “freshness”, “purity” and “self-confidence”.
Barthes would argue: here, a socially constructed problem (body odour as a flaw) is presented as natural to stimulate consumption and reinforce existing norms. Advertising naturalises the fear of one’s own body and makes it a prerequisite for social belonging.
The Genital Anxiety Market
In the age of whole-body deodorants, the body – and especially the intimate area – is declared a permanent problem zone. Advertising, influencers and medical-sounding language pathologise natural odours and secretions. The message: those who are not “fresh everywhere” risk social exclusion, shame, and loss of love.
Barthes would identify the myths in the advertising language and images:
“Freshness” becomes a universal value,
“Odourlessness” a prerequisite for acceptance,
“Whole-body care” a duty for modern subjects.
Foucault would show how these myths are embedded in a dispositif:
Medical experts, influencers, social media and product innovations work together to establish and monitor new norms.
Consumers become subjects who monitor, discipline and optimise themselves – not out of compulsion, but out of internalised fear of not being enough.
Pathologisation as a Strategy of Power
The pathologisation of natural bodily functions is not a random side effect, but a deliberate mechanism of disciplining and monetisation:
What was once considered normal is declared a “problem” in need of a solution – and this solution is always for sale.
Insecurity is not eliminated, but perpetuated: with every new product, a new deficit arises that needs to be addressed.
Barthes and Foucault together make visible how the market for whole-body deodorants not only sells products, but produces and stabilises subjectivities, norms, and power relations.
The Invisible Power of Myths in Everyday Life
In the age of whole-body deodorants, the body is not only cleansed, but becomes a permanent project of self-optimisation and self-monitoring. Fear of one’s own smell is not an individual problem, but a socially produced myth – and a lucrative market. We accept these myths as self-evident, thereby becoming willing subjects of the consumer society.
Barthes’ myth analysis and Foucault’s dispositif theory together reveal how, in the late-capitalist genital-fear market, natural bodily functions are pathologised, insecurities are created, and new compulsions to consume are established – all under the guise of self-care, hygiene, and social acceptance.
Influencers and Social Media: The New Instances of Shame
Where once parents, school or church were the instances of discipline, today influencers and social media take on this role? They set new, often unattainable standards for bodies, hygiene, and self-presentation. The constant visibility and comparability online intensify the feeling of never being “enough” – and drive the consumption of ever more products.
The logic is perfidious: those who cannot keep up risk social exclusion. Those who do keep up remain in deficit – because the ideal is always shifting further away.
Invisible Discipline: How Marketing Creates and Exploits Insecurity
The industry has long recognised that insecurity is a lucrative market. Marketing strategies deliberately create new “problems” – from armpits to feet to buttocks – and offer the appropriate solution at the same time. The result: a never-ending cycle of shame, self-optimisation and consumption, which not only burdens the wallet but also self-esteem.
Quiet Resistance: Reclaiming the Body
But there are counter-movements: body positivity, minimalism, “no-poo” movements and critical media literacy call for us to regard our bodies as something natural and valuable – beyond perfection and consumption. Accepting one’s bodily functions, allowing for flaws, and critically questioning marketing messages may today be the most radical acts of self-determination.
Stench as Resistance? The Limits of Protest in the Age of Consumption and Symbolism
The idea that body odour or “stench” today could serve as a form of resistance against social control and hyper-consumption is ultimately an illusion. In a society where even deviation and non-conformity are immediately appropriated as style, subculture or marketing niche, “stench” loses its subversive power. It is not understood as protest, but as social failure, as a sign of lacking distinction and cultural capital – very much in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu, who showed how subtle differences in habitus mark social belonging and exclusion.
It is precisely the ability to acquire the “correct” forms of body care, scent, and appearance that draws social boundaries and enables distinction. Those who disregard these codes risk not resistance, but exclusion and stigmatisation. Stench thus does not become a symbol of resistance, but a marker of social marginalisation.
In the age of consumer society and hyperreality, even the attempt to protest through “naturalness” or “unkemptness” comes to nothing. Because everything – even the seemingly resistant – becomes a sign that is fed into the cycle of meanings and the logic of consumption. Body odour as an “authentic” signal loses its meaning because authenticity itself has become a commodity and an image.
Conclusion: Being Human is Not a Flaw
The history of body care is a history of discipline – from bourgeois virtue, to medical pathologisation, to neoliberal self-optimisation.
Whole-body deodorants are not a sign of progress, but a symptom of a society that declares the natural to be a problem to profit from it.
Perhaps human odour is not a flaw, but a right. A sign of vitality and individuality. The fantasy of “permanent freshness” only creates new anxieties and dependencies. Accepting oneself – with everything that entails – is true freedom. And perhaps the healthiest form of self-care there is.
True resistance against social control and hyper-consumption therefore does not lie in consciously rejecting the social consensus on hygiene. Rather, it lies in the critical reflection and deliberate appropriation of one’s own physicality – beyond the pressure to conform and the compulsion to consume.
The challenge is not to define oneself by external markers, but by conscious distance from the rules of the consumer society. In a world where everything becomes a sign, perhaps invisibility, not playing the game, is the subtlest form of protest.
RELATED ARTICLES:
Questioning self-help critically: the truth about self-optimisation myths and success
Me-lennials and their psychology: narcissism, selfies and social media – self-obsessed?