Spring is finally here. The flowers are blooming, the bees are trying

to have sex with them and the birds are chirping. But unfortunately, a

rise in temperature brings on a new problem: a rise in body odor.     

If

you’re anything like me, you smell. Men create a steady supply of body

odor that, if unchecked, will threaten to suffocate the people you call

friends. If advertising for men’s deodorant is to be believed, the

simple act of raising your arm to wave hello, hail a taxi, or shield

your face from the sun can lay waste to an entire crowd of people.

This

is serious business and for that reason I can walk you through the

process of creating your very own spray deodorant, which you can and

should carry on you at all times. Then

I’ll explain the process of

marketing it to the general public to ensure that society has easy

access to these products to stem the bodily funk epidemic. It’s

profitable, and it’s entirely necessary to our survival as a species.

The

first and most important step of creating a deodorant is to choose the

name. Spray deodorants almost always have the name of something that

can hurt you. Axe and Edge are prime examples. This is not just to try

and make personal hygiene sound more like medieval combat; there is a

reason for this.

The first spray deodorant was actually an

accident, like penicillin, the potato chip, or LSD. Legend has it that

a Dutch weapons manufacturer was attempting to make pepper spray, or

mace, to be used defensively against muggers. Needless to say, some

ingredients got mixed up, and the end result was not a blinding agent,

but a powerfully fragrant spray. Some quick PR maneuvering changed the

mace into Axe, and the rest is history.

However, it is interesting to note that if you spray Axe directly into your eyes, it has a similar effect as mace.

The

next thing you need to come up with is a name for the fragrances

themselves. Now, unlike women’s deodorants, men’s deodorants aren’t

named after actual smells so much as they are named after forces of

nature. Axe body sprays come in varieties with names like Phoenix,

Dimension and Gravity. Not many people can describe the smell of

gravity, but

I’ll be damned if the odorologists at Axe haven’t

managed to bottle it. Right Guard and Degree have smells named after

temperatures, such as Arctic Chill, Fresh Blast and Silver Ice. Both

brands even have a scent simply called, “Extreme.”

What does

Extreme smell like? Don’t think about it for more than a few moments,

or your brain may start to leak out of your ears. It’s one of those

incomprehensible things, like “If a tree falls in the woods, does it

make a sound?” or “Why do people keep going to see M.

Night Shyamalan movies?”

The

trick here is to keep people standing in front of the deodorant display

for as long as possible. A man could conceivably spend hours in a drug

store wondering, “Which natural disaster do I want to smell like:

Tsunami or Avalanche?” After several hours of contemplating that

fallacy, most people will break down into tears and buy everything in

front of them.

Finally, the marketing. It’s not good enough to

tell people that your deodorant covers up the natural reek that they

create, you need to sell it as a device to attract women. In many

commercials, otherwise completely unattractive men with gelled hair

apply body sprays to their person, and then instantly get tackled by

the first supermodel they come into contact with. In extreme cases, it

seems to functions as a long-range, multi-personnel date-rape drug. Tag

body spray’s implicit suggestion is, “Tag Body Spray: It will make hot

women molest you.”

It’s important to stress two things here:

that this deodorant makes you desirable only to attractive women, and

that it is super manly. Old Spice learned this first lesson when they

made an ad with the tagline, “Old Spice: It attracts homely girls and

grandmas, too!”

As for the second point, if anyone doubts the

manliness of the product, be sure to put it in a phallus shaped can, as

most body sprays are.

There you have it. You have done humanity

a favor by producing a potentially lifesaving deodorant. All that’s

left to do is make the deodorant. And since there is no combination of

things that can accurately simulate the aroma of “Cool Instinct,” any

series of ingredients put into an aerosol can work provided that they

both: (1) smell strong enough to cover up your BO and (2) don’t cause

instant paralysis.