this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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They would have made a fortune on placing these in high school locker rooms.
What's funny is that you (and I) associate cologne with high school, but adult men were spraying that shit on themselves from like the 50s to the 90s. Then Axe Body Spray took over the youth market, and a lot of boys coming of age started reevaluating their life choices. Smoking in public also became rare, and generally people started smelling better without the need for fragrances.
I can't remember the last time I used cologne or smelled it on another person. But my laundry, shampoo, body wash, and beard balm all have their own fragrances.
I got a pretty bad fragrance allergy a few years ago and would break out in a big rash if I got them near my face. I think things are improving these days, but I was shocked at how much more sharp my sense of smell is now that almost nothing has artificial fragrances (save for deodorant, and some body soap that is like, made from ground up herbs). It's like someone whose senses are enhanced by losing one or more of them.
One of my siblings brought clothes laundered at his university, and the detergent was so cloying that I could taste it in the air, lol. Five years ago, I would barely have noticed it, because there was so much "noise" from the ~18 different scented products we all used on our bodies, clothes, air fresheners and bedding.
Even with fragrance-free stuff, everything still smells good. Just like cloth though, instead of artificial lemon or that blue-flavored dish soap. On the latter one, I've begun to taste it on dishes. I've since switched to fragrance-free dish soap because of that, lol.
Damned synaesthetics.
This has got to be a big part of it in two different ways: smokers wanting to cover their own stink, but also smokers having reduced sense of smell!
Nowadays I feel like people have nuked their sense of smell with fragrance generally. I trip to anyone else's house and I get headaches from the amount of automatic fragrance despensers, reed diffusers, essential oil atomisers, scented this that and the other on top of bombing themselves with strongly scented body products and sprays.
Don't forget covid, and long covid effects.
After having covid three times (and losing my sense of smell from it twice), I'm not sure if my sense of smell ever got back to normal.
In my experience, it's fortunately not too common. I disliked potpourri (headaches...) but the essential oil diffusers are so much worse.
I feel like people have scented things for as long as I can remember, but maybe how we're doing it has changed.
I personally like it when my home smells like "nothing," even when I come back to it after being gone a while. Smelling changes in humidity, level of dust, or anything else is pretty great.
Where are you if you don’t mind me asking? I feel like I’m not running into this on the US west coast
It feels mostly regional to me. The vibe I get is that Americans especially don’t really care for fragrances while here in the Middle East it’s a goddamn stereotype of us Lebanese men that we wear too much cologne.
(Or as I have grown up to understand it, just about enough cologne)
once lost a game of hide and seek cause the seeker could smell my cologne (i do in fact have some lebanese blood in me)
Good point, I'm only speaking from my experience in the Mid-Atlantic US region. It's probably different everywhere.
Very regional. I live in Colombia and literally every single person wears perfume or cologne. I’m the odd one for not wearing scents like that.
God, I wish that was me. For whatever reason a bunch of people here (but especially people 50 and up as you noted) wear heavy perfume/cologne. I’ll admit to being moderately smell-sensitive, but sometimes even walking 15 or 20 feet behind them will leave me STILL smelling it!
Sorry, that was my wife and I.
I find it's very regional inside of the US. It depends on a few factors, but age, prominance, and locality to a "night-life" tends to be the primary ones I find. I live very rural in Southern US, and it's hit or miss if I ever smell a guy with cologne, but when I do it's the guy I know goes out a lot and lives in-town or much older.
They would have been exclusively filled with axe though.