When Dahlia Lithwick’s 8- and 10-year-old sons learned about Axe body spray and deodorant from their 13-year-old cousin, they started applying heavy doses regularly, thus making the house smell like teen spirit fulltime. So Lithwick — though repelled by the company’s commercials — decided to see what effect the Axe products have on others by wearing them herself for seven days:
The truth is, my experiment in smelling like an adolescent male for a week had only two really profound consequences. One, I really did grow to love the fragrance. And no. I don’t want to talk about it. But two, and distinctly more important, both my kids were so embarrassed that they stopped using it within days of my initiating the experiment. Smell you later, Axe. It turns out that there is some Freudian window in which smelling like your mom is so beyond contemplating that they wordlessly gave it up altogether.
As for the Axe commercials, they’re nothing more than a modern-day, more-risque version of the ads that ran in the 1970s for a long-forgotten line of men’s products called Hai Karate…