When I was growing up it was not uncommon to be bowled over by the scent of the unwashed and certainly the undeoderized.  I know for positive sure that I had it easy in my youth because at least the sweat smell was a "clean" sweat smell; what I mean is that people bathed on a frequent basis then (more than just Saturday night) even if they hadn't yet stumbled on odorono. 

I have this vivid memory of Sister Mechtilde with her corpulent body and buck teeth lecturing us in 7th grade about how bad the room smelled by the afternoon in warm weather and that we needed to not only "wash" but use a "little bit of deoderant".  LOL

Mechtilde was an odd one that is for sure but she surely had a point. 

Let's meet an olfactory sensation:

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It is difficult to imagine a world without something as simple as deodorant.

In fact, the first underarm deodorant product did not come into the marketplace until 1907.  It was invented by a surgeon in Cincinnati.  He called it Odorono.  By 1919, advertising for Odorono was already well established.

In that same year, Jim Young wrote an ad for the brand that has become a classic.

The headline read, "Within the Curve of a Woman's Arm."

The headline for the Odorono ad, cleverly avoided mentioning the armpit.  The ad itself also drew women in with copy stating that, "persons troubled with perspiration odour seldom can detect it themselves."

Here is the original copy Young wrote:

Within the curve of a woman's arm.

A frank discussion of a subject too often avoided.

A woman's arm!  Poets have sung its grace; artists have painted its beauty. It should be the daintiest, sweetest thing in the world. And yet, unfortunately, it isn't, always. There's an old offender in this quest for perfect daintiness - an offender of which we ourselves may be ever so unconscious, but which is just as truly present.

Shall we discuss it frankly?

Many a woman who says, "No, I am never annoyed by perspiration," does not know the facts...

Of course, we aren't to blame because nature has made us so that the perspiration glands under the arms are more active than anywhere else. Nor are we to blame because... have made normal evaporation there impossible.

Would you be absolutely sure of your daintiness?  It’s the chemicals of the body, not uncleanliness, that cause odour. And even though there is no active perspiration - no apparent moisture - there may be under the arms an odour...

Fastidious women who want to be absolutely sure of their daintiness have found that they could not trust to their own consciousness; they have felt the need of a toilet water which would ensure them against any of this kind of underarm unpleasantness, either moisture or odour.

To meet this need, a physician formulated Odorono - a perfectly harmless and delightful toilet water...

The Odorono campaign ran originally in the Ladies Home Journal.

During that time the Journal and the American Medical Association warned that Odorono could be dangerous. Women, who saw the product and its advertising as being offensive and disgusting, cancelled their subscriptions to the Ladies Home Journal.

Yet amazingly, even with over 200 cancellations, Odorono sales went up by an incredible 112% in that year.

He took a taboo subject and created advertising that was cutting edge - by simply using the right words.  And, by being brave too…

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There was the strategy followed, for example, by Odo-Ro-No, a deodorant for women, which in 1919 became the first company to use the term “B.O.” (meaning, but not saying, “body odor”) in an advertisement. Previously, deodorant ads had confined their pitch to suggestions about how they would foster daintiness and sweetness. But Odo-Ro-No took a much more direct approach, telling potential customers to take the “Armhole Odor Test” and warning them that social success hinged on eliminating B.O.