Secret: Invisible Solid Powder Fresh Antiperspirant/Deodorant, 2.6 ozIt looks and smells innocent enough, with its pale pink label and delicate scent. But that’s the whole problem.

Yes, this is a post about antiperspirant. Specifically, about an antiperspirant scent that sends a particularly creepy mixed message: I’m a woman, but I smell like a baby. I’m talking about “Powder Fresh.”

I wasn’t aware of the unsettling implications of such products until I was college-age. Sure, I’d seen the labels—every major brand offers some version of Powder Fresh, and the store brands follow suit—but I didn’t realize they were referencing baby powder until I picked up a package on a whim and sniffed it. Immediately I remembered Jean Kilbourne’s film Still Killing Us Softly, a documentary about the damaging effects of sexist images in advertising. I saw it at BYU, 20 years ago, and I can still recall the shock of realizing just how extensively, consistently, and blatantly advertising degrades women.

Of course, anyone in our society who’s been awake at some point over the past few decades already knows that the media hypersexualizes everything from toothpaste to cars to jeans, because sex sells. Female sexuality, in particular. It’s bad enough when advertising sends the message that sex appeal is a woman’s most valuable commodity, but it’s not just your garden-variety curvy-girl appeal that laced the collections of ads that Kilbourne highlighted. These images quite literally objectified, dismembered, and even assaulted women in sexually charged ways—and they were all featured in magazines you’d find in your doctor’s office.

Yet even those ads weren’t the worst of the bunch. Without a doubt, the most despicable images were those which infantilized their subjects, suggesting that it’s sexy to be like a little girl.  At one point Kilbourne showed an ad I’d seen for myself in mainstream publications, multiple times:  a young girl (very young, maybe four or five) dressed provocatively and wearing a full face of makeup.  As soon as her image hit the screen, everyone in the room gasped. And thanks to YouTube, you can see for yourself. Kilbourne revisits the image (causing another round of gasps) as well as the larger issue of the “sexy little girl” phenomenon  in this segment of her latest presentation, in which she explains the impossible ideal (actually, one of the many) that contemporary women face:

For years now, for decades, we’ve been getting this message that we’re supposed to be both innocent and sexy, virginal and experienced all at once. Now as many of us know, this is tricky (audience laughs). And it’s also insulting, because the real message is don’t grow up, don’t become a mature sexual being; stay like a little girl.

Outrageous, right? But it’s such an acceptable message in our culture that we barely even notice it, until someone like Kilbourne points it out. These days, whenever I see Powder Fresh products on the shelves at my local Target, I imagine that gasp-inducing ad and think about how sick and wrong it is to make little girls seem like grown women, and grown women seem like little girls. Do we really think we’re doing ourselves a favor by smelling like baby toiletries?

I feel even more bewildered when I read stuff like this fascinating review of Dry Idea Powder Fresh roll-on (which includes a helpful tutorial for the inexperienced):

I haven’t used a roll on deodorant in years so was excited about using this one. I unscrewed the cap and saw the opaque ball at the top of the bottle. I held the bottle with my right hand, and it fitted perfectly into the weird shape of the bottle. I then moved the ball area over the underneath of my armpits. I then did the same with my left hand. I immediately could smell the ‘powder fresh’ fragrance, which was very pleasing. It always reminds me of freshly bathed babies.

And she’s not the only one. Online I scrolled through a couple dozen gushing reviews of powder fresh antiperspirants extolling the “wonderful feminine, yet clean, scent.” Yes, I’m a fan of clean. But clean like unto a dewy-faced infant?

I admit that even though I despise the child-woman beauty paradigm, I still perpetuate it some ways. Most, if not all, of us do. Take rituals such as leg shaving. I opted out for a couple of years back in the nineties, but nowadays I regularly pursue that silky-smooth I’m-two-years-old-again feeling via Gillette.

And heck, the antiperspirant I love most has an Asian pear scent. There’s plenty we could say about the potentially damaging consequences of the woman-as-juicy-fruit motif.

But at least this fruit is fully ripe.

Related posts:

  1. Promises, promises
  2. On A Scale
  3. Modest About Modesty


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