Resist the marketing.

You may have noticed that the people who use body spray are slow-witted knuckle-draggers. This is not a coincidence, because these are the people that this garbage is marketed toward.

They think that they are so cute for spraying this stuff all over themselves, as the rest of us are left gasping for air and actually tasting cheap perfume on our tongues as we attempt to breathe through our mouths in places such as shopping malls, trying to find bread that isn’t ruined by the fragrance in grocery stores, and filling up our cars with caution at gas stations as their body sprays pose a greater ignition hazard than the gasoline itself. In some cases, you can literally smell them coming from hundreds of feet away.

As amazing and tragic as it may sound, they have no idea. The reason for this is due to a phenomenon known as olfactory fatigue.

Olfactory fatigue is what’s happening when you become so used to a smell that you lose the ability to notice it. When someone uses a new kind of body spray on themselves, usually they stop with a brief spray. But after about a week of wearing it, they’ll start to go heavy on it, thinking that the spray is somehow getting weaker.

To make matters worse for the rest of us, body spray manufacturers encourage douchebags everywhere to nearly bathe in the stuff. One brand even encourages users to spray it on their clothes. Some canisters even have a diagram showing a person spraying it all around them. Isn’t that a marketer’s dream come true? Consumers that grossly over-apply their products so they’ll head back out to the store to buy more of it.

Using body spray comes off as a cheap substitution for taking a shower. Stop telling the world that you take cheap shortcuts and instead practice proper hygiene. I know that some that use body spray will attempt to justify it by saying “But Raizen, I do shower.” Whether you shower or not, the perception that people who use body sprays don’t shower still exists. If you apply body sprays after showering, people will think you didn’t shower. Stop defeating your own endeavors.

And while you’re at it, throw out all your body sprays. You don’t need them, marketers convinced you that you do. Prove to them and everyone else that you can think for yourself by throwing out all your body spray, and don’t buy any more.

Further reading: When I got into writing this article, I did some research, and was surprised at just how dangerous body fragrances can be. For one thing, there’s the fact that fragrances used in body sprays have been linked to a decrease in virility and fertility, which I’m pretty sure is the exact opposite of what the people that use these things are going for.

Then there’s the fact that there are thousands of ingredients that give body fragrances their smell, some of which are carcinogenic and can cause organ damage. These ingredients don’t have to be individually listed on labels, either. They can simply be referred to as “parfum” or “fragrance”.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find cancer sexy.

They can even be the cause of your inexplicable headaches, as explained by this article written from a more personal perspective. Then there’s the obvious problem with chemical sensitivity, which may be less of an allergy in the traditional sense and more of a survival mechanism that your body uses to inform you that something is not right with your environment.

When it comes right down to it, humans are not supposed to smell like aerosol and diluted industrial waste. If you want to smell like a field of flowers, go buy some flowers. What’s that? That’s expensive? Yeah, it is. But the things that are worth having sometimes are. But as for those cheap cans of body fragrance, just get rid of it.