Anyone who has ever caught a whiff of Axe body-spray knows that only adolescent males trying too hard to get laid will buy that stuff. But what would happen if a forty-something woman decided she wanted to walk around smelling like a 13-year-old boy for a week?



Slate's Dahlia Lithwick decided to find this out for herself. This involved committing to dousing every inch of her body using only Axe products (shampoo, body-wash, and conditioner). Luckily, she managed to get a few tips from an actual teenager: 
My 13-year-old nephew advised me to steer clear of the “nasty grossness”-scented products. All of the Axe scents, to the extent that they differ, seem to be mostly named after manly activities like mining or soldering. Ultimately I opted for Cool Metal (see: mining and soldering) in the body wash, shampoo, and spray formulations.
So what happened during her odd experiment? As Dahlia explains:
Mostly nothing. As it turns out, ours is a culture in which, as a general principle, people don’t really feel comfortable commenting on your scent, even when it is so powerful as to be causing climate change. So even if you apply Axe before a funeral—as I did—nobody is going to grab you by the arm and ask you to please leave. I wore a heavy coating of it to a dinner party one night. Eliciting no response, even when I started helpfully jamming my neck into the other guests’ noses, I did learn from several mothers that the Wall of Axe (a naturally occurring phenomenon in which eight or more teen boys reapply Axe after phys ed, then stand in the stairwell together) has become so bad at some local schools that it’s been banned altogether. Another guest described a perennial teen rite of passage—the agony of spraying Axe down your own pants for the first time.

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 contemplation that they wordlessly gave it up altogether. Indeed, they have both moved quite deliberately backward to the Suave Baby Shampoo, which is precisely where I would like them to stay, at least for a while. And thus, drenched in the smell of rusting metal, we all take two steps away from the Axe years, the entitled years, the boom-chicka-wah-wah years, that are bearing down upon us too quickly.
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