让埃德娜•墨菲走运的是，1912夏天在亚特兰大城举办的一次博览会上，与会者们热得汗流浃背。
两年来，这名来自辛辛那提的高中生一直在推销一种止汗剂却没成功。她的父亲，一名外科医生，发明了这种止汗剂，以使他在手术室时手上没有汗。
墨菲在她自己的腋下试用了其父发明的这种液体，发现它能除湿去味，就给这种除汗剂起名叫做Odorono（分开的英文意思是：怪味？噢，没有！）并决定开一家公司。
但是一开始这位年轻企业家的生意并不顺利。从祖父那里借来150美元之后，她租了间办公室，但很快她不得不把活儿挪到了父母的地下室去，因为她的挨家挨户销售团队没能赚到足够的收入。墨菲与药店零售商接触过，他们要么拒绝批进这种产品，要么把卖不动的Odorono又退回来了。
在20世纪初体香剂和止汗剂还是个比较新鲜的发明。首个体香剂——它能杀死制造体味的细菌——叫做Mum,于1888年注册了商标，而首个止汗剂——它既能阻止汗液产生也能阻止细菌生长——叫做Everdry，1903年投放市场。
但是许多人——如果他们听说过止汗化妆品的话——认为它没有使用的必要、不健康或者两者兼而有之。
“这时基本上还是维多利亚式的社会，”日本东京早稻田大学研究20世纪美国广告史的人类学家朱莉安娜•斯沃卡解释道。“没人讨论在公共场合出汗或者其他生理功能方面的事情。”
相反，绝大多数的人对付体味的办法是经常冲洗然后用香水遮盖出现的任何臭味。那些担心汗液渗透衣服的人则带上护衣汗垫，即一种棉质或橡胶材质的护垫，放在腋窝处用来保护衣物面料不受天热时大量汗液的浸染。
然而100年以后，体香剂和止汗剂产业价值高达180亿美元。这个从一项小众发明到一个热卖产品的嬗变过程很大程度上始于墨菲，而她的事业最初险些失败。
根据存放在杜克大学的Odorono公司档案记载，埃德娜•墨菲在1912年亚特兰大城博览会上的Odorono摊位最初仿佛是对这个产品的又一次打击。
"博览会上的演示者一开始任何Odorono的产品都卖不掉，打电话（给墨菲叫她送点）冷霜来弥补开支，"一份Odorono公司的历史记录上写道。
好在博览会持续整个夏天，当参观者被热浪烤蔫、汗水湿透的衣服时，他们对Odorono突然产生了兴趣。一下子墨菲就拥有了来自全国的客户，那年夏天在促销上花费就达到了30万美元。
事实上墨菲的公司还需要大力推进市场营销。虽然当时的Odorono能有效抑制出汗长达3天——比现在同类产品更持久——但其有效成分氯化铝必须在于酸性环境下才能保持活性。（早期的止汗剂的问题皆是如此，几十年后化学家才想出不用酸性环境保存氯化铝活性的配方。）
酸性溶剂意味着Odorono可能会刺激腋下敏感皮肤，还会腐蚀衣物。除了造成身体伤害之外还会带来不便，因为这种止汗剂是红色的，有时候会掉色染在衣服上——如果酸没有一下子把衣服腐蚀掉的话。根据公司的档案，当时客户投诉说该产品会引起腋下皮肤烧灼、红肿，此外它还毁掉了很多高档礼服，其中包括一位女士的婚纱。
为避免以上问题，Odorono的用户被建议在使用前避免剃腋毛，此外在晚上睡觉前就涂上Odorono，留出足够长的时间让这种止汗剂彻底干透。
（那个时代的体香剂由于没有使用含酸配方而不存在同样的问题，但是许多止汗剂，诸如Odorono的主要竞争者Mum，是以膏状出售的，使用者得把它涂抹到腋下——很多使用者不喜欢这个用法，并且这会在衣服上留下黏糊糊油腻的残留物。此外，有的顾客抱怨说Mum的早期配方有股奇特的怪味。）
墨菲决定雇佣纽约的广告公司J.WalterThompson，该公司派出广告文案员詹姆斯·杨负责这个项目。杨1912年被雇用开办该公司在辛辛那提的办事处，而这正是墨菲生活的地方。
杨过去的工作是上门推销《圣经》。他获得高中文凭但没有经过任何广告业训练。1912年通过儿时肯塔基州朋友的关系获得JWT广告文案员的工作。他的这个朋友当时正在和斯坦利•瑞丝谈恋爱，后者当时是JWT公司的一个经理并最终成了这家广告公司的老板。不过借助Odorono这块跳板，杨后来成为20世纪最伟大的广告文案策划人。
杨最初的营销重点是让消费者们改变“使用止汗剂抑制毛孔出汗是不健康的”的传统观念。广告指出Odorono(偶尔写做Odo-ro-no)是一位医生研制的，并说明“出汗过量”是一种令人难堪的轻微生理病态，需要药物治疗。
仅仅在一年时间里，Odorono的销量就猛增到6.5万美元，这种止汗剂通过船运远销到英国和古巴。可是短短几年之后销量下滑，到1919年杨感觉有压力了，如果不做点什么的话可能会丢掉Odorono这份合同。
而这正是杨更趋激进并扬名立万的时刻。这家广告公司针对止汗剂进行了一次上门调查，结果显示“几乎所有女性都知道Odorono这种产品，大约有1/3的人使用过，不过还有2/3的人认为自己不需要。”斯沃卡说。
杨意识到认为要提高销量不是让潜在的客户知道这种止汗方法的存在那么简单，而是让剩下2/3的目标客户相信，出汗是令人非常尴尬的。
杨决定把当众出汗形容成一种严重社交失礼，周围的人不会直接告诉你，却会愉快地在私下议论，这将影响你的人际关系。
他1919年在杂志《女士家庭期刊》上刊登的广告没有拐弯抹角。画面是一个男人和女人的亲密浪漫的场面，上面的大标题是：“在女性手臂的曲线下。对我们太过经常回避的一个话题的坦率讨论。”
接下来还有一段诗一般的广告文案，杨继续写道：
“女人的手臂！诗人曾歌颂过，伟大的画家曾临摹过，那应是世上最甜美、最圣洁的。不过很可惜，事实并非总是这样”。
广告继续解释说女人可能因为出汗有体味、招致厌恶，而她们自己往往甚至不清楚。这个广告的关键信息显而易见：如果你想留住身边的男人，最好不要有汗味。
这则广告在1919年引发美国的社会震动，那是提到体液还不太文明的年代。大约200名《女士家庭期刊》杂志的读者认为被广告“侮辱”，愤然取消订阅，斯沃卡说。杨本身也遭遇困境，在回忆录里他写道，广告刊登后在他的社交圈里，女性朋友都疏远、甚至不跟他说话，JWT的一个同事半开玩笑说他“侮辱了所有美国女性”。可是这个策略果真奏效了，根据JWT的档案，第二年Odorono的销量跃升112%，达到41.7万美元。
到1927年的时候，墨菲见证自己公司的年销量突破100万美元，1929年她把公司卖给NorthamWarren，著名指甲油产品Cutex的生产商，NorthamWarren还是继续雇佣JWT公司和杨推广这种止汗剂。
杨利用女性缺乏安全感的策略获得的巨大经济成功，很容易被竞争者模仿。很快其他的体香剂和止汗剂生产商也模仿Odorono所谓的“谣言广告”，吓唬女性购买止汗产品。（在10年到20年以后，同样策略使用在男性身上，说服他们购买体香剂和止汗剂。）
如果说1919年的广告在当时看似很极端，那么到30年代，连剩下的最后一点隐晦都没有了。当年Odorono的主打广告描绘一个不使用止汗剂的女人，她悲伤却长得标致，标题是《美丽却可悲：她从不知道长久维持吸引力的第一要旨！
或者看看Mum在1937年推出的广告里对一个不使用体香剂的虚构女子这样写道：
“你是一个漂亮女孩，玛丽，很多事情上你很聪明，只是对你自己有一点愚蠢。你想有浪漫时光，但是从来遇不到。一个又一个夜晚，你独坐闺房。你遇到过几个很棒的男人，他们一开始对你很有兴趣。可是把你带出去一次，之后就不了了之。这世界上有那么多漂亮的玛丽，却从不知道她们自己孤独的真正原因。在这个摩登年代，女孩在腋下带着令人反胃的味道，衣服上有汗渍有违反女性（或男性）的社交准则。这个错误带来的惩罚从不落空———不受欢迎。”
在Mum的广告里如此直接提到男人和女人的关系，代表着这类公司开始尝试性地向男性推销产品。
在20世纪开始的时候体味对男人似乎不是问题，因为这代表男性性感，正在撰写其关于将体香剂和止汗剂推销给男性的论文的奥本大学历史学博士生卡瑞•卡斯提尔解释到。可是很快这些公司发现市场还有一半没有使用他们的产品。
Odorno、Mum和其他产品早期的广告文案“开始在以女性为目标的广告的最后面不怀好意地加了一条评论：“女人，不要让你们的男人带着体味上街，给自己买的时候记得买两个。”卡斯提尔说。
1928年，JWT公司针对男性进行的一项调查体现出那个时代男性对止汗剂产品的态度。
“我觉得用体香剂来增加男性魅力是变态”，一个被调查者说。”我喜欢沐浴后会涂抹纯粮食酒，但不经常这样做。“另一个被访者声称。
可是潜在的利润不能因为每个人而丢失：“我觉得男性体香剂市场还是块处女地。广告文案总是直接针对女性，为什么不在知名男性杂志上发动一场信息宣传运动呢？”“如果像Mennen（译注：一男性用品知名公司品牌）这样的公司推出一款体香剂的话，男人们就会买的。现有的产品与女性有联系，大多数男人羞于使用。”
根据卡斯提尔的研究，1935年第一款针对男性的止汗剂产品上市，黑色瓶子包装带来现代感，品名是Top-Flite，就像时髦而却丝毫不相关的高尔夫球品牌一样。与为女士设计的产品一样，男性止汗剂的营销策略也是捕捉他们的不安全感：时值30年代大萧条，男性普遍担心失去工作。广告的焦点是“在办公室环境下出汗过多的尴尬”，会带来“非专业感”，可能“毁掉你的工作和事业”。
“大萧条转变了男性的角色，”卡斯提尔说。“以前的农民和工人，因为失去工作也失去了男性的骄傲，但是止汗剂能瞬间恢复这种男性骄傲——至少广告是这么说的。”这样一来，止汗剂已经摆脱女性爽身粉的出身。
举个例子来说，1940年出现了一种装在瓷瓶里的体香剂Sea-Forth，看上去好像一瓶威士忌，“因为该公司的老板阿尔弗莱迪•麦克凯威说他‘想不出还有什么比威士忌更能体现男性魅力，’”卡斯提尔说。
就这样，止汗剂成为北美男人和女人每天个人清洁的必需品，市场上像潮水般出现类似产品，诸如 Shun, Hush, Veto, NonSpi, Dainty Dry, Slick, Perstop 、 Zip等品牌层出不穷。随着更多公司投资与研发此类产品，在1940年到1970年之间出现一系列技术进步，诸如贴片、滚抹（用圆珠笔做基础）、喷雾剂和气溶胶等等，以及大量更有效、有时更安全的配方。
当然，爱唱反调的人们会说，就算没有墨菲和杨，西方社会最终还是会发展到对止汗剂和体香产品严重依赖，但是他们两个在美国人民的胳肢窝下面肯定留下了浓墨重彩的印记，就好像1912年夏天新泽西州的酷暑那样。
Lucky for Edna Murphey, people attending an exposition in Atlantic City during the summer of 1912 got hot and sweaty.
For two years, the high school student from Cincinnati had been trying unsuccessfully to promote an antiperspirant that her father, a surgeon, had invented to keep his hands sweat-free in the operating room.
Murphey had tried her dad’s liquid antiperspirant in her armpits, discovered that it thwarted wetness and smell, named the antiperspirant Odorono (Odor? Oh No!) and decided to start a company.
But business didn’t go well—initially—for this young entrepreneur. Borrowing $150 from her grandfather, she rented an office workshop but then had to move the operation to her parents’ basement because her team of door-to-door saleswomen didn’t pull in enough revenue. Murphey approached drugstore retailers who either refused to stock the product or who returned the bottles of Odorono back, unsold.
In the 1910s deodorants and antiperspirants were relatively new inventions. The first deodorant, which kills odor-producing bacteria, was called Mum and had been trademarked in 1888, while the first antiperspirant, which thwarts both sweat-production and bacterial growth, was called Everdry and launched in 1903.
But many people—if they had even heard of the anti-sweat toiletries—thought they were unnecessary, unhealthy or both.
“This was still very much a Victorian society,” explains Juliann Silvulka, a 20th-century historian of American advertising at Waseda Univesity in Tokyo, Japan. “Nobody talked about perspiration, or any other bodily functions in public.”
Instead, most people’s solution to body odor was to wash regularly and then to overwhelm any emerging stink with perfume. Those concerned about sweat percolating through clothing wore dress shields, cotton or rubber pads placed in armpit areas which protected fabric from the floods of perspiration on a hot day.
Yet 100 years later, the deodorant and antiperspirant industry is worth $18 billion. The transformation from niche invention to a blockbuster product was in part kick-started by Murphey, whose nascent business was nearly a failure.
According to Odorono company files at Duke University, Edna Murphey’s Odorono booth at the 1912 Atlantic City exposition initially appeared to be another bust for the product.
“The exhibition demonstrator could not sell any Odorono at first and wired back [to Murphey to send some] cold cream to cover expenses,” notes a company history of Odorono.
Luckily, the exposition lasted all summer. As attendees wilted in the heat and sweat through their clothing, interest in Odorono rose. Suddenly Murphey had customers across the country and $30,000 in sales to spend on promotion.
And in reality, Odorono needed some serious help in the marketing department.
Although the product stopped sweat for up to three days—longer-lasting than modern day antiperspirants—the Odorono’s active ingredient, aluminum chloride, had to be suspended in acid to remain effective. (This was the case for all early antiperspirants; it would take a few decades before chemists came up with a formulation that didn’t require an acid suspension.)
The acid solution meant Odorono could irritate sensitive armpit skin and damage clothing. Adding insult to injury, the antiperspirant was also red-colored, so it could also stain clothing—if the acid didn’t eat right through it first. According to company records, customers complained that the product caused burning and inflammation in armpits and that it ruined many a fancy outfit, including one woman’s wedding dress.
To avoid these problems, Odorono customers were advised to avoid shaving prior to use and to swab the product into armpits before bed, allowing time for the antiperspirant to dry thoroughly.
(Deodorants of the era didn’t have the problems with acid formulations, but many, such as Odorono’s main competitor, Mum, were sold as creams which users had to rub into their armpits—an application process many users did not like and which could leave sticky, greasy residues on clothing. In addition, some customers complained that Mum’s early formulation had a peculiar smell.)
Murphey decided to hire a New York advertising agency called J. Walter Thompson Company, who paired her with James Young, a copy writer hired in 1912 to launch the company’s Cincinnati office, where Murphey lived.
Young had once been a door-to-door Bible salesman. He had a high school diploma but no advertising training. He got the copywriter job in 1912 through a childhood friend from Kentucky, who was dating Stanley Resor, a JWT manager who would eventually lead the advertising company. Yet Young would become one of the most famous advertising copy writers of the 20th century, using Odorono as his launching pad.
Young’s early Odorono advertisements focused on trying to combat a commonly held belief that blocking perspiration was unhealthy. The copy pointed out that Odorono (occasionally written Odo-ro-no) had been developed by a doctor and it presented “excessive perspiration” as an embarrassing medical ailment in need of a remedy.
Within a year Odorono sales had jumped to $65,000 and the antiperspirant was being shipped as far as England and Cuba. But after a few years sales had flattened, and by 1919 Young was under pressure to do something different or lose the Odorono contract.
And that’s when Young went radical, and in doing so launched his own fame. A door-to-door survey conducted by the advertising company had revealed that “every woman knew of Odorono and about one-third used the product. But two thirds felt they had no need for [it],” Sivulka says.
Young realized that improving sales wasn’t a simple matter of making potential customers aware that a remedy for perspiration existed. It was about convincing two-thirds of the target population that sweating was a serious embarrassment.
Young decided to present perspiration as a social faux pas that nobody would directly tell you was responsible for your unpopularity, but which they were happy to gossip behind your back about.
His advertisement in a 1919 edition of the Ladies Home Journal didn’t beat around the bush. “Within the Curve of a Woman’s arm. A frank discussion of a subject too often avoided,” announced the headline above an image of an imminently romantic situation between a man and a woman.
Reading more like a lyrical public service announcement than an advert, Young continued:
A woman’s arm! Poets have sung of it, great artists have painted its beauty. It should be the daintiest, sweetest thing in the world. And yet, unfortunately, it’s isn’t always.
The advertisement goes on to explain that women may be stinky and offensive, and they might not even know it. The take-home message was clear: If you want to keep a man, you’d better not smell.
The advertisement caused shock waves in a 1919 society that still didn’t feel comfortable mentioning bodily fluids. Some 200 Ladies Home Journal readers were so insulted by the advertisement that they canceled their magazine subscription, Sivulka says.
In a memoir, Young notes that women in his social circle stopped speaking to him, while other JWT female copy writers told him “he had insulted every woman in America.” But the strategy worked. According to JWT archives, Odorono sales rose 112 percent to $417,000 in 1920, the following year.
By 1927, Murphey saw her company’s sales reach $1 million dollars. In 1929, she sold the company to Northam Warren, the makers of Cutex, who continued using the services of JWT and Young to promote the antiperspirant.
The financial success of Young’s strategy to exploit female insecurity was not lost on competitors. It didn’t take long before other deodorant and antiperspirant companies began to mimic Odorono’s so-called “whisper copy,” to scare women into buying anti-sweat products. (It would take another decade or two before the strategy would be used to get men to buy deodorants and antiperspirants.)
If the 1919 advertisement seemed extreme to some, by the mid 1930s, campaigns were substantially less subtle. “Beautiful but dumb. She has never learned the first rule of long lasting charm,” reads one 1939 Odorono headline, which depicts a morose yet attractive woman who does not wear the anti-sweat product.
Or consider the 1937 Mum advertisement that speaks to a fictitious woman who does not use deodorant:
You’re a pretty girl, Mary, and you’re smart about most things but you’re just a bit stupid about yourself. You love a good time—but you seldom have one. Evening after evening you sit at home alone. You’ve met several grand men who seemed interested at first. They took you out once—and that was that. There are so many pretty Marys in the world who never seem to sense the real reason for their aloneness. In this smart modern age, it’s against the code for a girl (or a man either) to carry the repellent odor of underarm perspiration on clothing and person. It’s a fault which never fails to carry its own punishment—unpopularity.
The reference to men in the Mum advertisement is a pretty quintessential example of the tentative steps taken by deodorant and antiperspirant companies to begin selling their anti-sweat products to men.
At the beginning of the 20th century, body odor was not considered a problem for men because it was a part of being masculine, explains Cari Casteel, a history doctoral student at Auburn University, who is writing her dissertation on the advertisement of deodorants and antiperspirants to men. “But then companies realized that 50 percent of the market was not using their products.”
Initially copy writers for Odorno, Mum and other products “began adding snarky comments at the end of advertisements targeted to women saying, ‘Women, it’s time to stop letting your men be smelly. When you buy, buy two,’” Casteel says.
A 1928 survey of JWT’s male employees is revealing about that era’s opinions of deodorants and antiperspirants.
“I consider a body deodorant for masculine use to be sissified,” notes one responder. “I like to rub my body in pure grain alcohol after a bath but do not do so regularly,” asserts another.
However the potential profit was not lost on everybody: “I feel there is a market for deodorants among men that is practically unscratched. The copy approach is always directed at women. Why not an intelligent campaign in a leading men’s magazine?”
“If someone like Mennen’s got out a deodorant, men would buy it. Present preparations have a feminine association most men only shy at.”
According to Casteels research, the first deodorant for men was launched in 1935, put in black bottle and called Top-Flite, like the modern, but unrelated golf ball brand.
As with the products for women, advertisers preyed on men’s insecurities: In the Great Depression of the 1930s men were worried about losing their job. Advertisements focused on the embarrassment of being stinky in the office, and how unprofessional grooming could foil your career, she says.
“The Depression shifted the roles of men,” Casteel says. “Men who had been farmers or laborers had lost their masculinity by losing their jobs. Top Flite offered a way to become masculine instantly—or so the advertisement said.” To do so, the products had to distance themselves from their origins as a female toiletry.
For example, Sea-Forth, a deodorant sold in ceramic whiskey jugs starting in the 1940s, “because the company owner Alfred McKelvy said he ‘couldn’t think of anything more manly than whiskey,’” Casteel says.
And so anti-sweat products became a part of America’s daily grooming routine for both men and women. A multitude of products flooded the marketplace, with names like, Shun, Hush, Veto, NonSpi, Dainty Dry, Slick, Perstop and Zip—to name just a few. With more companies invested in anti-sweat technology, the decades between 1940 and 1970 saw the development of new delivery systems, such as sticks, roll-ons (based on the ball-point pen), sprays and aerosols, as well as a bounty of newer, sometimes safer, formulations.
Naysayers might argue that western society would have eventually developed its dependence on deodorants and antiperspirants without Murphey and Young, but they certainly left their mark in the armpits of America, as did the heat of New Jersey’s summer of 1912.
