Morning Confusion

Wake up, switch off cell phone alarm. Yawn. Stand up, rub eyes. Yawn. Scratch that place that always itches just after waking up, on your lower back, just above the right butt-cheek. Yawn. Stroll around with one hand scratching belly the other rubbing eyes some more while looking for clothes. Pick random clothes, head to shower. Yawn. Turn hot water on, undress, get in… Clean head, clean hair, clean arms, legs, stand under hot water a while longer, just because it is hot. Taps off, get out, take towel, dry. Brush teeth, dress, deodorant. Time to make coffee, make coffee, sip coffee, finally wake up. Wait! What the hell deodorant did I put on?

I do not know whether it is something about being a man, or what manufactures think men want to think about their customers, but the names of men’s deodorants do not make sense. The can of deodorant in my bathroom cupboard is called shield men: cool. Is cool a fragrance? To think I thought it was a temperature, perhaps an attitude, although that is just slang. It is not just this deodorant, there are some interesting ones. The axe range of deodorants is a good example of what I mean; here are some names of their deodorants from the Wikipedia article on Axe: Dimension, Apollo, Dark Temptation, Gravity, and Phoenix. Now, are any of these a fragrance? I think the best one I ever saw was a deodorant called shower fresh, but why the hell would I want to put that on? Since it is usually just after showering that I put a deodorant on, and I smell shower fresh already, how can I not? I just showered.

Now on the other hand, for women you can get some much simpler fragrance names. It’s pretty great, women smelling like jasmine or peaches, maybe vanilla or caramel. Something simple and nice that is easily identifiable. Why can it not be the same for men? I personally would not want to smell like peaches or vanilla too much; since I admit that some things do smell feminine, and I would rather sniff at a girl to smell those than at myself. Which reminds me of interesting incident, I was with a friend who was shopping and went to the fragrance section and since she smelled the women’s fragrances I thought I might as well do that too. Unfortunately the first one that I tried to open I mistook a pull off for a twist off and took the whole top off and spilt a good bit of it all over my hands. I smelt like caramel all day long. Why did I not choose the jasmine one? Caramel just ends up smelling too sweet like pure sugar.

Back to the point. How about they make a fragrance for men like cinnamon, or pinewood, or some herb like rosemary or thyme (although I did find an herbal deodorant once that said it was mainly thyme and it was fairly nice in my opinion). Those are smells that I like enough to smell, that I would like to smell like. I would even like to smell like a good Irish stew, but that is a bit much. I do not need anything so mucho that has a name that has no connection to smell that I can think of. It would even be good if they gave a little description somewhere that said what it smelled like Maybe I am just weird, and I do accept that, but surely there is someone else out there that finds deodorant’s names confusing?

Jon