by Lore Sjöberg

Sport Scent
What, exactly, does "sport" smell like. If someone were to ask me to imagine the smell of "sport," I'd think of the exact scent that deodorant was invented to disguise, namely unwashed Rugby armpits. I suppose the idea is to portray yourself as someone who has played sports in the recent past, and may very well play sports again, but do City Sanitation Department employees wear "Sewer Scent" deodorant? C-

Fresh Scent
The question, of course, is "fresh what"? Fresh engine oil, for instance, wouldn't really hold up against, say, two-week-old dried lavender as a deodorant scent. Maybe it's supposed to smell like fresh deodorant, straight out of the vat the way mom used to make it. C-

Musk Scent
My first experience with the word "musk" was in an article about skunks in Ranger Rick magazine, which, combined with a picture of a musk ox a couple issues later, makes me skeptical of "musk" as a positive description. In reality, you end up smelling like a really manly pumpkin pie, which is only a notch or two above my first impression. C-

Powder Scent
By "powder" here they mean "baby powder," but they don't put "baby" in the name. I assume this is because they're trying to market to the lucrative demographic of "people who want to smell like babies, but who don't want to admit to themselves that they want to smell like babies." I wonder if the same marketing team that came up with this is also responsible for the recent abbreviation of "Baby Boomers" to just "Boomers." C-

Original Scent
I'm against "original" scents, flavors, or styles. I find it appalling that companies assume that I'm so intimately familiar with their product line that I know which item is the original, and which were afterthoughts. Would you buy "original flavor" Jell-O? Would you buy a car knowing only that it had "original style" transmission? Let's stand up as one and eliminate "original" as a product descriptor, except for "Original Flavor" ramen noodles, because what else are you going to call it? D