Who Invented The Deodorant And Why Did It Become Popular?

The most difficult type of organic body products to produce are deodorants and antiperspirants. They exist and are really effective, but they are typically used in a very different way to the aerosol sprays that are often associated with deodorants.

They typically work by killing sweat-producing bacteria that interact with sweat, whilst antiperspirants also aim to reduce the amount you sweat as well.

Exactly which type of deodorant is right for you largely depends on who you are and your lifestyle, but it is best to try and pick aluminium-free deodorants, as aluminium chlorohydrate is a common ingredient in antiperspirants.

Whilst concerns about body odour and smelling unattractive to other people are not exactly new worries, concerns about sweating specifically are barely a century old and can be credited to a single person, who wanted to market a product originally designed for surgeons.

Keeping Mum About Sweaty Hands

Edna Murphey was the daughter of a doctor, Dr Abraham Murphey, who had developed an antiperspirant solution using aluminium chlorohydrate with surgeons in mind.

Surgery requires the utmost precision, as one wrong move or literal slip could potentially be the difference between life and death. To get around this, Dr Murphey developed a red powder that would reduce sweating, and ensure they keep a good grip on their scalpel.

Ms Murphey, then a high school student, found that it not only worked to reduce sweat but also the smell of body odour, and realised there was potential to sell this as a revolution in body hygiene.

To that end, she borrowed $150 from her grandfather to set up a small business to sell what she called Odorono, pronounced “odour-oh-no”.

She believed she had found an untapped corner of the market, but the business was phenomenally unsuccessful at first, with many pharmacists either completely uninterested in stocking the product or returning unopened bottles of the red deodorant.

The problem was that whilst body odour was a concern in the late-Victorian era, the solution was worlds apart from what would be standard today.

The idea was that you washed with soap and shampoo, and then used perfume to overwhelm the olfactory glands of anyone in the vicinity. Dress shields would work to stop sweat from ruining a nice dress on a hot day.

Sweating was seen as a taboo to even talk about, and other early deodorants such as Mum from 1888 and Everdry from 1903 struggled to develop a product people even wanted to try.

However, after Ms Murphey had such bad luck with sales that she moved back to her parents’ basement to continue the business, she received a stroke of good fortune that changed the course of body hygiene forever.

The Heatwave That Changed Everything

In 1912, Atlantic City, New Jersey held a summer-long trade exhibition, and initially, it seemed to be yet another failure for Odorono, to the point that the demonstrator asked Ms Murphey to send some creams that would actually sell.

However, Atlantic City had a heatwave, and all of a sudden, the logic behind a deodorant made a lot more sense, and Odorono suddenly had $30,000 in sales. This was a good start but not nearly enough.

It was enough to hire a marketing agency, which took a two-pronged approach to sell the deodorant to the many people concerned that the bright red formulation would stain clothes, the acid stabiliser would burn through them and the idea that blocking sweat was inherently unhealthy.

The first adverts for Odorono were remarkably defensive as a result, focusing on it being a perfectly healthy way to save money on laundry bills.

However, the true success came from the second part of the marketing campaign, which targeted sweating itself as a truly embarrassing social contagion that would harm a woman’s popularity in social circles.

It was a shameful tactic with the benefit of hindsight, but it did work incredibly well to boost sales in a product every woman knew about but only a third of women felt they actually needed.

At the time, it was considered so offensive that 200 readers of the Ladies Home Journal that ran the advertising campaign cancelled their subscription and copywriter James Young was told in no uncertain terms that he had offended every woman in the United States.

However, the sales skyrocketed, exploiting the insecurity of customers in a manner 

unfortunately very common in the beauty world, one that would affect both male and female customers in very different ways in the years and decades that followed.