You DON'T need this...

Get this ,

In 1912 Edna Murphey, a teen from Cincinnati, took a product her surgeon Dad had developed to keep his hands dry while operating - and tried it on her armpits.  Guess what?  No more sweat.

So she built a company around it - called Odorono, Odor? Oh No - and despite a lot of scientific proof of its effectiveness, she couldn't sell any.

So what was the problem?

     Women were aware of the product, but didn't think they needed it. 

So she hired James Young, an aspiring copy writer fresh off a stint as a door-to-door bible salesman and he came up with this.

Killer headline, right? 'Within the Curve of a Woman's Arm. A frank discussion of a subject too often avoided.' 

It implied your body odour could be silently costing you your relationships, and no one would ever tell you. Two hundred women cancelled their subscriptions. Publishers begged him to pull the ad. Sales went up 112%.

Mr. Young's ability to tap into women's sense of fear and SHAME built an entire industry out of something that had been previously unnecessary.

Sound familiar?

By the 1930s the gloves were off.  Other deo makers caught on to the power of shame and soon dropped any pretence of subtlety.

One headline read: 'Beautiful but dumb. She has never learned the first rule of long lasting charm.'

And another aimed at a fictional woman named Mary said: 'You're a pretty girl, Mary, and you're smart about most things — but you're just a bit stupid about yourself.'