Eau d’adolescence – or the smell of your average teenager!

The Undertones may have famously believed that teenage dreams are hard to beat – but teenage smells are a different matter altogether.

If you power hosed them ten times a day and scrubbed them raw with carbolic soap, the unbeatable powers of galloping hormones would still render your fight a futile one.

The natural smell of a male teenager is a pungent cocktail of stale sweat and Lynx, an anti-perspirant spray that purports to smell of Africa, Vice or Dark Temptation – whatever they might be when they’re at home.

But, to the middle-aged nose at least, the only smell of Africa they actually give off is the one you might get from animal dung that has hardened over several days in the sub-Saharan sun.

And still the average teenager remains convinced that a toxic fug sprayed from a canister will somehow win the war against the sweaty stink emanating from your arm pits.

In the fight against sweat, they see underarm deodorant as their very own weapon of mass destruction. The truth is you’d be better off doing the Shake ‘n’ Vac on it.

Deodorants, by their very name, suggest they might be a way to rid yourself of a sweaty pong – but they were never more a perfume that tries to mast reality.

Equally it must be remembered that, when you are assaulted by that smell of sweat, there is actually a purpose to all of this.

The human underarm is among the most consistently warm areas on the surface of the human body, and sweat glands provide moisture, which when excreted, has a vital cooling effect.

Which is all very well until you find yourself sharing a small room with someone who has turned this cooling technique into an art form, and who consequently radiates the smell of a sports sock stuck down the back of the couch.

Teenagers, by their very nature, are not given to the pursuit any unnecessary exercise – even the simple things like putting plates and cups in the kitchen, let alone the dishwasher itself; or picking up clothes off the floor; putting football gear into the wash; or indeed simply lifting themselves off the couch.

So it shouldn’t be any great surprise that a thirty-second spray of toxicity is infinitely preferable to ten minutes under the water in a shower, which would then involve having to dry yourself – and ultimately spraying on the same deodorant anyway. 

But then again in their defence, we thought the same thing about Brut – or Hi-Karate, the self-proclaimed budget aftershave of the seventies which had the double benefit of clearing your sinuses and sealing your scarred skin after you’d removed half your face with a rusty razor.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.