When was the first time you noticed you had a smell? I’m guessing you were around the age of 13, sitting in class with your school uniform tight under your arms. It was probably late June and as you lifted your elbows, you caught a slight whiff from your pits that had not been there before.

That feeling is unavoidable. We were warned of puberty’s wrath: hair springing from places you didn’t know existed, spots sprouting on your face, and sweat dripping from every pore (no wonder we were all so annoying). This was probably the first time we noticed our bodies had an odour; a new griminess compared to the inodorous bodies of our childhood. So what actually is smell and why do we turn our noses up to some in disgust?

Whatever the answer is, we spend the rest of our lives trying to hide it: showering every day, layering on antiperspirant deodorant, or filling our houses with candles and diffusers. But at what point does this habit of cleanliness move towards something more obsessive? And when will we admit to ourselves that our idea of cleanliness is virtually unobtainable?

I started thinking about this during the festival season over summer. Like many other sheeple I trekked across several fields, pitched a tent, and spent five days listening to hard D&B — sounds appealing, right? With showers sparse, or non-existent, we had to resort to the dreaded baby-wipe wash. But weirdly enough, the longer the weekend went on, the less I seemed to notice everyone’s disgustingness.

The reason, I realised, was that there was nothing in the field telling us what clean should be. Covered in sweat and dirt, with no showers or baths around, there was no standard to reach for. You simply festered in your filth until you stopped noticing it. And it did make me wonder, what even is cleanliness if it is something we are not naturally pre-disposed to?

Scent has quietly shaped humanity for centuries. It is something we have learnt and adapted over time. In ancient Egypt, perfumes, tobacco, and incense were used to display wealth and status. By the 14th century, after the Black Death, scent started being associated with disease and illness: something which has seemingly stuck around ever since.

As humanity has progressed, we have moved our existence indoors, and a sterile existence has followed, one where hygiene comes from chemical-filled sprays and diffusers. We follow trends that tell us what is meant to smell good until we have landed on the latest one – odourlessness. We now wish to smell nothing.

And yet, scent is one of the most important aspects of living. Our brains use it to detect danger and sickness, it reminds us of old people, places, moments. But it is also tangled up in our social hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Capitalism feeds on this insecurity, selling us products to make us think we are more pleasant than we actually are.

Scent is the very essence of an animal. I have heard countless women say that the smell of their boyfriends’ pits is one of the most attractive things about him. But to deem men’s musk as sexy and rugged whilst condemning women’s odour as unhygienic is to hold a double standard that some can never break free from.

Worse still, all this scrubbing could actually be worse for us, compromising our immune systems and leading to more allergies or illnesses. Especially since COVID, our bodies are not being exposed to bacteria that build our immunity to fight off the simplest of colds.

So next time you buy a vanilla perfume, or slather on that antiperspirant, maybe stop to think about what is so wrong with a little bit of sweat or dirt? And when you are out swimming on a beach, or sitting around a fire with your friends, being a little bit grimy isn’t as bad as it’s all made out to be.