Stinks Like Teen Spirit

New, from the state that introduced the Clean Indoor Air Act back in the seventies (a law that sent piteous flocks of shivering office workers out into subzero weather to get their nicotine fixes), the anti-stink act for high school students.

I survived Bonnie Bell lipsmackers. I survived Tickle. I survived Love's Baby Soft. I overcame a massive Giorgio cloud during one year at a snooty prep school, college dorm incense, and weedy waves of Aveda products. But today's fragrance crazes seem almost unbearable. I've worked with some truly pimpy smelling work study students recently. If it's not a boy drenched in Axe, its a girl dowsed in some fruity bathroom cleaner-like body spray. I'd rather smell second hand smoke than that nast.

Just as the phrase Big Tobacco became shorthand for the cigarette lobby, I predict the phrase Big Stink will become the nickname of the Personal Care Products Council in Washington.

"We really don't think it's a good idea to legislate personal hygiene," sez John Hurson, Head of Government Affairs, Personal Care Products Council in the AP news.

Perhaps. I have little regard for the pitches of snake oil salesmen who push Axe and the like on an uninformed teen public. Still, crabby as I am, I don't want to deprive a young person of her right to smell pretty, even if she doesn't know what that means, and so winds up making herself smell like the Paris Metro in July.

Hopefully, education will make legislation unnecessary. Perhaps health and biology teachers, who must have a lot of time to fill because of that abstinence education thing, can help kids understand how perfume can make them reek.