In pandemic times, just a few years ago, personal-care brands had a big problem. Millions of pajama-wearing breadwinners were working from home and not caring what they looked like—or, in many cases, smelled like. In the first quarter of 2021, for example, personal-care behemoth Unilever announced that sales of its deodorants “declined in high single digit[s] as the deodorant market was… impacted by lower consumer usage.” Mintel data told that tale numerically. The U.S. deodorant market, valued at $3.8 billion in 2019, fell to $3.72 billion the following year. Mintel survey data from this period also showed that 28% of consumers admitted that they were deodorizing less frequently. Thank goodness those days are over, huh? Well, they may not be entirely. While the dollar value of the deodorant category bounced back up to $4.36 billion in 2022, three developments this month alone suggest that some are still cleaving to the hit-or-miss hygiene of the Covid era—at least if the need for marketing is any indication. The category has also grown; whole-body deodorants, aluminum-free deodorants, and sustainable or natural deodorants are all new categories. Research from First Insight shows that 62% of Gen-Z shoppers prefer sustainable brands and 73% will pay more for them. On April 23, for instance, personal-care brand Billie set up a wall-mounted billboard near the Pennsylvania railroad station featuring a triptych of armpits that passers-by are encouraged to scratch and sniff. Fortunately, the emanation on offer is the aroma of the brand’s tropical scent, Coco Villa. Coincidentally or not, Unilever’s Degree brand did the auxiliary billboard thing in Times Square during the pandemic—but the scratch-and-sniff option wasn’t available. (“We’re all about making our deodorant brands unmissable in the marketplace,” Unilever USA’s CEO of Personal Care Herrish Patel told ADWEEK.) Lest the placards suggest that only New Yorkers are malodorous, some West Coasters are apparently keeping it pretty natural, too. During the April 11 kickoff of Coachella, TikTokers began posting that while the music was great, the bodily bouquets were not. One attendee called the Indio, California, festival the “body odor olympics.” Another, in a video liked by 3.2 million people, posted: “As a non-influencer with an artist pass at Coachella, you should know some of ur fav influencers smell so bad.” Among those who took note of the funk were the social-media mavens at Shadow. On behalf of Dove, the marketing and communications agency quickly dispatched a team to give out free samples of its new Whole Body Deo Cooling Spray. The company also hired a plane to fly over the crowd, trailing a banner that read: “Smells like you need us. Dove Deo.” “When we started seeing tags on social, to help the crowd out, we knew we had to show up,” Dove North America’s head of influence Dana Paolucci told ADWEEK. Three days after the curtain dropped on Coachella, Axe (still another Unilever brand) announced that it had inked a deal with comedian Pete Davidson. The SNL alum is scheduled to take over the brand’s Instagram page on May 1 to host “Axe Me Anything.” That Axe needs a marketing push is itself a little surprising. A generation ago, young dudes—the target audience here—needed no encouragement to virtually fumigate themselves with Axe. “I’ve been a fan of Axe since I was a 6-foot-3, 90-pound teenager,” Davidson himself admitted in a statement, adding that Phoenix had been his scent of choice. Davidson, 31, was part of a generation influenced by Axe’s notorious 2002 ad “Billions” that featured crazed babes lusting after the dork wearing Axe. While the news is in the rear-view mirror now, lazy personal-care habits were as much a feature of Covid as face masks and hand sanitizers. An Ipsos poll taken in the U.K. at the end of 2020 found that 45% of men admitted they’d stopped shaving, 24% of men and women both were skipping showers, and 14% were leaving the deodorant in the medicine cabinet.