Head Space Daily Words...

Whenever I enter my eldest son’s bedroom in the morning, after he has gone to school, a fug of Lynx hangs over the place. I like the word fug but I could just as easily have used fog or smog. The stuff hangs there and as you breathe it in, you can feel it cling to your throat, with the scent of boy perfume. It plays havoc with my nasal cavities and I don’t find it at all pleasant but I am not the one at whom the product is aimed - which is boys with rampant hormones. When I was a kid, I used some kind of equally repugnant pit spray that I thought made me smell like a grown up - just a mere step on the path to Brut Splash On, Old Spice or Blue Stratos. Lynx is a product that represents coming of age, of reaching adolescence, mixing it with the opposite sex and standing on your own two feet. Every young lad seems to use Lynx - a product that has well and truly cornered the market. Surely no one above the age of eighteen uses the stuff and I apologise if you are an older user but maybe it’s time to move on – you smell like a twelve year old!! The advertising is all about boys being able to pull girls because they are wearing Lynx. Apparently, according to the Lynx website - where products are listed as Tools Of Attraction - if you use Lynx Apollo you are ‘guaranteed to take girls sky high or even to another planet’ because it gives you the ‘scent of an astronaut.’ This is ironic surely, as an astronaut is the human equivalent of boil in the bag and cannot smell too great. I imagine the scent would be somewhat stale. The ability to attract girls with your sprayed on odour is known as The Lynx Effect, which is a fantastic sales pitch and shows the power of a strong marketing campaign, based on humour. We can all remember the cave girl and bikini ads. The only Lynx effect I can determine though, is one of mild asphyxiation, where a girl agrees to go out with a boy on the promise that she can pop out for some fresh air. As I said earlier, these ads aren’t aimed at me and the teenage boy market is sold hook line and sinker. They love it, they love the smell of the stuff and they love how it makes them feel – grown up...