Before the 20th century, body odor wasn’t considered a social problem. People bathed less frequently, sweating was understood as a natural bodily function, and nobody was selling a product to fix it because nobody had convinced the public it needed fixing. That changed in 1919, when a struggling product called Odorono hired the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency to save its sales. What followed was one of the most effective and consequential marketing campaigns in history.

The ad, titled “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm,” ran in Ladies’ Home Journal and was so explicit about the social consequences of body odor that the magazine received over 200 letters of complaint. Sales went up 112% the following year. The campaign didn’t just sell a product. It manufactured an entirely new social anxiety that didn’t really exist before the ad ran. Within a decade, the deodorant industry was established, and within a generation, daily deodorant use had become a hygiene standard in the US.

The original Odorono came in a glass bottle.

But as demand exploded through the mid-20th century, packaging followed the same pattern as almost every other personal care product. It went plastic. Plastic was cheap, lightweight, and easy to manufacture at scale. Like most packaging decisions of that era, nobody was thinking about where it would end up.

The good news is today we have alternatives. Plastic-free deodorants in cardboard tubes, refillable metal cases, and compostable packaging are now available, while the natural deodorant within them that didn’t work as well in the past has largely been solved by modern formulations.

The history of pre-modern deodorant use teaches us that there are better options to using plastic.