In the early 1900s, American culture didn’t talk about sweat. It didn’t talk about body odor. And it definitely didn’t talk about women sweating.
It was considered too crass, too impolite—a topic fit only for private shame.
But one young woman, Edna Murphey, dared to break the silence. And in doing so, she created one of the most explosive markets in consumer history.
Edna was a teenager in Cincinnati when she first got the idea. Her father, Dr. Abraham Murphey, was a surgeon who had invented a liquid solution to stop his hands from sweating during operations.
The idea was simple: Aluminum chloride in a water-based solution could block the sweat glands.
Edna realized this invention had a future beyond the operating room. If sweaty palms could be stopped—what about sweaty underarms?
She bottled the liquid and named it Odorono — a cheeky abbreviation for “Odor? Oh No!”
Then she began the slow, often humiliating work of trying to sell it.
At first, nobody was interested. Department stores refused to stock it. Magazines declined her ads. The idea of advertising something as undignified as underarm odor was considered outrageous.
But Edna was undeterred. She packed up bottles of Odorono and headed to the 1912 Atlantic City exposition—a huge trade show at the time—where she rented a booth and personally hawked her product.
Sales were meager.
Worse, the few customers who did try Odorono often complained: It smelled funny, it stung their skin, or it stained their clothes. Edna had no background in chemistry or business. But she listened, improved the formula, and pushed forward.
Still, by 1919, Odorono was on the brink of failure. In desperation, Edna scraped together the little money she had and hired the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency—one of the biggest firms in New York.
The agency’s copywriter, James Young, had a radical idea. Instead of tiptoeing around the topic, they would confront women directly: Was your body odor ruining your chances at love, at marriage, or at respect?
In a now-famous ad called “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm,” the copy didn’t just promote Odorono — it created anxiety. It planted the idea that even the most beautiful woman could lose everything if she failed the “odor test.”
The backlash was immediate. Magazines and newspapers were flooded with angry letters—people calling the ad crass, manipulative, even immoral. But the ad worked. Sales jumped by 112 percent within a year.
From that point on, Odorono exploded into the mainstream—not just surviving but creating an entire new category: personal hygiene products.
Edna Murphey had turned cultural embarrassment into entrepreneurial gold.
She didn’t invent deodorant. She invented the idea that deodorant was necessary.
Today, a $30 billion global industry traces its roots back to a young woman with a borrowed invention, a red bottle, and a refusal to take “no” for an answer.