Axe deo finds an unlikely new customer
HARLESTON
Afew years ago, retired police officer Sam Bryce posted a question on the U.K. Facebook group “Ladies Who Lamb.”
A ram she owned had become very ill-tempered and was picking on his castrated fieldmate. Was there anything the other shepherdesses could suggest to calm him?
The replies came back within minutes: Lynx Africa.
Lynx is the U.K. name for the popular deodorant sold in the U.S. as Axe, a product that for decades has been marketed as a way for young men to become instantly irresistible to lasses.
In recent years, some shepherdesses have discovered the deodorant has an auxiliary benefit: When used among their flocks, it masks the hormones that get the boys butting heads.
“There’s no argy-bargy, no rowing,” Bryce says of the deodorant’s effects.
Since getting clued in, Bryce has regularly used a few long sprays of Lynx on Cash and Casper, two testosteroneaddled 4-year-old rams she keeps some 100 miles northeast of London.
The pair have lived together since they were five months old but are prone to fight following any period of separation.
“They puff themselves up and square up to each other and make this grunting noise,” explains Bryce, 55 years old, who often favors unwieldy Wellington boots paired with purple nail polish and sparkly eye shadow.
“It’s like when you see drunk men put their fists up and say, ‘I’ll fight you.’”
The deodorant isn’t just for the fellas.
Caitlin Jenkins, a 31-yearold shepherdess in nearby Suffolk, has used Lynx to successfully convince ewes to mother orphaned lambs.
Ewes identify their offspring by scent and spraying them both confuses the ewe into believing a lamb is her own, says Jenkins.
“I always go for Lynx Africa because it has a very distinctive strong smell,” she says. “The ones that don’t smell as strong have less chance of working.”
Axe was first launched by Unilever in France in 1983 after the company saw a gap in the market for a strong deodorant that smelled like cologne. The brand was sold as Lynx in markets where the Axe trademark was already taken, including the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
Twelve years later, Unilever launched Lynx Africa (and Axe Africa), a scent it marketed as “deep and sensual with a fresh top note set on a warm oriental base.”
Unilever says Lynx Africa is the top-selling male fragrance in the
U.K.
For years the brand’s ads drew complaints for being degrading to women. One early 2000s ad showed a teenage boy putting his feet against the nose of a girl in a library, who responded by enthusiastically licking them.
“In the animal kingdom, the horn turtle seduces the female by drumming his long toenails across her snout,” said the voice-over. “Thank goodness humans have the
Lynx effect.”
Over the past few years, Unilever has tried to reinvent Axe to be a more inclusive brand with more sophisticated fragrances and less gauche advertising. Its recent ads for Lynx Africa feature a talking goat— a play on the acronym GOAT, for Greatest of All Time — whose curving horns, coincidentally, make it resemble a ram.
Unilever, which declined to comment, has said that Axe isn’t tested on animals.
The shepherdesses say they’re careful to avoid the animals’ eyes while spraying them.
As a child, Bryce enjoyed milking her neighbor’s goats. After retiring as a police officer 18 years ago following a back injury, she decided “in a mad moment” to keep some sheep. She now owns what she calls a “hobby flock” of about 30 sheep.
“Being a police officer is quite a high-adrenaline job. No day was the same and I think that describes sheep really well—you never know what they’re going to get up to,” she says as a bleating long-legged lamb skips past and then leaps into the air for no apparent reason.
“I adore my sheep, but they’re the naughtiest things I’ve ever owned.”
Bryce says Lynx is especially helpful after Casper—a horned Jacob—and Cash—a woolly white Llanwenog Cross Ryeland—have been out mating with ewes.
“When the rams come back from tupping, they stink,” Bryce says. “They need a powerful smell.”
On a rainy spring morning, Cash and Casper chomp on a breakfast mix of barley, molasses and rapeseed in adjoining pens as a peacock and peahen—christened Charles and Camilla—flap about on a nearby roof. Cash finishes first and occasionally charges at the barrier separating him from Casper, running his mouth along the metal and butting it with his nose. “Those are all displays of dominance,” says Bryce.
Half a world away in Gisborne, New Zealand, 43-yearold sheep and beef farmer Toby Williams is also a Lynx user—but only for himself, not his 60 rams.
He has used Unilever’s Brut, Procter & Gamble ’s Old Spice and Johnson & Johnson baby powder to convince ewes to mother orphaned lambs.
“They all work the same,” he says. “The point is you’re providing a scent that confuses the animal.”
The fifth-generation farmer is skeptical that the Lynx Africa technique works, given how prone to fighting rams are, but agrees the principle is sound.
“Animals can see each other, but smell is what lets them know it’s one of their friends,” he says. “It’s triggering rams to say, ‘This is my mate. I don’t need to fight him.’”
Bryce says without Lynx, Casper and Cash “get full of themselves” and start to “bicker,” so she likes to keep a couple of cans on hand.
“I’m not the only nutter, lots of ladies have it in their tool kit,” she says. “It’s quite a well-known thing among the ladies—the shepherdesses— that Lynx works.” feedback@livemint.com
For German luxury-car makers, being first to fail is proving valuable when it comes to electric vehicles. After a bruising initial crack at bringing EVs to market, BMW AG is lapping its rivals.
In 2008, BMW engineers set out to develop an electric city car from scratch. Five years later, the company introduced the i3, a quirky four-seater with rear-hinged back doors and a frame made with carbon fiber. The car looked unlike anything else in its portfolio, but with its steep sticker price and limited range, sales were muted. Disillusioned, BMW slowed its EV plans.
Years spent soul-searching led to criticism that BMW was stalling on EVs. Lately, though, the company has been hitting the right notes with a much less radical approach. It designed EVs almost indistinguishable from their combustion enginepowered siblings, and is building them on the same factory line to contain costs.
The approach is paying dividends: BMW shipped more than twice as many EVs than Audi in the first quarter, and roughly two-thirds more than
Ewes identify offspring by scent and spraying both has also confused them into believing a lamb is their own
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VinFast Auto Ltd.’s firstquarter loss narrowed while car sales declined as the Vietnamese EV maker sets ambitious goals to be a global brand amid declining worldwide demand for electric vehicles.
The company reported a net loss of $618.3 million in the first three months of this year, decreasing 12.3% from the fourth quarter, the company said in a filing. Revenue for the period was $302.6 million,
Mercedes-Benz Group AG.
“BMW has been able to adapt its over one decade worth of battery-electric vehicle knowledge into its current model lineup with almost zero handicap,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent auto analyst near Hamburg. “They have carried the Ultimate Driving Machine mantra over to their EVs.”
BMW’s success is all the more impressive since it coincides with a broader slowdown in demand for EVs, particularly in Europe, where governments
The company has now designed EVs almost indistinguishable from combustion engine-powered siblings
are reducing subsidies. Mercedes cited the phase-out of its Smart Fortwo two-seater and sluggish demand in Germany for falling EV wholesales in the first quarter. Earlier this month, Tesla Inc. reported its first year-on-year global sales drop since 2020.
Some of BMW’s head start has to do with its rivals veering off course. Volkswagen AG’s Audi has been falling behind in China, its biggest market, after failing to offer models that cater to local tastes. Software issues