Dear Axe Deo,

I use Axe. It doesn't drown me in women. I get angry.

Text reads:

Dear Axe Deodorants,

I am very sad to say that I am on the verge of giving up your line of Men’s deodorants for good. My experience with your extensive bodyspray products has been nothing short of disappointing, and is at the very least a gross waste of time.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me perhaps explain my angst, right from where it all began: as a thirteen year old boy.

Naturally, your product immediately appealed to me. It wasn’t so much that I was brainwashed by the doglike incessant smokescreen that followed all my seniors in an inescapable hormonal fog of Phoenix and testosterone, through which I had to walk on a daily basis and which now serves as an immediate PTSD-esque trigger to darker, younger days, but rather the scientifically accurate promises in your advertising that assured me that all it took to change my virgin life into one of abs and being Brad Pitt in a suit surrounded by literally fallen angels was one mere spray.

And so, I became an Axe User.

But if I’m a true Axe user, then why, please explain to me, am I not wading through a knee-deep sea of bikini models biting their lips and gazing with sultry desire at my rock-hard abdominals?

Am I perhaps applying my can of Axe Twist incorrectly? I have taken painstaking lengths to study, in minute, frame-by-frame detail, the exact techniques the subjects in your many short-length documentaries use to become inundated in female pudenda, but no matter how true I am to the original techniques and hand-flicks, I cannot get more than one girl at a time.

He goes across the body, diagonally down his torso towards his left hip and then snaps the can across his waist and groin area. I have done this repeatedly, sometimes even more than once, and still, I don’t have difficulty rolling over in my bed at night because the entire female population of the planet serves as my duvet. What is going on?

I’ve tried everything. Nothing works. It doesn’t matter if I spend half an hour and entire bottle of Axe Hair Wax to sculpt my hair into a kiff bedhair quiff like those okes in GQ. It doesn’t matter if I inflict multiple coldburns on myself by applying several dozen cans in one sitting. Hell, it doesn’t even make one smidge of difference if I empty all my Axe products into a blender, make a pasty puree of them and soak my entire body in it for half an hour or before I pass out from the fumes, whichever comes first.

I’ve had this problem before. A few years ago I gave up Radox Mens Xtreme Body Wash because it didn’t turn me into John Smit rappelling down a refreshing waterfall after just one mere sniff of the stuff.

Then, to make matters worse, Sky Vodka didn’t transport me to literally a club in the fucking sky filled with babes and disinterested looking gentlemen. Even after six years of drinking a bottle every day, I have yet to get anything sexier, more carefree and youthful than extensive liver damage. And I’m pretty sure we both know how much Michelle Pfeiffer and Scarlett Johansson I’ve gotten in the past months of using certain expensive colognes.

I demand a public apology and a full refund, or at the very least a step-by-step, full and detailed (perhaps even illustrated) explanation of how to fully capitalise on Axe’s female-getting prowess.

Some idiots have suggested to me that I’d probably attract more women if I changed my backwards, unrealistic attitude towards them and stopped treating them like sandwich-making dogs who give you the sex at the mere hint of cheap deo, but of course they are utterly wrong. Why would advertising exaggerate or outright lie about its product’s social appeal or woman-winning powers? It’s absurd to think that companies would ever put soulless profits over the respect and responsibilities that society has come to expect.

So please. Send me the secret technique, or give me back my money. I have just recently started a project to utterly eliminate all inconvenience ever in existence by buying every Verimark product I can think of, and I’ll really need the money.

Until then, I’ll be giving Axe my own axe effect.

Yours sincerely

Author, writer, recent Old Spice client, 13 going on 26,

Matthew de Klerk

PS: I've read in the local news that I'm not the only person you've let down. This is unacceptable.

www.to-muse-and-abuse.blogspot.fr/2014/06/tv-commercial-product-user-still-not.html

TV Commercial product user “still not knee-deep in women”

Confusion and disappointment abounded today, after local man Andrew Chekdat announced that despite spending thousands of Rands on Axe and Lynx deodorants, expensive colognes, Armani suits, costly watches and even certain brands of mouth freshener and shower gel, he still has yet to be flooded or covered by an endless stampede of really, really hot chicks.

“It makes no sense,” he told reporters who gathered to hear the statement made outside his house in Pretoria. “It doesn’t matter where I spray, how much I spray, or even how many different products I use at the same time. Chicks don’t hound me, they don’t lose utter control of their senses when I look at them, they don’t bite their lips seductively when I pass them in the street. None of these products do what they say they do. Flip, I should be knee-deep in clunge by now, boet.”

Chekdat told reporters how at first he thought it was his fault.

“I thought, you know, maybe I’m not using the product right, maybe I’m not using it correctly. But then I copied the advert move-for-move, spraying, washing, and dressing in that exact manner, and still nothing,” he said. "Not even a single remotely gorgeous binnet draped over all me like a wet curtain."

He added that even dressing in an expensive Giorgio Armani suit with matching platinum Rolex watch, and wearing a dazed expression that was equal parts slightly constipated and self-obsessed while ignoring the beautiful, half-dressed women around him didn’t work, either.

“It’s almost as if these products don’t have any power in getting women,” he said. “But what else could they be for? I mean, in the adverts there is no indication of what they smell like, or how well they clean you or whatever, so it can’t be that. Surely you’d advertise a fragrance using, you know, smell? Like how Steers or Spur advertise their food with actual taste and a meaningful, realistic representation of their products instead of just images of the food being cut up?”

This is seemingly the opening of the floodgates of complaints against the beauty industry, as thousands of other unhappy customers – many of them women themselves – have added to the chorus.

“I put on beauty masks, I buy expensive clothes, I follow the trends in the latest magazines. I put on the stain-free underarm roll-on, I mist myself with the delicate breath of flowers trapped in a R1000 50ml glass bottle,” said local artist Meaghan Fuller, whose name really is spelt that way, yes, with two ‘a’s and an ‘h’, we checked. “And still I have yet to have a sensuous and yet caring Argentinian dark, brooding hunk in an expensive suit caress my neck and arms while objectifying me and my reducing my worth to just the fragrance I wear. It makes no sense. I should be drowning in abs and sports cars right now.”

She also mentioned that all those feel-good health products had done “absolutely fok-all”.

“You’d think with their chai berry and agave extracts, all-natural, preservative-free ingredients, and cleaning, deep-detox powers I’d look like Megan Fox by now,” she said, struggling to choke back the sobs, “but all I feel is constantly hungry, and I’m more Mike Myers Fat Bastard than Transformers Love Interest who is strangely written out of the series in an unconvincing and not-at-all profound manner.”

The complainants have since decided to lodge a class-action lawsuit against the nefarious purveyors of lies and disappointment, saying that they should be forced to be more honest about the products they hawk.

“Tobacco products have to carry labels saying ‘Caution: Smoking Kills’ and all those scary facts,” they said in a joint statement. “Why shouldn’t perfume manufacturers have to have a label saying ‘Caution: will not get you laid.’?”

The manufacturers have defended themselves, however, saying that they were sorry about these failures, and that a future line of products will amend these "horrid, regrettable errors".

"Ever since we simultaneously published these Axe adverts and yet at the same time also put out the Dove Real Beauty campaign, we've been dedicated to selling products that not only celebrate you as an individual, but ones that also make up for your glaring insecurities and personality defects," said Unilever in a statement. "We're really sorry that this happened, but we're also pleased to announce a new fusion of cologne, facewash and shampoo that will definitely get you all the hot babes you want. Look, here's an advert that proves its effective power on George Clooney. It even works on him."