Onus On Olfactory Overstimulation
BUZZSAW PRESS RELEASE
ITHACA, N.Y.– Somewhere in the midst of the suburbs in East Reynoldsburg, Ohio, rested a rectangular, cream-coloured building. Omitting the Doric columns at its entrance, it had heavy contemporary flair. This was the Bath and Body Works headquarters, and its teams were constantly on a mission to innovate on sweet, sentimental, sappy, saccharine scents that would entice higher profits. As of 2020, the PR team found itself overstimulated by a heavier workload.
One worker inhaled a fragrant powder before bitching that when happy hours came back into workplace culture, she would never look at a bottle of Corona the same way ever again.
Her coworker asked her to pass the bath salts, as she was buried in excessive amounts of news media and needed something to take the edge off. It was then that she shot up in her seat with an exclamation of Eureka! Consequently, everyone else in the room thought she was hallucinating.
But she ignored the haters. She presented the idea: what if bath bombs were made such that they fizzed out into news articles that kept people updated on current events? It solves the issue of not being able to read newspapers or phone articles in the bathtub.
Given the ingenuity of the idea, it was quickly patented and within a week shelves that had been empty for weeks (due to the fact that stores could not keep up with consumer demand for hand sanitizer) were now overflowing with Info Bombs. While Bath & Body Works restocked the bombs every week, they had forgotten to acknowledge how in this current Digital Age, even new news often becomes antiquated in less than a day. Fortunately, the secret formula of the bombs relaxed consumers so much that they really didn’t care when their Info Bomb content was about how suspenseful the election was when the results were already in. They didn’t even care to acknowledge the pruning of their fingers until the tub water went cold.
Business was not all a bed of fragrant florals, though.
The competition quickly became rather LUSH.
Somewhere in the midst of Poole, Dorset, of the UK, was a humble black coloured building with LUSH’s logo blatantly plastered at its entrance. Determined to maintain international acclaim, the PR team was chowing down on the ends of their pens nervously at how Bath & Body works had compromised their bath bomb sales in the U.S. How would they step up to the plate-or in this case, into the bathtub-and do better?
At one point, someone stood up and remarked that LUSH had a more artisanal feel to their products. Couldn’t they just continue making bath bombs, but they’d replace news articles with memes and target it towards cynical Gen Z kids so that Bath & Body couldn’t sue them?
It was worth a shot and worked temporarily. However, Bath & Body Works struck back with a “new & improved potent formula,” with their new bestselling bomb, Valerian Valium, flying off the shelves. Consumers raved about how it calmed them like nothing else, and made them able to sleep afterwards with dreams of rolling lavender fields surrounding them. They couldn’t have cared less about some outdated headline about the genesis of an epidemic.
Laura Ilioaei is a second-year English and Communication studies major who just found out there’s a pandemic. You can reach them at [email protected].