The Smell Episode: Axe Body Spray, Sriracha hot sauce, space perfume and Scratch-and-Sniff shirts

In this interview from our archives, Ms. Lithwick tells Carol, "I smelled like the most entitled, swaggery, full-of-confidence 13-year-old boy. I smelled a like something a little bit old had climbed into a rusty can and died. And it was really manly and fantastic."

The Slate writer's experiment came about by accident. Her family was on vacation with her 13-year-old nephew. He wore Axe. So soon her own sons, who are 8 and 10, were wearing Axe. One day, she inadvertently put the stuff on herself.

"I felt like I could hear the angels. I felt tremendous. And so I thought I going to try being a 13-year-old boy, or at least smelling like one, for a week," she explains.

Her husband threatened to move into the spare bedroom. But some of her female co-workers marvelled at how fabulous she smelled.

"My first reaction was, 'Hey, this is great, I'm getting a reaction,'" she says. "And then I thought, 'Oh my God, my children like a fragrance that makes 40-year-old women swoon. That can't be good.'"

And her kids?

"About four days into my experiment, they just stopped using the stuff altogether," she tells Carol. "I think there was some profound moment of, 'I don't want to smell like my mom,' and that was good."

Hear that interview with Dahlia Lithwick in this episode of As It Happened, plus more from our archives:

Barbara Frum explores the '70s craze for Scratch-and-Sniff Tshirts.

A woman who lives beside the Sriracha hot sauce plant describes living with the overwhelming smell of chilis.

A scientist describes the results of feeding chickens garlic.

And a perfume created in 1975 to commemorate a joint U.S.-Soviet space mission.