Body odour is a worry for thousands of people. Chemical products alleged to abolish or modify it enjoy enormous sales. Daedalus now has a new approach.

He points out that our body odour depends on our ‘personal ecology’ of skin bacteria, which make a living by fermenting our sweat. Some unfortunates are home to bacteria that ferment their sweat to highly offensive compounds. No amount of washing or deodorizing can abolish this problem. The skin bacteria form a stable equilibrium ecology, suited to the local conditions. They can never be completely eliminated, and the few survivors will recolonize their territory and establish the equilibrium anew.

But, says Daedalus, it is most unlikely that skin can sustain just one equilibrium ecology. He points out that our gut also harbours a complex stable consortium of organisms. Yet a few newcomers can sometimes precipitate an eruption of ‘episodic gastroenteritis’ that expels the old consortium and establishes a new one.

So DREADCO bacteriologists and cosmeticians are doing the same with the skin. They are sampling the skin flora of volunteers, and identifying the metabolic role of each organism in the consortium. For each volunteer, they will then devise a different mixture of organisms, calculated to exploit his sweat a little more efficiently, or be more at home in his surface microclimate. When spotted onto his skin, the new consortium will spread rapidly — possibly with a moving line of itching and reddening as the microscopic battle rages. When it has died down, his new occupiers will ferment his sweat differently. So he will smell different.

Discovering which consortia are most stable on what type of skin, and what smell they produce, will be a complex and demanding piece of research. But DREADCO's ‘bioactive anti-odour treatment’ should then be wildly popular. Victims of body odour will run (or be pushed) to the DREADCO clinic for the treatment. Criminals on the run may join the queue, hoping to change their smell and baffle the bloodhounds. And the Brussels bureaucracy, always keen to impose yet another intrusive European harmonization, may ask Daedalus to devise a super-dominant skin consortium, to be spotted onto every EU citizen. A uniform European smell, eliminating all xenophobic remarks about smelly foreigners, could bring a new instinctive unity to the emerging superstate.