It was a day like any other over at the SUNY ESF campus, but everything was about to change. ESF Junior, Mike Fern, was onto something, “I began to notice that I smelled. And then I lifted my head up and realized, shit, the entire room smells…like sweat.” Immediately Mike decided something needed to be done so the wonderful smell of pine could return to their campus buildings and classrooms.
Once Mike got back to his dorm, he began to brainstorm, “I had to figure out a way to stop smelling without using environmentally harmful things like shampoo and body wash.” Mike faced a challenge, but he was not ready to back down. He rushed to the ESF lab and began to play around with ingredients such as biodegradable chalk, rain water and lavender. He came to the conclusion that these ingredients smelled good, but that he had no idea what to do with them, so that’s when he grabbed a blender. “My mom always told me that things taste best when mixed and mashed together, so I just threw the stuff into a blender and got this weird, chalky substance that smelled like Valentine’s day. Yeah, it smelled like a girl, but that’s better than smelling like a wet dog, isn’t it?”
Mike took this chalky substance and crammed it into an empty toilet paper roll (he likes to recycle items that otherwise have no better use) and then inserted a Pog (remember those?) into the bottom of the roll so that he could push the substance up and roll it onto his body–“It works like a push-up pop. You know, there’s ices inside the tube and you have to push up on the bottom to get more of the ices out to eat them. Hence the name ‘push-up pop.'” We got it, Mike.
He has decided to call his product “Smell B Gone” after he had a dream about his smell being gone.
Towards the end of his interview he added that he “can’t believe no one has ever thought of something like this. It’s awesome. I just roll it all over my body and I never even have to shower. Best of all, it masks the smell of weed in addition to body odor. I’m going to see if the bookstore will sell it…at least the ESF bookstore will, they’re a little bit more ahead of the SU bookstore in the world of body care.”
Good for you, Mike, good for you. Here’s hoping you never walk into a CVS and notice all the other good smelling, chalk-like substances in pretty push-up-pop-like containers and stay forever young.
***Disclaimer**** Not everyone who attends ESF smells…only the ones who don’t shower and spend all day hiking and watching tadpoles do.
