Harriet Dart was being unkind — but actually, it's a good thing to tell someone they smell

Paging Dr Ally Louks, we have another olfactory ethics debate right under our noses. Harriet Dart has apologised after being caught on mic saying her opponent at the Rouen OpenLois Boisson was offputtingly stinky.

Before the start of the second set, Dart sauntered past the umpire’s chair and made a snide comment about Boisson’s supposed odour. "Can you ask her to put on deodorant?” said the British No4. “She smells really bad."

How, exactly, Dart could catch scent of her rival’s alleged pong across an entire indoor court remains unclear. Tennis is, famously, a non-contact sport. Compared to, say, rugby or wrestling, if your nose is in another player’s pits something must have gone seriously wrong.

Was Dart suggesting that the stink waves were cartoonishly wafting across the net at her? Had Boisson skipped a shower to wage psychological warfare on her opponent? Or was Dart kicking up a stink because she was losing already?

Boisson had the last laugh, spanking Dart with a 6-0 6-3 win and posting a meme about the incident. The French player tagged personal care brand Dove in an Instagram story featuring a deliberately badly photoshopped picture of herself on court holding a deodorant bottle. “Apparently need a collab," remarked Boisson.

Meanwhile a shamefaced Dart issued a formal apology. "I want to apologise for what I said on court today, it was a heat-of-the-moment comment that I truly regret,” she said. It seems the Brit was the one unable to handle the heat. Perhaps she could collab with Impulse body spray to get that under control.

Clearly, Dart was being unkind and unsporting. Telling someone they stink is a playground taunt, but then tennis is famous for this kind of chicanery. Dart’s outburst sees her join the pantheon of tennis tantrums, where athletes at the top of their game are reduced to childish outbursts.

When John McEnroe yelled “you cannot be serious” at the Wimbledon umpire in 1981 it went down in history. Who can forget Tim Henman angrily (and accidentally) belting a ball at a ball girl in 1995, Serena Williams losing it at a line judge during the 2009 US Open (“I swear to God I’ll f***ing take the ball and shove it down your fucking throat”), or Jerzy Janowicz spitting on the line during a row with the umpire at the 2013 Australian open.

Tempers and tennis go together like strawberries and cream. But Dart’s barb comes at a time when people online have become unusually attuned to the politics of smell.

This is mostly thanks to the work of Cambridge academic Dr Louks, whose PhD thesis “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose” went viral. People were initially confused by her contention that scent in literature often has a racist, classist or sexist subtext, but suddenly smell and its politics were everywhere.

For instance, we now have a heightened sensitivity for how politicians might smell. Emmanuel Macron, it was recently reported, walks around in a cloud of Dior Eau Sauvage. The French President applies “industrial” quantities of the scent “at all hours of the day”, journalist Olivier Beaumont wrote in his new book The Tragedy of the Élysée. “Less-accustomed visitors may find themselves overcome by the floral and musky scent.”

While that sounds overwhelming, it may be preferable to come within smelling distance of Donald Trump. The US President smells like a terrible mix of “armpits, ketchup, makeup and a little butt” American politician Adam Kinzinger claimed on the Jimmy Kimmel show.

Clearly, policing how other people smell is political. And smell-based insults pack a real punch. But is it ever okay to tell someone they smell?

As London — and the Tube — warms up to summer, we’re all going to be smelling a lot more of each other. Not least because of the scourge of “natural” deodorants being advertised everywhere. Promising to keep you fresh with an aluminum-free formula, natural deodorant is used at one’s peril.

Seduced by the pretty packaging and social media astroturfing campaign, I took a brand new tub of the stuff on a work trip to Europe last year. I spent three days with my arms clamped to my sides, paranoid about my own pong. As someone who actively courts smell-based compliments (shout out to Lush’s Super Milk leave-in conditioner), it was my own personal nightmare.

If you ever catch me smelling less than fresh, you have carte blanche to tell me. As for Dart, while it wasn’t her finest hour, she remained true to the illustrious tradition of tennis temper tantrums while Boisson came out, fittingly, smelling like roses.

India Block is a culture and lifestyle writer