I’m a big picture type of person. I like to start with a wider or broader view of something to establish a greater context within which to look at a more specific subject. In the case of using antiperspirants or deodorants and our obsession with body odor, I think it helps to first understand why and how we sweat before tackling the bigger decision of which type of product to use or if you should use any product at all.
Sweating is your body’s natural way of cooling itself off –whether that extra heat comes from hardworking muscles (the result of exercise or over-exertion), from over stimulated nerves (being nervous), or from the burning of food via the body’s metabolic processes. When sweat evaporates from the surface of your skin, it removes excess heat and cools you. So even though sweating can sometimes be embarrassing, it’s a natural bodily function that regulates and maintains the body’s normal temperature, which is crucial to our survival.
The average person has 2.6 million sweat glands in their skin. There are two different types of sweat glands in our underarms, apocrine and eccrine. The eccrine glands are by far the most numerous and produce most of the sweat in our underarms, as well as other areas, including the forehead, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet.
For the most part, human perspiration has no smell until fermented by bacteria, which thrive in hot, humid and acid pH environments like your armpits. The apocrine glands are responsible for making you stink. That’s because the sweat they produce contains fats and proteins from within your body that are carried to the exterior surface of your skin where they react with bacteria that live under your arms –creating odors. The fats and proteins in this sweat make it a little thicker and milkier than eccrine sweat and sometimes yellowish in color. This is what typically causes those yellow stains in the armpit area of your shirts.
Ironically, the under arm hair that most women tend to remove, either by waxing or shaving, can actually help minimize odors because it wicks moisture away from the skin and helps keep the skin dry enough to prevent or diminish bacterial colonization in the first place. This hair is less susceptible to bacterial growth and so it’s ideal for preventing bacterial odor. While antiperspirants and deodorants aim to achieve the same objective: eliminating the source of odor-causing sweat, they work in fundamentally different ways and I’ll talk about that a little more in my next post.
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