If you trust advertisements, the only way to survive this summer is with whole-body deodorant. Commercials for the product typically feature a hyper-earnest person confessing that they solved their odor problem by putting whole-body deodorant everywhere—and, yes they mean everywhere.
At first glance, the whole-body deodorant phenomenon is a comical cash grab. If you can convince folks to apply deodorant beyond the confines of the armpit, so much more product will be sold, it would seem. But beyond the greed and absurdity, these products and their marketing both exemplify—and unfortunately exacerbate—our culture’s fear of sweat.
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Although I think we all need a perspiration peptalk, I’ll absolutely concede that sweat is an objectively weird and flamboyant way to control body temperature: It’s a coordinated breach of the skin by the salty ocean inside. One minute you’re cool as a cucumber; the next you’re leaking liquid from inside your body. And yet, it is the most efficient strategy in the animal kingdom for staying cool when temperatures rise. The evaporation of these cooling floods dispatch our body heat into the atmosphere with stellar efficiency and sweep us back from the brink of heatstroke or death.
In fact, evolutionary biologists count sweat as one of the curious advantages that makes us human, a human superpower you might say. Sweat is much more efficient than, say, panting because we have oodles more naked skin (than tongue), millions of specialized glands, and a fluid entirely devoted to cooling us down. Other animals dispatch arguably grosser bodily fluids to evaporate away their body heat, including urine (seals), liquid poop (vultures) and vomit (bumblebees). In comparison to what evolution might have bequeathed humans, sweating is a gift.
Even still, many of us side-eye sweat because of the stink. The majority of humanity’s dubious aroma emerges from our armpits at puberty, thanks to the activation of a unique sweat gland that is much different than the ones releasing the cooling, salty floods. This second sweat gland (called an apocrine gland) produces a waxy and mostly odorless sweat. Specific kinds of bacteria living in your armpits find this waxy sweat delicious, and when they eat it, their metabolic byproducts—a scientific euphemism for “bacterial farts”—is what makes that area aromatically raunchy.
Most deodorants work by being antiseptics: You put it on, the deodorant kills all the bacteria that eat apocrine sweat, and their death keeps stink at bay. But here’s the rub: putting deodorants over your whole body, as some advertisements advise, would likely spread antiseptic everywhere and have the potential to disrupt your skin’s microbiome. These symbionts help fight off pathogenic bacteria and fungi. Annihilation of these populations in your armpits, a contained area specifically responsible for an exceptionally noxious stink, seems comparatively moderate. (And if a brand of whole-body deodorant contains no antiseptic then it’s just perfume by another name, and mediocre perfume at that. )
The truth is that humans don’t just smell “good” or “bad.” We also just smell like ourselves. There’s a subtle symphony of aroma that distinguishes you from me, beyond the strong odor of our armpits. Our body odor print is often recognized and appreciated by those closest to us. Many cherish the scent of their partner, their baby, their parents, their best friends. This aroma can evoke feelings of attachment, nostalgia, desire.
Read More: What Your Body Odor Says About You
A successful whole-body deodorant wouldn’t just dampen the unpleasantly ripe aroma of our armpits, it would interrupt the subtle symphony of smell that distinguishes your aroma from everybody else’s and provides subtle clues about yourself to your nearest and dearest. Why would you mess with that?
Much of the reason is shame marketing.
In the early 1900s, advertisers developed a strategy called whisper copy to rescue the then fledgling deodorant and antiperspirant industry. Whisper copy, launched first in 1919 for a product amusingly called Odorono, equated body odor with social exclusion. In short: You stink, people are gossiping about it, and you’ll consequently never find love or a successful career.
One example of the strategy from 1937, borrowed by Odorono’s competitor Mum deodorant read, “In this smart modern age, it’s against the code for a girl (or a man, either) to carry a repellent odor of underarm perspiration on clothing or person.” This “straight talk” whisper copy strategy is still used by traditional advertising and social media influencers when marketing deodorant (and other personal care products) today.
And it’s not just the odor of sweat that can feel shameful. The mere appearance of the bodily fluid can also betray social anxiety and stress—a moist handshake at a job interview, soggy armpits when you’re chatting up your crush. That’s because temperature isn’t the only sweat trigger; the stress hormone adrenaline can also open the floodgates.
We can often suppress other socially embarrassing bodily functions—a fart or a burp—for a second or two, enough time to relocate somewhere more socially secluded. But when sweat glands get marching orders, whether it’s from our internal thermometers or our emotional centers, the tides of sweat (and shame) wait for no one. The biological realities of sweat collide with our unreasonable (but perpetually sought out) desire to perfectly curate our external appearance.
Our control freakish behavior is even more amplified because of social media and the rise of video conference call applications, where we can carefully tweak our brand identity to the people in our social circles. Yet those filtered digital personas go rogue in real life, especially when a heat wave, hot flash, or moment of anxiety soaks a tidy outfit.
But here’s the thing: We’re all nervous on dates or job interviews. We’ve all had a body odor malfunction. It’s part of being human. Let’s reinforce empathy rather than shame when our bodies go off-message.
Completely controlling our sweat is a faulty quest so let’s opt for moderation. Especially given that staying cool will be a key to surviving increasingly warmer temperatures. How unfairly lucky that humans are both the perpetrators of climate change and have a biological advantage for surviving it.
So instead of being ashamed of sweat this summer, let’s include it in the body positivity movement. And let’s appreciate that our sweat is not only keeping us alive, but also more connected.
