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Body Odor & Antiperspirants
Stop! Your Go-To Antiperspirant Might Be Making You Smell WorseAs an AskMen reader, the kind of guy who enjoys browsing countless articles about male skin- and hair-care products, one thing is certain: You use deodorant. Specifically, you use antiperspirants, because you know that deodorants are for suckers and that combating body odor is best done by stopping it at the source (sweat). Well, according to scientists at Ghent University in Belgium, the only thing us well-meaning armpit-swipers are doing is making ourselves even stinkier.
A reminder: Body odor happens when the ever-present bacteria on your skin consume the lipids and amino acids found in sweat and then jettison their waste in the form of foul-smelling little bacterial poops. Common deodorants aim to combat this by both killing off the bacteria and replacing their stink with more pleasant smells. Antiperspirants, attempting to do us one better, are deodorants that also use an aluminum compound to clog sweat glands altogether.
Apparently, neither of them really do us any favors.
In the admittedly small study reported by Real Clear Science, the researchers asked six men and two women to stop using their chosen deodorant products for 28 days, while one man who typically didn’t use any (who is this hero?) was asked to apply some daily. Because everyone’s bacterial communities are different, it was difficult to determine precisely which changes were brought about by the cessation/commencement of deodorant use, but: By the end, every participant’s bacterial makeup had changed. What’s worse, antiperspirants specifically seemed to result in an increase of Actinobacteria.
You’ll at this point be unsurprised to learn that Actinobacteria are the major culprit behind body odor. The researchers can’t yet say why this is the case, but they believe the aluminum gland-clogging compounds in antiperspirant may kill off less-smelly “good” bacteria, allowing their stinky Actino cousins to flourish.
On the other hand, plain-old deodorant may be linked to a slight decrease in the smelly guys. Regular deodorant also happens to be less expensive than antiperspirants on average, since it doesn’t claim to do as much. Is it possible that major cosmetic brands have long known that they could make more money by selling us more expensive products that only result in us needing more of said product? Huh, imagine that.
For most men, this is a pretty good indicator to at least try out the more pedestrian stuff and see if you can’t smell the difference. The aluminum compounds in antiperspirants are also what lead to the pit stains in your undershirts, so there’s another reason. For other men, this isn’t great news — many men sweat so much that life would be very uncomfortable without an effective antiperspirant.
For you guys, talk to your doctor — they have ways of making you sweat less that don’t also make you smell bad.