I’m wondering about the health impact of using anti-perspirant. But to be clear, I’m not asking about the substance itself and whether that’s harmful. Rather, this is about the impact of interfering with a normal bodily function. Presumably there’s something the body gains out of underarm sweat, or people wouldn’t do it. So I’m wondering if there’s some impact from denying the body this function.
Possibly the need has been obviated to an extent by modern climate control? In any event, I would expect that the impact would be minimal. But I’m wondering if there is any impact altogether or if it’s completely benign.
I’m 66 years old and have used anti perspirant since I started to stink in my late teens. Never had a problem. If my arm pits don’t sweat I think other parts of my body pick up work of cooling my body.
Disclosure: I worked on an anti-perspirant brand for several years. As a result, I know way too much about underarms.
First, it’s important to understand that your body has two types of sweat glands.
Eccrine sweat glands are located all over your body (including your underarms). Eccrine sweat is essentially salty water, and your body uses eccrine sweat to cool off in hot temperatures. Blocking the eccrine sweat glands in your underarms with an anti-perspirant is unlikely to have a material impact on your body’s ability to regulate temperature, since your underarms are a very small portion of your overall skin surface.
Apocrine sweat glands, on the other hand, are only located in certain places on your body, typically those places where you have wiry hair: mostly, your underarms, genitals, and nipples. Apocrine sweat is different from eccrine sweat (I’ve read it described as “a pale milky goo”), and it’s full of proteins which bacteria like to feed on – and when bacteria do so, they release waste gas, which is where underarm odor comes from.
It’s not clear exactly the role that apocrine sweat plays for humans, though I’ve read hypotheses that it can serve as a sexual signal, as well as a warning (since apocrine sweat can be triggered by stress). So, stopping underarm sweat/odor would seem to also block those signals – however, I suspect that those signals are compensated for by other social signals which we, as humans, have developed.
Pretty much all of them do; various aluminium salts are the only active ingredients which the US FDA recognizes as providing anti-perspirancy (and, anti-perspirants are classified as an over-the-counter drug). A deodorant-only product doesn’t contain aluminum salts, but it also does nothing to reduce perspiration.
The debate over aluminum and Alzheimer’s has been going on for at least 30 years (and probably longer). I’m not close to the topic, but my understanding is that the science isn’t clear; I’n also not sure iif topical use of aluminum can get into the bloodstream.
Due to a condition that was causing them to become painfully infected on a regular basis (hidradenitis suppurativa), I had my apocrine sweat glands removed from my armpits. I think it’s been about 20 years for the left and 10 or so for the right. I’ve suffered zero ill effects from this.
Like kenobi 65 said those glands seem to have more primal use than modern.
Bruce Lee had his apocrine sweat glands removed, for vanity reasons. This surgery is rumored to have contributed to his death, because he could no longer sweat and was training/filming in very hot conditions. But that’s nonsense. I still sweat, Bruce still sweatted. I just don’t ooze goopy bacteria anymore. Lee’s cause of death is still speculated upon but lack of apocrine sweat glands shouldn’t be considered.
This sounds like some sort of comedy bit, since those glands are tiny and numerous and distributed over a significant area. But sure enough, I googled it, and they just excise the entire patch of skin containing those glands. Kind of a brute-force solution, but it seems like it works.
I just have two long thin scars along where my arm meets my body. They must have gone fairly deep because I still have some numbness in my triceps. I never actually inquired as to how they accomplish the removal but I always assumed that they went in an pulled out those glands. Or just cut the fuck out of everything and let it scar over. Looks like the procedure in the above picture is newer than mine.
I’m not sure if it necessarily follows that the mere existence of a bodily function means that it must serve some important purpose. It’s at least possible that it’s some vestigial function that was important to our evolutionary ancestors but no longer serves any real purpose. That said this isn’t my area of expertise, so I don’t actually know if it is or not.
I was going to use the appendix as an example of this, but from a quick check of Wikipedia apparently the idea that the appendix is a vestigial organ has changed in recent decades.
:eek: So they don’t close the wound? Photo C says that’s two weeks after surgery. Why would they not use balloons to increase the skin on either side of the incision so they could remove the problem area and then sew it shut?!?
It’s interesting how there are deodorant/antiperspirant and deodorant-only products on the store shelves. Evidently, there is a market for people who are OK sweating under the arms but don’t want to stink. Either that or they have bought into the thinking that antiperspirants may be harmful in some way.
Traditionally, it’s more the former than the latter.
Back when I worked in the category, in the 1990s, deodorant-only products were maybe 20% of the market. Nearly all of them were targeted specifically to men – brands like Speed Stick, Right Guard, etc., offered both antiperspirants and deodorants. Our research showed us that there was a segment of men who didn’t care so much about wetness as they did about stinking.
But, we also found that there was a not-insigificant percentage of men who had no idea that there was a difference between antiperspirants and deodorants, and had no idea if the product they were using was meant to stop them from sweating.
Meanwhile, the “unisex” brands (like Sure, Degree, etc.), and the women’s brands (Secret, Lady Speed Stick) pretty much only offered antiperspirants. At that time, Secret offered exactly one deodorant-only SKU, and it was a poor seller for them. We saw that the percentage of women who didn’t care if they had wet underarms was much lower than the percentage of men who didn’t care.
Even back then, there was also a small group of consumers who specifically didn’t want aluminum in their products. They would usually opt for a deodorant-only product, for that reason. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that there is a similar, pretty small group of consumers today with similar views.
To speak to the last post, I’m a male who has used deodorants his entire life since teen years (so about 30 years now). A couple of years back I bought a deodorant and didn’t pay attention to the fact it wasn’t an antiperspirant. I know the difference but I just assumed it had both functions.
Not long after I started using it, I noticed a huge difference. I was sweating like a pig after any kind of exercise. Specifically from my armpits. It was dramatic enough I even considered checking myself into a doctor before remembering I’d recently bought a new deodorant. So I checked and sure enough, it was not the “dry” version of the product I normally bought. I was shocked by the difference. I didn’t think it made that much of a difference but at least for me it did.
Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent and just an anecdote but I can tell you that not using an antiperspirant can certainly have a negative effect for someone who usually puts it on every morning.
Antiperspirant only reduces about 20% of the sweating. It doesn’t stop it completely. Plus, the yellowing of shirt arm pits is caused by the antiperspirant chemicals. Deodorant-only products don’t damage clothing.
If by Humans, you mean only Africans and Europeans, then you are correct. Maybe those ethnic subgroups were the biggest market for the work you were doing, but there is almost an entire highly populated continent out there that doesn’t have this problem.
Quote from the Master (above link) : “In 2006 Yoshiura et al. noted the longstanding observation that in Asian populations where dry wax is common, sweaty armpits and body odor are rare. Their further research demonstrated in 2009 that earwax type and armpit sweat are strongly associated genetically, and that ABCC11 evidently codes for both.”
I actually did consider mentioning, in my earlier response, that underarm deodorants are far less of a “thing” in Asian countries, as most East Asians don’t suffer from underarm odor on the way that humans from other regions do (to the point that strong underarm odor may even be considered to be a medical issue by some Asians).
And, yes, the company I worked for was producing antiperspirant and deodorant products for the U.S. market.
Warning #2: The armpit picture is nothing compared to the pictures of the genital region at the bottom of the screen. Both of them must have had some really terrible infections, if they were willing to undergo something like that (although that looks like a pre-pubertal boy in the bottom pictures).
I typically use a non-antiperspirant deodorant. For me, at least, it’s because I don’t really sweat much from my armpits. (That is, unless I’m also sweating everywhere else because I’m doing something physically demanding or in a hot environment.) But even without generating much noticeable axillary moisture, I know that without deodorant I’ll still get some stink. I take that as a sign that I have not-particularly-active eccrine sweat glands in my armpits, but pretty standard apocrine ones.
So I don’t really need to keep obvious moisture at bay, but I do want to fend off odor. In that case, I don’t see the point in chemically blocking sweat. And when I do use an antiperspirant, I don’t really like the strange “hyrophobic” feel of it when I go to shower.
Having been involved in the treatment and, in a couple of cases, the surgical therapy for chronic, severe, HA-associated infections…yes, the cure is drastic and looks horrible, but the infections were much, much, much worse.
(Many of the infections can become superinfected with various anaerobes. Cleaning wounds with significant anaerobic bacterial colonization is, well, an olfactory experience that really can’t be described. The only other cases that came close were some not-so-fresh autopsies. And even then…
“Room clearing” means something entirely different when the room in question is an operating room…