Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 18, 1993 TAG: 9312030376
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LIZ DOUP KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Especially in the summer.
You sweat buckets. You sweat bullets. You sweat at work, at play, at love.
But what do you know about sweat except that it stinks? What should you know?
Keep reading ...
Pheeeeeeewwww!
That smell - that sickening, sour stench seeping out from your armpits and fouling the air around us is body odor.
Get rid of it. Now.
Tolerant folks that we are, we'll accept all manner of personal quirks except reeking BO. That's why each year, 98 percent of America forks out nearly two billion bucks for ``underarm protection.'' As for the other 2 percent, get with the program, please.
The problem, as we smell it, is this: Sweat on its own is odorless. But when normal body bacteria meets perspiration, it breaks down the sweat, causing icky odors.
Stinking isn't a smooth social move, so ever since we abandoned the nomadic life and formed communities, we've looked for ways to avoid grossing out those around us.
In his ``Art of Love,'' Ovid cautioned the lover to ``keep the rank odor of goats away from his armpits.'' Cleopatra opted for sweet-smelling oils.
Finally, and not a moment too soon for modern society, deodorants - which mask odor and fight bacteria - debuted a century ago. Antiperspirants - which do all the above ``and'' inhibit sweating - quickly followed.
Today, women pick antiperspirants 98 percent of the time; men, deodorant, 62 percent. The reason is machismo, not marketing.
``Men think sweat is sexy, that sweating is part of what being a man is all about,'' says a female executive in the business, who asks not to be identified. ``I sit in meetings with these guys, most of them wearing jackets, and I think `Is there water pouring down your jacket right now? Are you part of the 62 percent using a deodorant?'''
Regardless of personal taste, before we pick our personal armpit perfume, companies test them.
``We put people in a hot room with high humidity, sorta like Miami in the summer,'' says David Fondots of Reheis Chemical Co. in Berkeley Heights, N.J., which makes the active ingredients in antiperspirants.
Pre-weighed cloth pads under the armpits collect sweat. Then, following the human bake-off lasting a few minutes to an hour, the liquid is measured.
At Hill Top Research, a testing lab in Miamiville, Ohio, ``odor evaluators'' test deodorants by sniffing the pits of panelists who get paid to wear products.
Evaluators sniff the right pit, then left. Right. Left. Four sniffs total by noses so well-trained they smell more than your basic BO.
``Their noses are the Cadillac of the industry,'' says Mary Ellen Hubbard, test-area supervisor. ``I remember one evaluator asking a woman, `Have you been eating tomatoes?' Turns out the woman had been canning tomatoes the day before.''
What ``odor evaluators'' smell, in fact, is a bouquet of one to two dozen organic acids that create body odor when sweat and bacteria meet. The ``rose'' in the bouquet - the acid mainly responsible for that armpit aroma - was discovered three years ago by George Preti, an organic chemist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
An important discovery for the industry because the more scientists know, the more effective a deodorant they can make.
``Not that everyone finds the odor to be unacceptable,'' Preti says.
Fact is, what's rank to one person may be riveting to another.
As Napoleon Bonaparte messaged to Josephine after the battle of Marengo: ``Will be home in three days ... don't wash.''
by CNB