What Creates Body Odor?

There are three things that make you sweat. You sweat when you get overheated, you sweat when you exert yourself and you sweat when you’re nervous or under stress.  Of the three, sweat from stress stinks the most.

As your body temperature rises in the heat or when you exercise, sweat glands all over your body produce moisture to cool down your skin and when it evaporates it carries away the heat with it. This kind of sweat is 99 percent water.

But when you’re under pressure or nervous, adrenaline and cortisol enter the bloodstream. It raises your heartbeat, some people’s faces get bright red and your body reacts by creating sweat. But this is a different kind of sweat. It’s produced by different glands in the body. It’s 20 percent fats and proteins and most of it comes from the armpits and pubic area. This is the kind of sweat that stinks and produces body odor.

Really what the stink is supposed to do is ward off attackers. Just like the smell of a skunk wards off enemies, a human’s BO can get so bad it could have a tendancy to keep other animals away – at least keep other humans away.

So to solve that problem researchers developing deodorants focus on stopping the smell chemically, not just covering up the smell. The company that developed Secret’s Clinical Strength antiperspirant deodorant has a patented molecule that chemically traps odor molecules and these are the molecules produced by stress.