Ah ... the sweet smell of success! That's what Brandi, a 17-year-old student living in New York City, remembers experiencing when she was in elementary school and only eight years old. Even though she still hadn't gone through puberty and wasn't troubled by body odor, Brandi started using deodorant in advance. "I wanted to stop the stink before it even started," she says.
Did Brandi really need to use deodorant? Probably not. If you take a daily bath or shower and wear clean clothes, chances are you might be just fine without it. Or you might be one of the many people who like the way their body smells naturally and choose to ignore the deodorant dilemma entirely. In fact, many people find other people's natural body smells attractive.
Often, during puberty, your personal scent changes in a way you or other people might find unpleasant. Your sweat glands put out more perspiration, and bacteria on your skin cause the sweat to have a different odor than before. If you're concerned about how your underarms smell, there's a whole aisle in almost any drugstore or supermarket full of sticks, roll-ons, gels, sprays, and creams designed to change or cover up your scent. Some can even keep you from sweating at all! Read on to see how deodorant can help you keep body odor at bay.
What Is It?
Deodorant is a combination of chemicals that mask or destroy unpleasant odors. To do its job, it needs to be able to stick to where the odor starts. Most underarm deodorants have a combination of perfume and different kinds of adhering agents, like mineral oil and talc, to keep the scent where it's needed.
All brands of deodorant are pretty similar — usually, the only difference is in the scent. Deodorants made for men are the same as those made for women, except that different perfumes are added to each.
The main difference among products in the "deodorant" section is that some are deodorants, some are antiperspirants, some are both. While deodorant gets rid of odor by covering it up, antiperspirants get to the root of the problem by stopping sweat altogether. Usually, antiperspirants contain a deodorant in them, as well, just to keep all your bases covered.
How Does It Work?
Since body odor is caused by sweat and bacteria, your best bet to stop both is a deodorant-antiperspirant combination. Deodorants with an antiperspirant look the same and smell the same as the ones without — so how do they keep you dry?
All antiperspirants have an aluminum-based compound as their active ingredient. If you look on the back of an antiperspirant container, this ingredient is always listed first. When your skin takes up the aluminum, each cell takes in water at the same time. As water flows in, the skin cells begin to swell. The cells get so big that, eventually, sweat can't squeeze past the cells to exit your sweat ducts.
Eventually your cells have to release the water that they've taken up, and the swelling goes down. Your sweat glands open again, and sweat can flow back out. To keep from sweating, you have to reapply your antiperspirant.
A Stinky Hoax
You may have heard from your friends or read an e-mail saying that aluminum-based products can cause breast cancer. The American Cancer Society has been denouncing this Internet-based rumor as a hoax since December 1999. Other e-mail rumors link antiperspirant with other types of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, or worse. To this date, no studies have shown any connection between using antiperspirant or deodorant and developing any health problems. So don't sweat about whether you should be using a "natural" deodorant — although some people prefer the natural stuff — any type of deodorant or antiperspirant is safe to use.
