Your Shining Armor Against Odors

People sweat, and that is a good thing. An average person loses up to two litres of liquid per day by sweating. That goes mostly unnoticed because sweat is made of 99 % odorless water. Only when sweat mixes with bacteria on your skin does it start smelling. That’s chemistry.

Though it may not smell like a fresh and cool summer morning, sweating keeps you from overheating. Not sweating would mean somehow having to regulate your body temperature differently. You could pant like a dog, for instance, but that would look weird. So, unless sweat pearls drip from your forehead, most of the time people won’t even notice what’s going on with your sweat glands. Just put on some deodorant against body odors and you’re fine. That’s chemistry, too.

Sometimes though, the job is not done by simply killing the odors. Sometimes, you have to get to the bottom of it. If you seriously want to dry out the trickle from your armpits, you should skip the deodorant and switch to an antiperspirant instead. You can choose from a variety of products with different ingredients. Aluminum chloride is the most common component to give antiperspirants efficiency and, together with silver ions or zinc as additives, to build yourself a shining armor under your arms. But what is this stuff and how does it help keep you dry?

SILVER IONS: YOUR SWEAT’S KRYPTONITE

Do you work out a lot? Do you save mankind from evil on a regular basis? Or do you just tend to sweat quickly and heavily in general? Well then an antiperspirant with silver ions might be a reliable companion for an everyday Superman like you are. Water-soluble silver citrate, a salt from citric acid, prevents even the nastiest odors. How cool is that? Plus: It is particularly skin friendly and won’t leave any stains on your shirt (or cape).

Sweat is not always the same. In fact, sweat can be very different depending on its trigger. Physical exertion and high temperatures, for instance, make you sweat – and smell – differently than high amounts of mental stress would. When stress hits, an antiperspirant containing not only aluminium chlorohydrate but also zinc has your back (or your armpits). Zinc can have a soothing, cleaning and healing effect on human skin. More importantly: It can reduce the production of sebum, which can lead to less sweat-induced odors under stressful circumstances. Thus, an antiperspirant containing an antibacterial zinc complex is designed especially for covering the unpleasant effects of stress-induced sweating. So when the going gets tough, zinc is king.

Aluminum is one of the most prevalent chemical elements in the world. It’s even in our food. Aluminum chloride – or its derivative called Aluminum Chlorohydrate, to be perfectly smart-aleck – is widely used in many different antitranspirants due to its antiseptic and sweat-retardent characteristics. If you sweat only a little and you just want to cover the odors from it, you might as well rely on a deodorant without aluminum chloride. But if your armpits are never really dry, you should think about using an antiperspirant with aluminum chloride. It partly “locks down” your sweat glands and is one of the most efficient tools to significantly reduce your sweating.

Oh, and no worries! Your armpits make up no more than 1 % of all the sweat glands in your body. Go ahead, count them. So locking them down still leaves you with more than enough other glands to sweat from. But none of these are likely to leave such pesky spots under your arms.