A lot of people are using deodorant when they don't need to
There's a group of people who don't produce the chemical that leads to body odour.
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Your support makes all the difference.Applying deodorant is part of many people’s daily routine. Whether they roll it on or use a spray, it’s normal for most people to use deodorant to fight body odour.
However studies have found that the use of these odour-fighting products could be unnecessary for many.
Research has found there is a particular gene which could reveal whether or not your sweat would produce body odour.
When looking at whether people produced dry or wet ear wax, they found that people who produced dry ear wax also happened to lack a chemical in their armpits that bacteria would feed on – thus creating body odour.
Body odour of itself is odourless, however when it reacts with bacteria on the skin sweat is broken down revealing a chemical which produces a smell.
A larger study, from the University of Bristol, looked at participants in Britain and first set out to discover how many women produced body odour and subsequently how many used deodorising products. The study found that of 117 women who didn’t produce odour, three-quarters of them still used deodorant.
The leading author of this study, Professor Ian Day, put the use of deodorant in non-odour producing women down to social pressures.
“An important finding of this study relates to those individuals who, according to their genotype, do not produce under-arm odour. One quarter of these individuals must consciously or subconsciously recognise that they do not produce odour and do not use deodorant, whereas most odour producers do use deodorant. However, three quarters of those who do not produce an odour regularly use deodorants; we believe that these people simply follow socio-cultural norms.”
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