Sweat doesn’t smell.

It is mostly water, a little bit of salt and some tiny amounts of other body waste stuff. The millions of eccrine glands located all over our body sweat to maintain our internal body temperature.

When it comes to ‘the pits-n-bits’ there are different sweat glands present; these are called apocrine glands. These glands secrete a milkier sweat that has a different composition; namely fats and proteins. Apocrine glands are located in the ‘grassy’ parts of the body and secrete directly onto the hair follicles.

Bacteria live on your skin. We have trillions of them in and on our bodies. Bacteria that live in the ‘grassy’ parts like to munch on the rich apocrine gland sweat. The ‘leftovers’ from bacteria’s feast is what we associate as body odor. Body odor is seen as bad which is kinda sad because it’s normal to smell. In fact, the apocrine glands main purpose is to give you your own distinctive stank.

Deodorants simply reduce the number of bacteria. This reduction in the number of bacteria eating your apocrine sweat allows you to not smell as much.

Conversely, antiperspirants only effect your eccrine glands from pumping out sweat, which doesn’t really do much except keep you drier. Since your armpits apocrine gland sweat is what feeds the bacteria and antiperspirants do nothing to suppress the output from these feeder glands; we think it’s best just to sweat!