This article was first published inÂ
The Who’s Tommy is not one of the most memorable of the numerous musicals I’ve seen on Broadway. I was not a great fan of the group’s music, but nevertheless in 1993 the show called out to me for the strangest reason.
Back in the 1970s, a colleague and I had created The Magic of Chemistry, a show that blended chemical demonstrations, stage magic, slides and music to highlight the role that chemistry plays in our lives. I was always on the lookout for images to illustrate points we were making in the show. One day, while browsing in a record store, I came upon The Who Sell Out, an album the group had recorded in 1967.
Featured on the cover was Pete Townshend applying deodorant to his armpit from an oversized tube of “Odorono.” That picture, I thought, would be great to flash on the screen to accompany a discussion of chemicals used in everyday products. I bought the album and made a slide of the cover that we then used for years.
Even better, one of the songs on the album was titled “Odorono” and featured the lyrics: “She ripped her glittering gown / She couldn’t face another show / Her deodorant had let her down / She should have used Odorono.” Just the right music to play in the background as I described the chemical ingenuity in personal-care products.
What prompted this stroll down memory lane? The current trend for “whole body deodorants.” No longer are we just being urged to prevent the wafting of offensive odours from our armpits, we should also be considerate of others and ensure that no belligerent scents drift out from other body parts, including regions “down there.” A pretty clever marketing idea. Increase the surface area that has to be covered, and you increase profits.
How about profiting from a little science? Are such products really needed, and is there any risk in using them? Let’s go.
Sweat is the means by which the body regulates temperature. Evaporation of moisture requires heat, which is taken from the body, resulting in a cooling effect. Chemically, however, sweat has a different composition depending on where it is being secreted.
Most of the body is covered by eccrine sweat glands that produce mostly salty water that has no scent, while apocrine glands in the armpit and groin areas emit waste proteins, carbohydrates and fats along with moisture. These provide tasty meals for bacteria living on the skin. And like us, bacteria poop. Their excrement is composed of a variety of odorous compounds, the most notorious of which is trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid. This has a decidedly hircine odour. There’s a word that isn’t commonly encountered. It means “goatlike,” and anyone who has ever sniffed a male goat will testify that this is not a fragrance we want springing from our armpits. Female goats, on the other hand, find the scent positively alluring.
Given that apocrine glands are found only in the armpit and groin, there doesn’t seem to be much sense in trying to deodorize from head to toe. Accordingly, perspiring armpits have been the traditional target of antiperspirants and deodorants, which are not identical products.
Deodorants contain substances that impede the growth of skin bacteria along with fragrances that cover the smells the microbes produce. Antiperspirants actually prevent sweating by forming a plug in apocrine glands.
The very first product to silence body odour was introduced in the late 1800s as “Mum,” the name supposedly taken from the phrase “mum’s the word,” meaning to keep silent. It was a paste that contained zinc oxide, a chemical that does have some antibacterial properties, but while it may have reduced odour, cavorting with a thick paste in the armpit was not appealing.
In 1903, “Everdry” came along and introduced aluminum chloride as its main ingredient, the first true antiperspirant. Aluminum compounds react with moisture to form a gel that plugs up apocrine glands. Everdry, though, was inconvenient because it took forever to dry.
Other formulations of aluminum chloride soon appeared with “Odorono (Odor..Oh..no)” eventually conquering the market. As the story goes, surgeon Abraham Murphey was bothered by sweaty hands when he operated and experimented with solutions of aluminum chloride to tackle the problem. His teenage daughter Edna tried it on her armpits and realizing that it thwarted both wetness and smell saw a business opportunity. Odorono was born. Sales sputtered until 1912 when Edna set up a booth in Atlantic City to promote the product. In the sweltering summer heat, people were keen to try Odorono, and with sales increasing, Edna was able to hire an advertising agency. A “marriage made in heaven” was forged when the account was assigned to copy writer James Young, who came up with a brilliant idea.
At the time, Odorono was mostly marketed as a product to reduce underarm sweat and prevent clothing from becoming stained. Young had a different message. He aimed to convince women that they may be unaware that they are emitting odours that generate gossip behind their back and may even interfere with romance. “If you want to keep a man, you better not smell” was the message. It worked. Despite some ladies being so insulted that they cancelled subscriptions to magazines that featured Odorono ads, sales boomed.
Before long, many other manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon that rolled merrily along until the 2000s when the market for deodorants and antiperspirants flattened. A new idea was needed. Underarms had been saturated with aluminum compounds, antimicrobials and floral scents, so the advertising gaze shifted downward. Maybe if people hadn’t been concerned before about scents escaping from “down there,” they should be.
An army of novel “whole body deodorants” was poised to do battle against private part aromas. And they featured a new weapon, one that I had previously encountered in quite a different context. I had come across mandelic acid years ago when I had attacked the bogus cancer therapy “Laetrile.” This contained amygdalin, a compound isolated from apricot pits that claimed to poison cancer cells by slowly releasing cyanide.
Indeed, amygdalin does release cyanide, but its effect on cancer is fictional. As the compound breaks down, it also produces mandelic acid along with cyanide. This is what leaped from my memory as I perused the ingredient list on a typical all-body deodorant. What was mandelic acid doing there?
As it turns out, mandelic acid has antimicrobial properties that can reduce the number of skin bacteria looking to dine on apocrine gland secretions. It is safe enough. Mandelic acid belongs to the family of “alpha hydroxy acids,” compounds commonly found in skin creams because of their ability to slough off dead skin cells.
Now you can see how looking into all-body deodorants took me on a journey that weaved through Laetrile and Odorono and led me to reminisce about that picture on the cover of The Who Sell Out. That album regrettably was among the ones I sold for a paltry sum when the digital music age made records obsolete. Sigh.
