I recently wrote a post on hygiene hacks and confessed that I did not use a traditional antiperspirant. I use alternative measures to ensure I am “daisy fresh,” so there was no need to hold your nose in my presence.
I watched a new episode of “The Great American Baking Show” yesterday. I was bombarded by commercials showing people spraying a total deodorizing spray not only on their armpits but on their saddle area, feet, back, neck, and just about everywhere else. I always felt that these areas were handled with simple soap and water.
I remember the push in the 1970s to get women to use “Summer’s Eve” vaginal douche, which led to all sorts of problems, from dryness to infections. I was surprised to discover that vaginal douching, a bad idea unless medically necessary, had been pushed by advertisers for some time before that. Lysol (the cleaning product) encouraged the use of a Lysol douche with ads with titles like, “She was the perfect wife except for one neglect.” By 1911, there were several reported deaths and poisonings due to this practice. Lysol responded by telling women to continue using Lysol, but dilute it first! Keep those customers coming, who cares if you are poisoning them! Doctors will tell you never to use vaginal douches unless directed by a healthcare provider. You will mess things up.
My father was born in Chicago in 1910 in a home that initially didn’t have a modern bathroom. When he was younger, he remembers being bathed in a washtub. As he got older, he went to a community bathhouse where you could buy a sliver of soap and the use of a towel for a few pennies. This would be a once-a-week event. I asked him if people smelled in those days, and he said no, people did a daily wash-up to ensure they were clean.
The first time that I traveled to Europe was in the 1980s. I remember hearing that no one used deodorant and expected my nose to be assaulted. I did not encounter smelly people on that trip. They were doing other things to clean themselves. Today, most Europeans have converted to commercial deodorants, likely due to advertising.
Although modern bathing and showering are the result of indoor plumbing, keeping oneself clean and good-smelling has been documented as far back as Egyptian times and has been recorded among just about any group since that time. Some used religious cleansing as the reason to keep clean; others had communal bath houses where they could socialize and bathe. Egyptians used simple soaps, while the Romans and Greeks cleaned their skin with scented oils. Other cultures relied on water or mild abrasives to clean away the stink.
We often think of Medieval times as odoriferous, but people from then were concerned about cleanliness and tried to keep themselves smelling nice. Then, as now, the more wealth you had, the greater your access to hygiene options.
Yes, there have been times when people thought bathing was unhealthy or a sign of moral degeneracy, but many still did their best to smell better by wearing pungent spices or perfumes.
Dirty clothing often causes a stink; in the past, cleaning clothes could be difficult. People would beat or brush out dirt, air out clothing, and sometimes remake outfits to remove stains. There were no dry cleaners in those days!
Often, their clothes were made of wool or linen, two natural fibers that are bacteriostatic and odor-resistant. They also wore layers of clothing so that their outer clothes never touched their skin. Their “underwear” was frequently changed. If you were wealthy, it was changed daily. If you were poorer, it was washed several times a week.
Research gains in the late 1700s and 1800s made the mass production of inexpensive soaps possible. Pears translucent soap was introduced in 1807, and Lever Brothers (now Unilever Corporation) introduced Sunlight soap in the late 1800s. During this time, soap went from a luxury item for the elite to a product that just about anyone could afford. In Germany, detergents were invented in 1900 and found their way into multiple products, including self-care items like Dove soap, a syndet (detergent) bar introduced in 1955.
Dial soap, which has antimicrobial agents, was the first deodorant soap and was introduced in 1949 with ads that stressed, “Dial stops odor before it starts!” Deodorant soaps have used a variety of antimicrobial agents that have been banned over the years. More recent studies have shown that consumer deodorant soaps are no different from regular soaps in reducing skin bacteria and pose a danger to the environment. Dial is still a popular soap; it uses an anti-bacterial agent called benzalkonium chloride, and I’m unclear why.
Liquid soaps were invented in the mid-1800s, but most current liquid soaps are not soaps but detergents. Softsoap brand hand soap (a detergent) became popular in the 1970s, and shower gels (also detergents) became popular in the late 1980s.
There are several methods to deal with odor. The first one is to clean your body regularly. In the US, this means taking a bath or, more likely, a shower. In other places with less access, it could mean a trip to the river or a sponge bath. Other methods are to use a masking smell, like a perfume, to hide offensive odors or to block sweat production in odor-causing areas.
I went on a hiking trip with a close friend. I stayed at base camp and did day hikes while my friend and his son did a five-day trek over the mountains. My friend is typically very clean, and I have never noticed him to have an odor problem. However, he wore the same clothes on this hike and had minimal opportunities to wash. It was sweltering hot, and he sweated quite a bit. When I picked him and his son up, I could only describe the odor as similar to a garbage dumpster. After a shower, he was as good as new, but I suggested he burn his hiking clothes.
Our bodies have two types of sweat glands: eccrine glands, which are located all over the body. When you sweat, your body uses evaporation to cool itself off. Most people can’t smell this type of sweat, but some can, including me. Eccrine sweat doesn’t smell bad at all; it smells like people, and I rather like it.
The other glands are the apocrine glands located in the scalp, breasts, armpits, and groin. These glands produce an oily sweat that serves as food for certain bacteria. The waste products from these bacteria give people body odor, or BO.
Feet only have eccrine glands, but sweaty, unclean feet trapped in shoes can generate odors due to different bacterial by-products. That is why smelly armpits and stinky feet have different types of pungent aromas.
I remember TV commercials from the 1960s in which a person would be identified as smelling bad, and the announcer would say, “He has BO!” But instead of him saying BO, a loud fog horn would blast, “BEEEEE OHHHHH!!!” That had to be a pretty effective commercial because I was just a young kid, and I still remember it vividly. It let me know that BO was a bad thing.
A fun fact is that many East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) don’t wear deodorant due to a gene mutation that impacts their apocrine glands. They don’t produce oily sweat, so those smelly bacteria can’t grow.
This history of deodorants is fascinating and has modern and historical components. People have used various methods to reduce odor, from Europeans who wore masking perfumes and spices to South Asians using alum-based products like the Thai deodorant crystal and Filipino Tawas powder. Alum is bacteriostatic; in other words, it slows down the growth of bacteria. Fewer bacteria mean less odor.
Washing your body is the primary way to reduce BO. Additionally, there are two ways to control underarm smells: deodorants and antiperspirants.
Commercial deodorants used to have antimicrobial agents, but they have mostly been removed due to health and environmental concerns. Now, most commercial deodorants are just masking agents; they are cheap-smelling perfumes for the armpits.
Antiperspirants use aluminum salts. These salts plugged up sweat glands, so there is no sweat for odor-causing bacteria to eat, and so there is no odor. Antiperspirants are the most effective way to control malodorous underarm smells.
There is a fear that antiperspirants can contribute to Alzheimer’s disease and breast cancer. These fears have been debunked many times and are not true, but they persist from self-proclaimed health gurus, often for their benefit.
I can’t tolerate antiperspirants because they make me itch. However, dermatologists now say to put these agents on at night to plug up sweat glands and shower them off the skin in the morning to eliminate skin irritation. I have not tried this as I already have another odor-controlling method that works very well. I’ll talk about that in the next paragraph.
I mentioned that some Asian cultures have used alum salts for hundreds of years to control body odor. These salts were marketed in the US starting in the 1980s as magic deodorant crystals, and I started using them in the early 2000s. These contain aluminum in compound form, but it is a different compound than those used in antiperspirants. Alum salts don’t block sweating; they are bacteriostatic and inhibit odor-causing bacteria. For me, they work like a charm. Ads say to wet the crystal and apply; I rub a dry crystal on my damp underarms after I shower. This method wastes less of the mineral and gets the job done.
Commercial deodorants were introduced in the late 1800s under the Mum brand, and antiperspirants were marketed in the early 1900s under the name Odorono. Neither was very popular for several reasons. Victorian era people felt it was improper to talk about such things as body odor, and they also felt that washing their underarms and wearing perfume worked well enough to keep odor at bay. The early deodorants and antiperspirants had many drawbacks including being irritating and staining clothes.
Edna Murphy’s father was a surgeon who developed an aluminum chloride solution to keep his hands dry during surgeries; she saw its potential to stop underarm sweating. Due to Victorian sentiment, she wasn’t very successful selling her antiperspirant until the 1912 Atlantic City Exposition, where she had a sales booth. 1912 had an especially hot summer, and visitors were especially smelly. She sold enough products at the exposition to hire the advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson Company. They assigned a new hire, James Young, to the campaign. Mr. Young was a former door-to-door Bible salesman without training in advertising. However, he was the man for the job. James Young is considered the father of shame-based advertising and could make potential customers worry about things they didn’t worry about before. He started to run ads for women saying that men would not love them unless they used Odorono, and sales took off.
From a 1937 ad:
You’re a pretty girl, Mary, and you’re smart about most things, but you’re just a bit stupid about yourself. You love a good time, but you seldom have one. Evening after evening, you sit at home alone. You’ve met several grand men who seemed interested at first. They took you out once, and that was that. So many pretty Marys in the world never seem to sense the real reason for their aloneness. In this smart modern age, it’s against the code for a girl (or a man) to carry the repellent odor of underarm perspiration on clothing and person. It’s a fault which never fails to take its own punishment—unpopularity.
He applied the same strategy with men during the great depression, stating that no one would hire them unless they used Odorono. Men then started to use the product. He turned a product that no one wanted into one that grossed 28 billion dollars in 2025.
There has been some backlash against commercial deodorants and antiperspirants, which has prompted companies to create green-washed products and home cooks to develop DIY concoctions. Let’s take a look at the marketing hype and ingredients used.
One is to continue to promote false claims that commercial antiperspirants cause dementia and breast cancer. To repeat, this is not true.
The other is to create fear about “unnatural” chemicals used in commercial products. You may be sensitive to a random chemical, but it is not thought that these agents are more dangerous than other deodorizing methods.
The term Natural has absolutely no real meaning. Frankly, the often criticized aluminum salts used in commercial antiperspirants are completely natural as they come from nature. Please don’t get hung up on this term, as it is used to manipulate you.
Antiperspirants are the most effective way to control underarm and foot odor due to excessive sweating. Natural deodorants use a variety of other agents to control odor and bacterial levels. Some work for some and not so well for others. Men sweat more than women and frequently work in more physically demanding jobs. Therefore, it is much more likely to hear women in office jobs claiming good results from a natural deodorant, where a man working in the field may be less enthusiastic. Here are some common ingredients used in natural deodorants:
Baking soda is a natural deodorizer, but it may worsen your BO as it is basic (remember acids and bases from high school chemistry?). The bacteria that cause BO in your underarms prefer a basic environment, and baking soda can encourage their growth. Plus, it can be irritating.
Essential Oils- Some essential oils, like Tea Tree, have mild bacteria reducing properties and may reduce odor-causing bacteria. However, all fragrances, including essential oils, can irritate sensitive skin, causing skin breakdown and more problems.
Coconut oil is used as a base that also has bacteria-reducing properties.
Arrowroot powder is a moisture absorber that may keep the underarms drier.
Corn starch has the same function as arrowroot powder, but is likely more irritating.
Activated charcoal- can reduce odor, but it can be irritating and staining.
Alcohol is often used as a preservative, but it could have some bacteria-reducing properties.
Magnesium salts have some bacteria reducing properties.
If you are a heavy sweater, natural deodorants are likely to be less effective. Additionally, they often cost significantly more than mainstream deodorants. You can buy an antiperspirant at Dollar Tree for $1.25 or a name-brand antiperspirant for about $4, while a Native brand natural deodorant starts at $13 (Walmart prices as of 4/2025).
There are many DIY recipe hacks for making your own deodorant, many using coconut oil and baking soda (see caution above). There are also several deodorant substitutes. Here are some of them:
-Spray or scrub rubbing alcohol under your arms. It reduces bacteria, but it is skin-drying.
-Use essential oils directly; this mostly masks odor, but can be very irritating to the skin.
-Use baking soda directly, it may cause overgrowth of harmful bacteria and can irritate.
-Apply glycolic acid directly; it reduces bacteria growth as it is acidic, but may be drying.
-Milk of Magnesia may reduce bacteria.
Some people have bacterial overgrowth problems that aren’t controlled by typical methods, and some dermatologists might recommend washing underarms several times a week with an antiseptic agent like benzoyl peroxide (PanOxyl), chlorhexidine gluconate (Hibiclens), or povidone iodine (Betadine). They would be instructed to wash their underarms with these agents and then leave the solution on for a few minutes before thoroughly washing it off. These cleansers can all dry out skin, so they should not be used daily. Most would use a daily antiperspirant or deodorant on top of this.
Whole body deodorants were introduced in 2017 with the brand Lume. Lume’s active ingredient is mandelic acid, which (like its cousin glycolic acid) makes an area more acidic and less friendly to smelly underarm bacteria.
Lume created a whole new market using funny but shame-based advertising; there are now many competitors. I recently checked out some at Walmart, and most seem to just be rebranded deodorants. Marketing is everything!
I’m a psychiatrist, meaning I’m also a licensed medical doctor. In my years of practice, I have been the medical director of several inpatient programs that required me to do a comprehensive physical exams…that is a head-to-toe exam, when a new patient was admitted to my unit. My nose has been very close to several thousand people so I feel I can honestly assess the need for a whole body deodorant. In my opinion, they are entirely unnecessary and could potentially disrupt the skin’s natural biome.
The vast majority of patients I have examined over my 40-year practice have smelled fine with basic hygiene. The ones that didn’t smell so good resulted from being dirty or having dirty clothing (or most likely both). They returned to being non-smelly with a shower and clean clothes.
For your saddle region, use gentle soap and water (or sometimes just water for women’s genital region). Your body cleans your internal structures automatically.
For stinky feet, change out shoes allowing them to dry, wear fresh socks, apply absorbent foot powders, and consider antiperspirant creams for severe cases.
If the above doesn’t help in those regions, it is best to see a doctor to determine if you have something that needs medical attention, like an infection.
Of course, there are other reasons why some people smell bad. We all know what we smell like when we eat garlic chicken or have a few beers, but those are temporary problems. Additionally, some illnesses, medications, and infections can cause odor problems. These are best sorted out by a healthcare provider. Lastly, some individuals have metabolic issues where they excrete malodorous scents. These individuals are rare, and I have never encountered one during several thousand physical exams.
For most people with odor problems, regular soap and water and clean clothing is the place to start, along with the application of an underarm deodorant or antiperspirant. If you don’t want to use anything under your arms you can try “washing up” a few times a day.
I’m not here to change anyone’s mind or to get them to start or stop any agent. If you are happy with your current hygiene routine, so be it. I’m here to educate, inform, and hopefully tell an interesting story.
Peace,
Mike
Sources for this post include the Smithsonian web page and other internet sources. Images are from the internet, and all content is used only for educational purposes. This post is not medical advice. See your doctor if you have medical or odor concerns.