A Deodorant Revolution Is Coming!

This summer is quite hot and that boosts the sale of not only drinks and ice creams but also the sales of antiperspirants and deodorants.

Various Deodorants
By Th145 (photo taken by Th145) CC BY-SA 2.0 de], via Wikimedia Commons

But it's not really sweating itself that is making us not like the smell. That is happening because of bacteria living in and on human skin. And how exactly? Well, the sebaceous glands secrete a wide variety of fats. The eccrine glands secrete a solution of salt, lactic acid, and other organic compounds. But the raw materials used by the bacteria that actually smell are produced by the apocrine glands that are found only in a few places of the body – the armpits, near genitalia, around the nipples and in the outer side of the ears. And they start fully working in puberty.

Then the skin bacteria from the genera Staphylococcus, Corynebacterium and Propionibacterium come into play. These microbes change the secretions from the glands into molecules that smell bad to us. The worst one is known as 3M3SH (3-methyl-3-sulfanylhexan-1-ol). Humans are capable of detecting (smelling) this in a concentration of 0.000000000001 grams per liter.

But now a team from the University of Oxford found how exactly do the Staphylococcus hominus bacteria find the materials to produce 3M3SH and if we could block this we should also block the production of this smelly chemical. That gives the makers of deodorants the chance to focus on either killing the bacteria or just blocking its way to its food.

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