Fort Noxious
I'm a straight guy in my 30s with pretty strong body odor. I saw your column about how more men are doing body hair trimming. I remember you saying not to remove all the hair, and I don't want women to suspect I'm gay. However, I'm wondering whether shaving my pits would help with my BO.
--Pepe Le Pew
When a woman you meet can't stop thinking about you, ideally her thought isn't, "Could there be a small dead animal making its home in his armpit?"
Underarm stink comes from a specialized sweat gland. Your body has two kinds of sweat glands, eccrine and apocrine. Eccrine glands are the air conditioners of the body, producing sweat that's pretty much just salty water to cool us off. Apocrine glands, on the other hand, are scent glands, found mostly in the armpits and groin and around the nipples. And sorry, this is gross: Any smelliness emanating from the apocrine areas comes not from the sweat itself but from bacteria that move in to lunch on it.
So -- intuitively -- it seems like shaving that pit hair (removing it entirely versus just trimming it) would make a difference, giving the bacteria far less of a, um, dining area. Unfortunately, the studies on this are problematic -- with too-small sample sizes (meaning too few participants to know whether the findings reflect reality or are simply due to chance). One of the studies was done not by independent researchers working out of a university lab but by five researchers employed by a multinational company that sells razors and shaving products. This doesn't necessarily mean their results are skeevy. However, a finding like "Let that armpit hair grow wild and free and wave in the wind like summer grain!" is probably not the stuff career advancement is made of at a company selling hair removal products.
Also, as you suspect, shaved pits on a straight man (one who isn't an Olympic swimmer or a serious body builder) may lead women to suspect he is gay or some body-obsessed narcissist. If you do decide to try pit-shaving, in summer heat, you might forgo tank tops and wear shirts with loose short sleeves. And when you're about to get naked with a woman, see that you pre-allay her fears. Explain that the shaving thing is merely about getting the hideodorousness under control -- not getting into a skin-tight dress, a ginormous platinum wig, and a 14-foot boa in "don't f*ck with me!" fuchsia.
I realize that a sample size of one is not very scientific, but my own experience says shave those pits. I noticed that my body odor went way down went I began shaving at 12 or 13. I was soon shaving every day. I’m blonde, so the stubble wasn’t obvious but the odor was.
Jen at July 25, 2018 5:07 AM
As a guy you don't need to shave with a razor, use clippers and keep it trimmed down
Practically the same effect, not seen as overly metrosexual, and you don't have to deal with ingrown hair, which is not something you want happening near sweat glands
lujlp at July 25, 2018 9:09 AM
LW can consider laser hair removal. It takes several treatments to go from hairy to hairless. Each treatment only kills off hair in the follicle that is actively growing. The laser treatment can thin the forest and won't tip anyone off regarding body obsessions. I did my legs and armpits. Instead of shaving legs daily, I do it only once a month or less to get the stragglers. It would be good to discuss the desired results with the technician doing the procedure. It wouldn't help for it to remove too much hair in patches.
justme at July 25, 2018 12:33 PM
Back in HS, a couple of three-sport jocks remarked that they had less trouble with this issue during swimming (varsity, competitive) season. Either it was being in the water for lengthy periods of time, or something in the water. Chlorine kills the little critters, so perhaps that's it. A splash of bleach after showers? I hear you can get it scented, too.
Richard Aubrey at July 25, 2018 2:19 PM
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