Why are whole-body deodorants suddenly everywhere?

Maybe you actually smell fine.

Whole-body deodorants are upon us.

They’re not an entirely new concept: Axe Body Spray, Unilever’s fusion of fragrance and deodorant, has been singeing nostrils since 1983, and in 2018, Lumé, created by an OB/GYN, came on the scene for “pits, privates, and beyond.” This spring, legacy brands jumped on board en masse: Since the start of 2024 alone, Secret, Dove, Old Spice, and Native launched whole-body products consumers can apply as sticks, sprays, and creams.

What the funk is going on?

“It is either, at best, an absurd, comical money grab — and at worst, a concerning phenomenon for your health,” says Sarah Everts, author of The Joy of Sweat. Sweating is a human superpower, she says; few other species can use sweat to avoid overheating.

To Everts and other critics, the existence of whole-body deodorants should raise our curiosity about why we feel the need to smell a certain way — or not. They should also make us wonder who stands to profit by changing social norms about sweat, hygiene, and odor.

Sweat and the strategies for managing it might seem relatively simple, but they’re not. The market for deodorants, especially the kind intended for application everywhere, rests on a foundation of collective confusion about how these products and our bodies actually work.

Different parts of the body make different kinds of sweat — and different kinds of smells

Not all sweat is created equal: Human bodies have two kinds of sweat glands, and their products are not exactly the same.

Apocrine sweat glands are typically concentrated in the places where hair grows during puberty — the armpits, the groin, and the butt. These glands make a waxy substance that certain bacteria love to eat, and it’s the byproducts of that microbial banquet that create the musky aromas most commonly associated with body odor.

“The sweat in our armpits is different — quite different — from the sweat that covers your body,” says Andrew Best, a biological anthropologist who studies sweat at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. That’s because the rest of your body is covered with eccrine sweat glands, whose product is a more watery, salty liquid that’s less appealing to bacteria but does a bang-up job of keeping us cool.

Eccrine sweat is what covers most of our body during exercise. It might occasionally evoke recently ingested food and drink, with particularly piquant notes after a garlic bread binge or a very boozy night. Still, because it’s not well-suited for bacterial consumption, eccrine sweat just doesn’t usually generate the odors that apocrine sweat does.

There is such a thing as dysfunctional sweating: About 10 million Americans produce way more sweat than their body’s temperature-regulating needs, either as a consequence of certain medical conditions or medications, or just because it’s the way they’re wired — a condition called hyperhidrosis. Other, less common medical conditions produce particularly pungent sweat.

But most of the sweat most people produce serves a positive biological function: “Sweating is almost always good,” says Best.

Deodorants and antiperspirants aren’t the same

The over-the-counter products available to combat sweat typically do one of two things: They either prevent sweat glands from producing sweat to begin with (antiperspirants), or they change the smell of the sweat (deodorants).

Antiperspirants block sweat pores using one of several aluminum-containing compounds. In the Food and Drug Administration’s book, the fact that antiperspirants change the way a body part functions — in this case, a sweat gland — makes them over-the-counter drugs. That classification means companies face more restrictions if they want to include these aluminum compounds in products. (A rumor literally spread by an email chain letter in the 1990s and a long-abandoned 1960s-era hypothesis have led many people to avoid using aluminum-based odor control products due to fears about breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively; heaps of science have since shown these fears are unfounded.)

Although many products intended for underarm application combine an antiperspirant with a deodorant in one, products labeled as deodorants alone aren’t supposed to contain these aluminum compounds. They’re not intended to block your sweat pores; rather, they aim to change the odors that result from the sweat once it’s already on your skin.

Distinguishing between antiperspirants and deodorants is important because sweat actually plays a huge role in keeping us cool when we’re overheating, and blocking too much of it could threaten a person’s ability to regulate their temperature. In part for that reason, antiperspirants are typically labeled for use only under the arms (conveniently, the origins of most of the smells people using these products are trying to control).

Deodorants, on the other hand, can use a range of approaches to reduce the smell of sweat all over the body without interfering with its cooling function, says Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist in Cincinnati. (Dobos has never worked for any of the companies now marketing full-body deodorants, although she has in the past done non-deodorant-related work for the parent company of Ban, which now makes a deodorizing lotion for private parts.)

Dobos reviewed the ingredient lists of a range of whole-body deodorants, including legacy brands and newer brands. The spray products typically contained little more than alcohol and fragrance — they’re basically perfumes, she says, and the alcohol concentration in these products probably isn’t high enough to kill the good bacteria living on your skin, which have a staggering range of protective functions.

Meanwhile, several of the creams contained lactic or mandelic acids, whose low pH creates an environment that favors the growth of those good, non-stinky bacteria, crowding out odor-causing germs. A handful of sticks and creams contained starch, aimed at absorbing wetness. Some brands’ entire ranges contained zinc compounds known to neutralize stinky molecules; other active ingredients include compounds called cyclodextrins intended to absorb odor, and enzymes called microbial ferments that purportedly degrade odor-causing molecules. Many of these ingredients also turn up in standalone deodorants intended for underarm application.

One product, a Lumé “sweat control” deodorant cream, contained an aluminum compound that’s actually an antiperspirant, which raises concerns about a problem with the product’s labeling, says Dobos. “​​I have a feeling the FDA will give them a call.”

Do most people actually need full-body deodorant?

With the exception of improperly labeled products, most whole-body deodorants can do …whatever it is they do without hijacking the body’s cooling system. Still, before people decide to fork over the money for yet another cosmetic product, it’s worth thinking about whether sweat from behind your knees, your skin folds, or even your nether regions is actually a problem in need of a solution.

After all, these products are not meant to target odors from underarm sweat. Rather, they take aim at odors due to apocrine sweat in the groin — not something casual contacts typically perceive because groins are (usually) under a few layers of fabric and a few feet away from others’ noses — and eccrine sweat elsewhere on the body, which is largely inoffensive to most noses, even when there’s a lot of it.

“Just bathing should take care of whatever quote-unquote ‘problem’ you think you have. And if you need to be throwing more at your microbiome than a simple daily shower,” Best says, “it’s probably your perceptions of your smell that are the problem, not actually the smell.”

“Nobody’s being fooled into thinking that you’re a citrus fruit,” added Everts.

Because deodorants qualify as cosmetics and not as drugs, the companies that produce them don’t have to do safety or effectiveness testing before selling them to the public. That means products that could cause skin irritation or allergic reactions — especially in the more sensitive skin of the groin — can still be freely marketed for whole-body use. “It is the Wild West,” says Adam Friedman, a dermatologist at George Washington University who is also a faculty member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society.

Sweat itself can irritate the skin, and for people with pathologic sweating such as those with hyperhidrosis, whole-body deodorants are likely to disappoint because they don’t actually reduce sweat output. “[They’ll] have no effect on excessive sweating and may even cause harm,” says Friedman — but because people with these conditions are so desperate for help, it’s a marketing no-brainer to try to sell them solutions. When it comes to skin conditions, he says, it’s “very easy to take advantage of those suffering.”

If you try a whole-body deodorant, avoid applying it to mucous membranes (the wet surfaces beyond labial folds and anuses) and use it only on select portions of intact, non-irritated skin to lower the chances the product causes more problems than it solves.

Dobos noted the ingredients in most whole-body deodorants are largely benign and probably won’t disrupt your skin’s microbiome too much if used in moderation. In her view, these products are unlikely to be biologically problematic. “But they’re probably still culturally problematic [in that they set] the wrong expectations for young people regarding how their body should smell,” says Best.

Hygiene norms can be manipulated to make money (off of you)

Body odor exists on a spectrum, and one end of that spectrum includes smells that are globally recognized as gnarly, much as there’s broad human consensus that sewage and dead animals have offensive aromas. So yes, human sweat can smell quite bad. As early as the first century BCE, the Roman poet Catullus dissed a male contemporary for the “grim goat” housed in his armpits, saying (poetically) it was the reason he never got laid.

But it’s also true that a lot of American norms around body odor originated with people who had a financial stake in creating them. The inventors of the first modern antiperspirant couldn’t get people to buy it for the first decade after they developed it; sales only took off after a 1919 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal hinted that women with insufficiently “dainty and sweet” underarms would never land a husband.

Americans may be particularly easy marks for advertising campaigns that promise conspicuous hygiene. The nation’s peculiar association between cleanliness and godliness, imported by Puritans and Quakers centuries ago, helped personal odor become a particularly strong signifier of moral, physical, and racial purity in the US early in the nation’s history, writes anthropologist Marybeth MacPhee. These ideas led to olfactory discrimination against Black Americans, creating a particularly strong incentive to “smell clean” as a strategy for acceptance into (or protection from) white society; they have also been used to disparage immigrants with different diets and fragrance norms as diseased or low status over the years.

Such concepts clearly have commercial utility, as well: They’ve helped create a lucrative market for dubiously necessary hygiene products in the US — especially among women and sometimes to their detriment, as in the cases of douching and talcum powder. If you have a problem with smells coming from your groin, “you need to be going to a doctor, not a store,” says Everts.

But with whole-body deodorants, companies are urging consumers to sanitize all body aromas — not just the goat-y ones.

Among the experts I spoke to, there was strong consensus that whole-body deodorants exist largely to make money for the companies that sell them. Deodorant and antiperspirant sales have been pretty steady for the past few years, says Dobos; adding a new product with new uses potentially increases the amount of money both manufacturers and retailers can make.

“They’ve manufactured a problem so they can sell us a product to fix it,” says Best.

Whether you’re buying or not, it’s worth thinking about what it means to reject all of your body’s natural smells, not just its most offensive ones. The fundamental odor unique to each of us — not the stuff coming out of our armpits, but the rest of the aromas our bodies make — is part of our identity, says Everts.

“It’s a symphony of subtle smells that make you who you are and help the people who love you and spend time with you identify you,” she says. “Why would you mess with that?”