It's good to sweat

For a story about deodorant this might sound counterintuitive, but it's good to sweat!

I had an aunt who is no longer with us, a horse person, she loved whiskey, racing and dancing, she understood how to play ‘life’. At one time I recall her imparting to my sister the sage advice that ‘horses sweat dear, men perspire, but women glow’. Thinking about it still makes me smile, perception is just a state of mind.

As much as I love my Aunt I do need to defer her advice on this matter however. As an ex athlete (and man) I love to sweat. If I am not sweating then I’m not working hard enough. The feeling of expulsion that comes from a good blow out of exercise is the proverbial bell to Pavlov’s dog, it makes the workout complete and keeps me coming back for more.

Moreover it feels healthy and good for me, cleaning out pores and forcing out built up toxins. Messy, wet, smelly; all of the above but I maintain sweat is good, sweat is healthy, neigh, sweat is essential.

So we made our deodorant to allow for this. It's designed to not block the pores or the armpits. It's designed to mask the odour of sweat and work to help keep a healthy balance of bacteria and sweat to prevent unnecessary smell and discomfort, but not to block sweat. Our deodorant is designed to be reapplied throughout the day. We use organic rose water; gentle, soft, fragrant rose water to carry the other ingredients. The gentle nature of our deodorant means it will not block sweat. And if you are working outdoors or in an active role, yes you will need to reapply, maybe a number of times a day.

But rather than this be a negative we would ask a simple question: To not have to reapply your deodorant when you are working in a physical job, what ingredients would need to be in that product to block and mask your sweat and odour all day?

Needless to say the answer does not make for good reading.

In order to stop sweat and odour completely, even for the most sedentary of situations, let alone a truly physical job like building, farming or mining for emeralds, would require us to stop or dramatically reduce your sweat by throwing the kitchen sink at the problem with little to no regard for the impact said kitchen sink would have when it lands.

Let’s explain; see the body still needs to cool itself, so the sweat and toxins are redirected to other outlets, back through your body’s system until they find their way out. Or maybe they just build up and wait. Wherever these toxins end up we are stopping the process of excreting them in the most efficient fashion, a process our bodies have evolved over thousands of years. Then there is the odour. Odour created by the bacteria that consume the proteins excreted in sweat. How to you stop a 12-ton truck? With a brick wall. That is, you kill the bacteria and plaster over the cracks. Enter stage right our not so good friends Triclosan, Aluminum, Propylene Glycol or Phthalates – go on check out the rack on these bad boys. As a combination they are about as toxic as you can get for the human body whilst still being legal. But stop sweat and stop odour yes they do that too.

Here are some links you can follow that better prove the details around what these guys are really like, after hours, once they have wooed your mum at the front door.

Old rationale for reference;

At Triumph & Disaster we say that it’s good to sweat.

Sweat is one of the signs of a normal, healthy integumentary system. So our objective will never be to stop sweat in its entirety, to do so is reckless and ignores the natural functions of the body and our health. But we do aim to stop odour and mask the effects of sweat, we do this with ‘Spice’.

Humans are designed to sweat’, armpits in particular have evolved as a key component in our bodies heat management and toxin excretion systems – mess with these at your peril. Sending toxins away from armpits back into the body only creates stress elsewhere by asking other parts of our natural excretion and perspiration systems to do more than what they are designed to do. So promoting the complete blocking of sweat in the name of self-confidence or comfort should come with some serious disclaimers i.e. health warnings.

At T&D, we don’t stop sweat, our ethos is to work with the body’s natural flow by working with it to limit excess moisture and control the aromas created through the excretion of sweat. It’s this control of aroma that we are most interested in. With our deodorant ‘Spice’ our goal is to limit body odour by impairing the bacteria that produce it, dousing them with hypnotic, fragrant notes to create an intoxicating blend of exotic moolah.

SWEAT SCIENCE

When sweat evaporates from the surface of your skin, it removes excess heat and cools you, essential if you are in a desert.

Unfortunately, When we are nervous or scared this also produces an increase in epinephrine secretion, acting on our sweat glands, the palms and armpits, to make sweat. Hence that “cold” sweat we feel when asking out a hot date.

There are two types of sweat gland, eccrine and apocrine. When

the eccrine sweat gland is stimulated our cells secrete a fluid similar to plasma, it is mostly water with high concentrations of sodium and chloride and a low concentration of potassium.

Sweat is produced in apocrine sweat glands in the same way, however tis sweat contains proteins and fatty acids, which make it thicker and give it a milkier or yellowish colour, it’s this type of sweat that bacteria love and metabolise the proteins and fatty acids to produce an unpleasant odour.