Do we really need deodorant ‘down there’?

Some have welcomed the rise of full-body deodorant, but many are wary given the history of unnecessary feminine hygiene products. Photo / 123rf

When full-body deodorants started to multiply on drugstore shelves and in Instagram ads last year, the response online was a chorus of verbal side-eyes.

“What are these ‘whole body deodorant’ commercials?? Are people not washing???” tweeted a podcaster in Philadelphia.

“I gotta know what are y’all doing to stink so bad?” asked another X user.

In June, a Reddit thread titled “What is up with whole body deodorant becoming so popular?” garnered nearly 600 comments. The most popular one: “Soap companies find a way to sell more soap.”

Whole-body fragrances aren’t a new concept. Axe Body Spray, for instance, is an aerosol deodorant that became a running joke, as well as a lifestyle for a certain subset of adolescent boys (as many a middle-school teacher can attest). And deodorising sprays for the “unmentionable” areas have been around for decades, too: FDS - for “feminine deodorising spray” - has been around since the 1960s and is marketed as “safe to use during your period and can help you control natural odours caused by your period”.

Over the past few years, though, deodorant products for the entire body have proliferated. Many are either directly marketed to women or vaguely so; watching broadcast TV or listening to the radio or scrolling Instagram or TikTok, it’s easy to get hit with ads for them from Native, or Lume, or Mando (the rare example specifically for men), or even a legacy brand like Secret or Dove.

These ads have proved to be too frank or too eyebrow-wagglingly euphemistic for many. Secret cheekily drowns out the words for intimate areas with the hisses of an aerosol can. And Lume, which was introduced in 2017, describes how bacteria in the private parts “farts out” odours and promises to deodorise not just “pits” but also “underboob”, “buttcrack” and “front fumes”. On a subreddit called “Commercials I Hate”, one user wrote, “I thought it was just some weird dream I had, but it turns out it was a real commercial that I watched.”

Full body deodorant is obvi the new thing, every other commercial is a different brand. They all say they fight odor for 72 hours. I’m sorry SEVENTY TWO HOURS??? Are yall not showering every day?? Please reconsider if that’s you 😂😂

— The DisCountess (@Discountess_) May 19, 2024

Of course, for every knee-jerk negative reaction, there’s an equal and opposite “I LOVE THIS STUFF … especially when summer is like 120 degrees outside.” But there’s a more substantial backlash forming, too - likely rooted in our collective memory of products aimed at female “freshness” that were at best preying on invented anxieties, and at worst actively harmful.

There are circumstances where you might instinctively reach for a whole-body deodorant. On X, users have rightly pointed out that certain medications and conditions increase sweat and body odours, and that some lines of work are particularly sweaty - like outdoor jobs and jobs in toasty environments like kitchens.

Cenetta Baker, 34, is a full-time applied-dance student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as well as a burlesque performer. Daytime rehearsals find Baker and her classmates “laying on the floor, quite literally rolling on top of each other”, she says with a laugh, “and no one wants to be the smelly person in that situation”. Her burlesque work, too, involves thorough, sweaty-making warm-up routines, costumes made of fabrics that “don’t always have the best airflow” and “body parts really close to people’s faces sometimes.”

She can’t always shower between her daytime and nighttime commitments, either - so she’s found Dove’s Whole-Body Deo to be a useful tool.

“I find it helps. Even if it’s just with me overthinking it,” she says. Online, she knows, people are skeptical. Still, since starting to use the product, “I’ve never [had to say to myself], ‘Oh my God, girl. You stink,’” she says with a laugh. To her, the peace of mind alone is worth it.

Chris Adigun, a dermatologist based in Chapel Hill, NC, has used a full-body deodorant herself. “I’m shocked at how well they work” on notoriously stinky parts of the body like the underarms, she says.

That said, Adigun has a few concerns. For instance: many of the areas where our bodies sweat don’t necessarily get smelly. The bacteria that produces BO feeds off the secretions from our apocrine glands, which are located in just a few places, including the genitals and underarms.

“Your whole body doesn’t stink,” Adigun says. “So why do they have to be marketed to be used on your entire body?”

There’s also the slight risk of allergic reactions, she adds. “Doesn’t mean the product is a problem - it’s just, the more stuff you put on your body, things can happen.”

Adigun also worries about misuse of the products. Many brands of full-body deodorant tout the safety of their products for the “intimate areas” or “private parts”. Some specify in their ad copy that it’s for external use only, but “‘intimate areas’ is not specific enough”, Adigun says. “Some people find their upper thighs to be intimate areas, whereas other people would only call their vaginal canal an intimate area. Who’s drawing the boundaries?”

Heather Rogers, a dermatologist in Seattle, shares Adigun’s concern that products could cause irritation if applied to the innermost private parts. For the female-bodied, Rogers explains, the product should only be used “on your labia majora and your mons pubis, but not inside”.

Rogers says that some deodorants merely mask the stench that bacteria and sweat tend to produce together, and it’s better to use products that target those upstream problems - such as antibacterial washes in the shower and antiperspirant with aluminium. (The latter has been controversial in the past, though many experts and the National Institutes of Health now say it’s safe for most people.)

She also recommends applying the antiperspirant, perhaps counterintuitively, at night, since it “takes a little while to work”, needing time to “create these temporary plugs” in your sweat ducts.

An ounce of prevention, in other words, may be worth 3.5 ounces (and $15) of cure.

Beyond whether it’s effective, though, many remain concerned that the very existence of whole-body deodorants at all is vaguely nefarious. After all, as that savvy Redditor put it, wouldn’t it be just like a company that sells deodorant to want to sell you more deodorant?

“I’ve never had an issue with my whole body smelling, and very rarely in my day-to-day life have I noticed anyone else having this problem either. Why is there this sudden push for whole body deodorant?” one woman wondered on X.

Some have welcomed the rise of full-body deodorant, but many are wary given the history of feminine hygiene products we don’t actually need. https://t.co/aqsXcPt9Ee

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 9, 2024

“They’re telling people they stink to profit from their insecurity,” wrote another.

Certainly, Rogers says, that kind of thing does happen. “We’ve been told we need to use eye cream, face cream, neck cream, hand cream, when really, the same thing works just as well in all those places,” Rogers says. So she’s wary of companies “saying, ‘let’s divide and compartmentalise so people buy more products’.”

Rogers also shares the concern that whole-body deodorant might be preying on an invented insecurity. Sweating is normal, and it has always been normal.

“After Covid,” Rogers muses, “people came out and started being social again, and maybe we forgot what other people smell like.”

In an emailed statement to The Post, a representative for Secret and Native, which are both owned by Procter & Gamble, wrote that the brands’ whole-body deodorant products “are specially formulated for use on sensitive areas such as under the breast, bikini line and groin, and include skin-loving ingredients like niacinamide, glycerin and shea butter to help address challenges people have in managing odor in these areas.”

“Women have told us that they are looking for odor and chafing protection beyond their armpits and have even resorted to using underarm deodorant for all over their bodies, which wasn’t created for this purpose. Our Whole Body Deos were created to address this consumer desire and need,” a representative for Dove wrote in an emailed statement, while noting that in its own research, only a tiny proportion of consumers currently use a whole-body deodorant while a hefty majority would like to try one.

Representatives for Mando and Lume did not respond to requests for comment.

Sharra Vostral, assistant dean for research at Northwestern’s School of Communication, is the author of Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology. Powerful forces, she says, teach us from an early age “to feel shame over, really, very normal things - things that actually are necessary for our survival. Like it’s really important to be able to sweat and to perspire, so that you don’t overheat,” Vostral says. “You poop. You pass gas. You don’t want to hold that in. It’s all really important.”

As Vostral points out, though, history is littered with examples of products that claimed to help women feel less shame about their natural smells.

“A lot of these products speak to our desire to be appealing. They tap into these fears of, ‘If I don’t smell good, people won’t like me.’ Those are reasonable things, so we have to be somewhat sympathetic,” Vostral says. “But the way it’s turned around and monetised and then sold back as though you’re the problem becomes troublesome.”

“Women have been fed such horrible misinformation - that their vagina is dirty and it needs to be cleaned with things like douches, that would totally disrupt their natural bacterial flora and cause overgrowth of certain organisms and disrupt this very delicate milieu,” agrees Adigun. “I hate that message. It does a really great job of cleaning itself.”

What’s more, some products really were scams; others even caused bodily harm and illness. Lingering awareness of this genre’s checkered history could be colouring the way the public has responded to the rise of full-body deodorants.

The vaginal sprays that became popular in the 1960s, for example, were denounced by doctors in the 1970s as pretty much useless. Scented tampons, popular throughout the 20th century, have fallen out of favour in part because, as Vostral points out, “menstrual fluid doesn’t smell while it’s in the body; it starts decomposing and starts smelling once it hits the air”. Douching, an early (less-than-reliable) birth-control method that enjoyed a second life as a feminine-hygiene tool into the 1990s, is no longer recommended by doctors after it was found to increase the risk of pelvic inflammatory disease and vaginitis.

And baby powder with talc, advertised throughout the 20th century as a discreet way to avoid odours below the belt, has been found to have caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma in women due to talc often being laced with asbestos. In 2021, Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay US$2.1 billion ($3.5b) in damages to women who developed ovarian cancer after using its products.

Lume, to its credit, took the extraordinary step in 2021 of acknowledging all this. In a commercial, a narrator describes harmful mid-20th-century products that tried to mitigate women’s “down-there” odours through internal means - like medicated douches and “germicide” sprays for the vagina.

By contrast, Lume was founded by an OB/GYN, the ad points out - and treats groin BO externally, by “paralysing” the bacteria that forms in sweaty places and causes odours, “stopping the stink for up to 72 hours”, the narrator says triumphantly.

Nevertheless, questions have begun to arise. A class-action complaint filed in the Southern District of New York in June alleges the deodorant brand Native “has never clinically tested its whole-body deodorant” and that Native’s claim that its whole-body deodorant lasts for three days “is false”. (A representative for Native declined to comment on the complaint or the allegations it contains.)

Maybe feminine-hygiene purveyors really have wised up. Maybe consumers have too.