Earlier this year, the deodorant brand Sure launched a product to be used on “ta-tas”, “trotters”, and “marbles” (AKA breasts, feet and testicles). “Whatever you call them, wherever you smell”, Sure Whole Body deodorant can help, a playful TV advert promised.
It’s not a completely new concept: many of us will remember the intense whiff of a liberally applied “body spray” – the deodorant-cum-fragrances brought out by brands such as Lynx, Charlie and Impulse that were popular in the 00s. But specific deodorants for body parts other than the armpits weren’t really a thing until 2018, when an American obstetrics and gynaecology doctor founded Lume Whole Body Deodorant, after repeatedly seeing patients who were worried about odour “below the belt”. Sold as a roll-on, cream, spray or wipes, it can apparently be used on “pits, underboobs, belly buttons, butt cracks, vulvas, balls, feet and more!” On its website, it has more than 200,000 five-star reviews – and now the mainstream deodorant brands are following suit.
In July, Lynx launched its own “lower body spray” which, if its advert is anything to go by, smells so good that it will have people leaning in to sniff your bottom, crotch and feet. The ad starts with a basketball player who is so distracted by the scent of another player’s crotch that he forgets to defend, instead enjoying the opportunity to get up close and personal with his opponent’s shorts as he leaps up to the basket. Later, a woman crawls across a cinema aisle to follow a man shuffling to his seat, so that she can keep her nose close to his backside.
The past two years has also seen whole-body deodorants launched by Dove, Old Spice and Secret. Then there’s AKT, the deodorant balm that partnered with the Team GB rowing team during the Paris Olympics, which is lauded chiefly for being a natural deodorant (another expanding market) whose promotional material also boasts that it can be applied “from head to toe”.
“Trust me, you’re going to love it,” the LA-based influencer Nicole Bennett told her TikTok followers earlier this year as she advertised Dove’s Whole Body Deo, explaining that it can be used “anywhere you need to freshen up”. UK-based Bella Hill uses similar language in her video promoting Sure’s product, praising the way the deodorant can be used “wherever you need it”. Monique Rossi, the general manager of Unilever’s deodorant brands (which include Sure) in the UK and Ireland, says consumer research identified that “one of the top needs” in the deodorant category is freshness, which is why the whole-body product was developed.
But is this actually something we need? Most of us have been getting by with just the underarm stuff, which seems to be, by-and-large, effective – it’s not as if we’re still carrying medieval-style nosegay bouquets wherever we go to ward off the stench of others.
“I wouldn’t say this is something consumers want, so much as something consumers are being made to want,” says Jessica DeFino, a beauty reporter and Guardian US columnist. Someone might watch Hill’s TikTok video, for example, which begins with a confessional, “Does anyone else get a bit insecure about smelling bad in the gym? Because I do”, having not previously worried about what they might smell like in the gym, knowing they will take a shower afterwards. But, once the idea that they should be smelling fresh at the gym is in their head, they might also seek a solution to that “problem” they didn’t previously know they had.
For the vast majority of people, whole-body deodorants are not necessary, says Michelle Spear, a professor of anatomy at the university of Bristol. “Human bodies are designed to sweat and, in most cases, that’s healthy and normal.” Body odour happens because of sweat and bacteria on the skin’s surface that form part of the skin’s natural microbiome – which can help fight infection and regulate our immune response. We have two main types of sweat glands: the ones all over our bodies are called eccrine glands, which produce a watery sweat that helps with cooling. The other type, apocrine glands, are the ones that can make us smell bad, as they secrete a thicker fluid which, when broken down by bacteria, creates odour – but they are concentrated in the armpits and groin. “That’s why underarms are usually the focus of deodorant, not the whole body,” Spear says.
There’s nothing unsafe about using a whole-body deodorant, “if used as directed”, Spear says, as most of them are made without the high concentrations of aluminium salts used in antiperspirants, which would be too harsh on areas of the body where skin is thinner or more sensitive. People with eczema or sensitive skin should be cautious before using them, though, and users “should always patch test before using widely”, she advises.
However, these products are “not cheap”, Spear points out and, while it’s a personal choice to use one, “no one should feel they are somehow unclean if they aren’t using them”. If someone is washing daily and using an underarm deodorant or antiperspirant, but is still struggling with body odour, that could indicate an underlying medical condition, Spear explains, which needs to be investigated properly, rather than masked with a whole-body deodorant.
London-based dermatologist Noman Mohamed, who posts on TikTok and Instagram as @drnomzzy, agrees that a whole-body deodorant is “by no means necessary as we don’t stink everywhere”. He is critical of deodorants in general, which “only mask body odour” as opposed to antiperspirants, which temporarily block sweat pores. Contrary to common usage, he recommends applying an antiperspirant before going to bed at night, “as that’s when the glands are less active and therefore easier to plug. Less sweat means less food for the bacteria, resulting in reduced body odour.”
Mohamed has noticed an increased interest in whole-body deodorants on social media, which he thinks is part of the boom in “self-care” and an increased focus on personal hygiene that has become particularly prominent after the Covid-19 pandemic. “Companies have latched on to this desire to give people what they want and make a tidy profit while doing so,” he says.
Rossi says Sure’s whole-body products “were developed in response to consumer insights that shoppers were looking for products that delivered malodour protection for different parts of the body beyond just their underarms”, noting that “people don’t always like to talk about it, but odour affects us all in different ways”.
Mohamed thinks that as talking about body odour has become less “taboo”, it has helped create more of a conversation about people’s anxieties around it – creating a space for companies to jump in and “solve” these worries with a product. On social media, body odour and personal hygiene are “now freely discussed with opinions and tips or tricks being shared across all platforms”, he says.
Perhaps it is the increase in such conversations that has led to the development of deodorants and antiperspirants with ever higher protection times, with many now claiming to last 72 hours, and some, such as Triple Dry’s Classic roll-on, advertising a whopping 100 hours odour-free. Such promises are appealing because they offer “convenience and reassurance”, Spear thinks. People like “the idea that you’ll smell fresh no matter what life throws at you. But, realistically, our skin is designed to sweat, shed, and renew itself daily.”
Spear warns that using a product that masks odour for days “isn’t a substitute for washing, and could cause irritation or a disrupted skin microbiome if people rely on it instead of normal hygiene”.
The response on social media to the influx of whole-body deodorants has been mixed – with some dismissing them as “marketing ploys” and others saying they have been a gamechanger for “boob sweat” or symptoms of menopause. One Reddit user posted about finding Lume helpful in the lead-up to their hysterectomy, when they had to wear menstrual pads at all times. “I sometimes got a body odour smell in the creases where my legs and crotch meet,” the post read. “I was showering daily and wearing clean clothes but it didn’t matter. I bought some Lume and it solved the problem. Not having to deal with occasionally smelling bad on top of everything else I was going through was one less thing on my plate.”
Spear can see that in specific situations, taking a further hygiene precaution such as using a whole-body deodorant might appeal – for example, people living in hot climates, or those with conditions such as hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating) – “but even then, they’re more of a preference than a requirement”, she says.
Despite the fact that we don’t necessarily need these new products, the expansion of the deodorant market plays into a wider focus on the hygiene and beauty of our private parts, DeFino adds. It might have seemed ridiculous to many readers of the writer’s Substack in late 2023, when her 2024 beauty predictions included vaginal and anal cosmetics (“butthole beauty”) becoming huge, but “the industry has proven me right”, DeFino says, with large growth in these categories over the past few years, “maybe, most notably, from full-body deodorant balms, sprays, wipes”. Though such products can be applied to any part of the body, a lot of the advertising suggests users might apply them between their legs.
Perhaps this was an inevitable step for Lynx, which has always traded on sexiness: its 2011 “fallen angels” advert saw beautiful women with wings and haloes plummet to Earth towards the irresistible scent of Lynx-wearing men. But, by equating desirability with this latest product – especially given that Lynx is marketed primarily towards teenagers and young men – the brand is arguably capitalising on its target customer’s vulnerabilities. In the same way that vaginal douches could fuel anxieties about vaginal hygiene (for the record, vaginas are self-cleaning), the marketing of “lower body” sprays could create a sense that washing alone is not enough. And, heaven forbid teenagers decide that these products can be used in the place of showers, as some kind of “goblin mode” hack.
“I would say there is some general genital anxiety in the air,” DeFino says, pointing to abortion bans in the US, the British supreme court’s recent ruling that being a “woman” means “biologically female”, as well as “the rise of conservative pronatalist rhetoric, a renewed focus on rigid gender roles and legislation that interferes in citizens’ sex lives”.
“All these policies reduce people to parts with prescribed uses,” she says. “The anxiety produced by this reduction gets projected on to products. When the state is policing your body, ‘genital skincare’ suggests policing it yourself can restore some sense of control.”
“Control” certainly seems to be the key attraction of whole-body and long-lasting deodorants. A number of the influencers advertising Sure’s whole body products online refer to “Fobo” – “fear of body odour”. I haven’t seen that acronym used by anyone who is not selling Sure products, except to mean “fear of better options”, so it may well have been cooked up by the brand, rather than something people are genuinely saying. But that doesn’t mean the sentiment behind it isn’t true: research conducted by fabric-softener brand Lenor in 2019 found that, of the 2,000 British adults polled, 30% had held themselves back socially because of a fear that they smelled bad.
Such anxieties are only heightened by social media, creating pressure to have the kind of perfectly cultivated, curated life that is advertised to us at every turn. The algorithms want us to worry about how we smell, just as they want us to worry about how we look – because then we will buy more products.
“Social media and beauty marketing have played a big role in normalising the idea that any body area that sweats could be treated,” Spear says. Nobody wants to smell bad – although perhaps anyone who has felt sucked in by whole-body deodorant’s marketing might appreciate the reminder that a disgust of body odour has been linked to an increased likelihood to hold rightwing views – but it is perfectly possible to stay fresh without whole-body products. As Spear stresses: “Most people manage fine with traditional underarm deodorants and basic hygiene practices.”
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