![]() On days two through six, participants did not use any deodorant or antiperspirant. On day one, participants followed their normal hygiene routine in regard to deodorant or antiperspirant use. They then launched an eight-day experiment, in which all of the participants had swabs taken of their armpits between 11 a.m. To learn about the microbial impact of antiperspirant and deodorant, the researchers recruited 17 study participants: three men and four women who used antiperspirant products, which reduce the amount we sweat three men and two women who used deodorant, which often includes ethanol or other antimicrobials to kill off odor-causing microbes and three men and two women who used neither product. ![]() "Yet, whether use of these products favors certain bacterial species - be they pathogenic or perhaps even beneficial - seems not to have been considered, and remains an intriguing area needing further study." ![]() "Within the last century, use of underarm products has become routine for the vast majority of Americans," says Julie Urban, co-author of the paper, assistant head of the genomics and microbiology laboratory at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, and adjunct professor of entomology at NC State. "Just which of these species live in any particular armpit has been hard to predict until now, but we've discovered that one of the biggest determinants of the bacteria in your armpits is your use of deodorant and/or antiperspirant." "Thousands of bacteria species have the potential to live on human skin, and in particular in the armpit," says Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at NC State and co-author of the paper. ![]() "Ultimately, we want to know if any changes in our microbial ecosystem are good or bad, but first we have to know what the landscape looks like and how our daily habits change it." "We wanted to understand what effect antiperspirant and deodorant have on the microbial life that lives on our bodies, and how our daily habits influence the life that lives on us," says Julie Horvath, head of the genomics and microbiology research laboratory at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, an associate research professor at NC Central, and corresponding author of a paper describing the work published in the journal PeerJ. ![]()
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