by Mara Altman
I could go on and on about the episodes I’ve experienced and tactics I’ve used to camouflage or downplay my sweat, but I’m more curious about looking into why sweat feels like such a big deal. Why, depending on context, is it so horribly embarrassing? We are built to sweat—it’s not only normal, but actually essential for our survival—so why do we spend a collective eighteen billion dollars trying to pretend that we don’t have pores? I’m not looking to find a way to stop perspiring or even to overcome the shame, I only want to know why I can’t sweat (other than inside a gym or a sauna) and have it not be weird.
I thought I could answer this question by approaching Lillian Glass, a human behavior and body language expert. She also acts as an expert witness in court cases—evaluating the comportment of those being tried—and advises people on how to hide their tells. For those who feel that they blush too easily, she’ll train them to apply green-toned foundation to neutralize the revealing red.
I wanted to know, from her point of view, what sweat communicated to those around us. Why, during a barbecue this summer, was I compelled to go to the bathroom to stuff my armpits with toilet paper and replace the wad every half hour? Rather than show my sweat, I probably left the festivities with the attendees thinking I had bulimia or misplaced implants. Did I actually have reason to be so afraid of some measly wet marks?
Before I got on the phone with Glass, I wondered if I’d been blowing all this sweat stuff out of proportion—been fixated, obsessed by perspiration. In all likelihood, Glass would laugh at me and say, “Honey, sweat is as natural as eating a whole pint of ice cream alone in the dark, so go find yourself something worth your while to be concerned about.”
But in less than a minute, it was clear that the conversation would be veering in another direction. Glass, a professional accustomed to the buttoned-up atmosphere of a courtroom, couldn’t even keep her disgust in check. “Sweat is icky,” she said. She took a pause before what I thought was going to be an elaboration, but I was wrong; she just wanted to thrust the knife in a little deeper. “Yes, there is a definite ick factor,” she reiterated.
“But why?” I asked.
She said in a society that often likes to mask emotions, sweating is a tell—it shows what’s really going on inside. She said we sweat when we are sick, anxious, and deceitful. She knows when a defendant is lying or nervous because of an instantaneous beading on the upper lip and forehead. Sweating, she said, can also connote bad health, obesity, and laziness. “You aren’t keeping your cool, so to speak,” she said. “Something is taking place inside of your body that is not attractive.” Also, the mere visual of sweat begets the fear of a looming odor, she explained. “We are having a biological reaction to the sweater’s biological reaction.”
“But what if it’s just hot outside?” I asked. I’ve got glands that seem set to spurt on a hair trigger. It’s not fair. Surely it’s not evil to sweat when the sun is bearing down.
“A drippy, sweaty face is not attractive,” she reiterated.
Maybe it was the fault of movies. Sweaty roles are reserved for characters who are suffering from food poisoning, are about to turn into a zombie, or are caught with child porn. You never see the beautiful ingénue sporting a pair of sweat rings just for kicks. According to Hollywood, the only time good people sweat is when they are at the gym or in the midst of mind-boggling sex (which is confusing because, depending on context, the same bland and innocuous liquid can either be associated with shame and embarrassment or hard work and the erotic arts). This paradigm doesn’t give sweaters like me a lot of leeway to be cool while also being hot.
Glass kept telling me how to fix it. “You need to mask it or control it because it can be uncomfortable for the person looking at you.”
I didn’t want to believe this, but I knew that this was kind of true. I’ve shown up to a party with droplets suspended on my temples and a glimmer of underboob sweat, and people have gazed at me with the same mix of concern and disconcertment I’d expect if they’d just caught me fornicating with an antelope.
“There are many things you can do!” Glass told me to put ice on my wrists. She said to dab my face with powder.
A study conducted by Harris Interactive, a market research agency, found that roughly half the people interviewed were more embarrassed by extreme sweating in public than they were of having their fly down or passing gas.
“I guess part of me wants sweat acceptance,” I finally told her.
“I wish I could say that we would accept you . . . ” Glass said.
Could a sentence begin more ominously?
“But the reality is that we’re not going to.” She told me once again that sweat makes people unattractive and that even celebs get lambasted if they are caught with their glands leaking. “People aren’t supposed to be wet, otherwise you’d be a fish.”
“A fish,” I echoed.
“I’m sorry I don’t have better news,” she said.
* * *
There had to be a better or at least more diplomatic way to examine this function. Glass obviously had no sympathy for sweaty beasts. But I decided to take a step back and first learn more about the divisive liquid. Was there anything, physiologically, that made it deserving of its odious reputation?
Nigel Taylor, a professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia whose passion is human temperature regulation, agreed to speak with me. He applies his knowledge of perspiration, which is deep and expansive, to problems such as figuring out how long soldiers can partake in combat under the weight of their gear without getting heatstroke.
He gave me the basics of sweating, none of which lead me to believe heavy sweaters should be social outcasts. We have thermoreceptors all over our body—the chest and spinal cord among other locales—which report to the hypothalamus. If we are exercising or find ourselves outside on a scorching summer day, the thermoreceptors will deliver an important message. “They say, ‘Shit, it’s getting hot in here. You need to do something about it now!’” Taylor explained.
First, our blood vessels will dilate, bringing them closer to the skin’s surface, which begins the process of releasing heat. If we do that and are still too hot, that’s when we begin to sweat.
Taylor continued to explain that we have two types of sweat glands—apocrine and eccrine glands. Apocrine glands are mostly in our armpits and groin and tend to leak during more emotional moments like trying to dig up the perfect change to buy some K-Y Jelly while a line of people behind you impatiently stare. Those glands produce viscous, oily, and slightly opaque sweat. Bacteria love to feed on this type of sweat and can leave an off-putting odor (the ideal complement to those stressful moments!). Eccrine glands, on the other hand, are located all over our body—there are millions upon millions of them—and they expel what is essentially just water with some traces of sodium.
In a perfectly efficient world, we would sweat, but you’d never see any evidence of it—we’d sweat only as much as could be immediately evaporated from the skin (which is the actual process that cools us down)—but many of us don’t work that way. The wetness we see on our skin’s surface is excess; it’s like pouring car coolant out of a bottle and onto the ground. Taylor told me that it’s mostly useless except for making us feel awkward, but there is clearly also another way to look at all that extra liquid: Our bodies are being overachievers. We are winning so hard at the cool-down game.
Besides, too much has to be better than the opposite, right?
“So what would happen if we couldn’t sweat at all?”
“If you can’t rid yourself of heat,” Taylor said, “you’ll die of hyperthermia in twenty minutes.”
Hyperthermia is, as the name would imply, the opposite of hypothermia; it occurs when our body temperature gets too high. The condition causes tissues to break down and organs to fail. “When that happens, that’s it for us,” he said. “We’re dead.”
I liked that answer. Sweat has gravitas; it is the beating heart of our skin. We nee
d it to go on and on and on.
* * *
Sweating, as Taylor explained, is not only entirely and utterly normal, but also necessary, so I wanted to know what gave the liquid such a toxic societal association. I began looking to the past. Something must have happened during sweat’s upbringing that caused it to turn from an everyday Joe into a villain. I felt like a therapist trying to figure out why my patient began to enjoy dismantling gophers. Something had happened during his formative years, but what?
It took some time, but while searching through old medical journals and studies, I discovered a German medical historian and doctor, Michael Stolberg, who’d spent more than a year trying to untangle our ancestors’ views on sweat.
“I was surprised,” he told me later. “When I embarked on this, practically nothing had been done on the history of sweat! Nothing!”
Stolberg also gets excited about uroscopy, the practice of diagnosing an illness based on the color, smell, and even taste of a patient’s urine. (He actually wrote a whole book on this.) “In the 1600s, they had the most beautiful and detailed paintings of urine,” he told me. “You should check them out. The colors refracting. Just beautiful.”
Officially, Stolberg one-upped me in gross.
To piece together a coherent picture of early sweat perception, Stolberg translated old textbooks, medical records scribbled in Latin, and letters written by people who were trying to make sense of their sweat-soaked inheritance.
He focused on a three-hundred-year period—1500 to 1800—and found that sweat, for people back then, made for a precarious catch-22. “On the one hand,” he said, “sweating was very welcome. You needed to sweat in order to purify your body—it had a cleansing effect. But on the other hand, the stuff that came out of you was gross and people had a fear that this substance, even in vapor, might reach someone else and make them sick.”
“Sounds tricky,” I said.
“Absolutely,” he agreed.
To recap this dilemma: It was essential and healthy to sweat; yet that same sweat was considered by others who might come into contact with it as being as dangerous to one’s well-being as standing before a hungry and rabid lioness. (Okay, not quite that dangerous, but still dangerous.)
Stolberg went on to tell me that at the time, physicians and laypeople alike thought that clogged sweat glands were among the leading causes of illness and death. To illustrate, he recounted a tale that he’d documented in his 2012 sweat treatise “Sweat: Learned Concepts and Popular Perceptions 1500–1800.” A man in the 1700s found his sweaty feet a pain in the ass, so he began slathering fat on them during walks. The amount of sweat decreased and almost simultaneously his sight began to grow weak. “The way they understood it,” Stolberg said, “was that the harmful matter, which, until then, had been excreted from the feet, had now turned toward the eyes.”
In another case, two hundred years earlier, a man named Achatius Trotzberg sought a doctor’s help because he’d started to experience pain in his stomach and limbs. He told the doctor that he suspected it was because the once nearly constant sweat storm stemming from his legs and feet had recently fallen to a measly drip. The lack of sweat clearly meant that poor Achatius couldn’t get the bad stuff out, hence his body, with all the bad stuff stuck inside, was turning on him.
I wish Achatius was correct, because if he were and sweat got all the bad stuff out, then given my propensity for leaking, I’d live until at least 145.
People were so afraid to screw with their sweat output that they wouldn’t use cold water, lest it close up their pores, hence blockade perspiration and render them unwell. The misunderstanding was easy to make. For one, doctors had observed ill patients who had suddenly felt better after a big sweat. Instead of interpreting it for what it was—a sign that a fever had broken—they thought the sweat itself had carried the illness outside the body.
Then Stolberg hit me with this gem: “It’s kind of funny because people still believe some of this today,” he said, “that sweat cleanses or detoxifies the body, even though there is absolutely no science to back it up.”
I would have thought it was funny, too, except I suddenly realized that I might be one of those people he was talking about. “Sweat isn’t cleansing?” I asked. “Like at all?”
I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to catch a disease from the stuff or die if I wasn’t juicing from every pore, but I’d definitely had my fair share of sauna sessions after drinking too much alcohol, suspecting that somehow the sweat would clear me of my hangover. I’d also religiously attended Bikram hot yoga for a year and could swear I’d felt detoxified with a renewed sense of sentience after peeling off my soaked clothes. (I also loved being in a place where the dry people were the marginalized ones.) I funded my habit by volunteering to wash all the sopping-wet towels that the paying clients left behind. It was the most disgusting task I’ve ever been given and that’s even when I factor in that I’ve popped a friend’s butt pimple before.
“Of course sweat doesn’t cleanse the body,” Stolberg said, laughing.
This was such a crazy revelation that I felt this new-to-me, yet old-to-Stolberg fact needed additional validation. The only reason I felt comfortable reaching out to ask more professionals, was that when I’d told friends—really smart people who can make their own beds and have been to college and everything—they, too, had thought that sweat had cleansing effects.
“You got to be fucking with me,” one said, when I told her that apparently hot yoga is really only good for dehydration.
All the people I asked—a dermatologist, a physician, and a physiologist—chortled under their breath before reiterating a similar refrain. “There might be trace elements of something like garlic,” said David Pariser, a dermatologist on the board of the International Hyperhidrosis Society, “but toxins are removed through urine and feces. The liver is what detoxifies.” There was enough condescension in his tone to humble a pack of arrogant Wall Street lenders.
If that myth has stuck with us through all these centuries, then maybe, in a more subtle way, the early belief that sweat is a dirty and contagious liquid has as well.
But what probably led to the greatest alienation of the sweaty amongst us occurred in the early twentieth century: advertising! Or more specifically, the advent of antiperspirants.
I’m keeping this part short, because it closely echoes the same trajectory and promises that the invention of razors (and the ensuing advertisements) had on female body hair: salvation and sexiness via complete eradication. Basically, advertisers like to create insecurities—bodily ones seem to be their favorite—and then exploit them ruthlessly. Women’s armpit sweat was first targeted for annihilation while men’s sweat, for at least another couple of decades, was still viewed positively. A sweaty man was masculine. Wet pits showed how hard he’d worked out in the fields. Women’s sweat, meanwhile, became a daily atrocity.
At first, women wouldn’t play along; they were tentative about clogging up their glands. They still believed dammed sweat could cause an internal disaster, but advertisers in the early 1900s persevered and upped the ante. They not only tried to educate women—“no harm will come from stopping the troublesome perspiration in limited sections of the body,” read one ad from the era—but also aimed to convince them that sweat causes severe shame and a botched sex life. I’d say they were successful, as those are both feelings I have experienced myself.
Have I told you the one about the sweaty girl who walks into a bar to meet her internet date? No? Good. That will be for me and my deathbed.
Advertisements for popular early antiperspirant brands such as Mum and Odo-ro-no (odor? Oh no!—so clever) depicted such sad scenes as a gussied-up gal with a solemn face and nowhere to go because, you guessed it, her pits were rank! The ad is accompanied by this copy: “You’re a pretty girl, Mary, and you’re smart about most things. But you’re just a bit stupid about yourself . . . You’ve met several grand men who seemed interested at first. They took you out once
—and that was that. WAKE UP, MARY!”
There are umpteen of these ads, but I’ll just drop another treasure right here:
If you think you don’t perspire enough to matter, just smell the armhole of the dress you are wearing when you take it off tonight. It won’t hesitate to tell you that you’re no exception to the rule! You’ll know at last why romance is passing you by!
After one hundred years of relentlessly informing us about how disgusting we all are, the message seems to have taken a firm hold. Visible sweat is so inadvisable and unexpected—unless you’re wearing yoga pants and a Lululemon sports bra as you walk out of SoulCycle and inscribe #soulsweat on your Instagram photo—that if it happens to you, you must have an excuse ready.
“Sorry, I’m super gross” works for me sometimes. You’re welcome.
Sweating, officially, has become more than a body function; it’s now yet another problem to be fixed. I observed this firsthand when I talked to Michael Brier, the owner of Kleinert’s, a company that has been selling “sweating and odor solutions” since 1869. They make pads that look like disposable diapers for overactive armpits and swabs doused with aluminum chloride that are supposed to stop your skin from leaking for seven straight days. I thought it would be enlightening to get the viewpoint of someone who’d made it his life’s business to thwart sweat.
“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed about what I do,” he said in response to my questioning. “I feel actually that I’m doing good for society. I’m helping people, like yourself, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I’m not a murderer.”