A brief history of sweating in America

Staying "dainty" in the summer heat

Marion S. Trikosko, Man wiping back of neck as he walks down a street in summer, 1950. (Library of Congress)

This summer, Thomas and I learned firsthand: you haven’t sweated till you’ve sweated in New Orleans. It becomes an art; you wear black to hide the wet spots. You go sleeveless. You take quick-burst cold showers a few times a day.

New Orleans is proud to be America’s sweatiest city. Poets Dave Brinks and Andrei Codrescu, co-founders of the New Orleans School of the Imagination, once offered classes in “Sweat Management for New Orleans Summers.” And in 2002, Old Spice created a huge uproar by claiming San Antonio and Dallas were sweatier. “I have never had a good hair day,” Sara Moppin, a Bourbon street bartender, indignantly told the New York Times.

But every American city is sweaty. During the late 19th century, as the Science History Institute explains in its Distillations podcast (in an epsisode titled “The Smell of Shame”), when people crushed into cities and started working armpit-to-armpit in factories and offices, they realized they (and their fellow humans) were damper and stinkier than they thought. And so, deodorant was invented.

The name of the inventor of the first deororant, MUM, is lost to time, but we know it was patented and commercially introduced in 1888. Based in Philadelphia, MUM was a white zinc cream packaged in a little tin. (It was also good, the copywriters said, for sweaty, malodorous feet.)

MUM is still being sold, with a tilda over the “U.” Not sure if that means it’s now pronounced “mewm,” but it was definitely originally pronounced Mum, as in mum’s the word:

In 1952, MUM launched Ban, the first roll-on deodorant. The applicator was invented by chemist Helen Barnett Diserens, who was inspired by what was then another cutting-edge technology: the ball-point pen.

The creatrix of the modern deodorant industrial complex, though, is Edna Murphey. In 1912, when she was still in high school, she founded Odorono. Her dad, a doctor, concocted an aluminum-based compound to keep his hands from sweating during surgery. She tried it on her pits, and it worked! But in the early 20th century, people didn’t talk about sweat. Women made their own deodorant at home, or wore dress shields (which are still around, by the by).

People back then also harbored suspicions about the safety of aluminum — and to be fair, EverDry, the first commercial antiperspirant, was so caustic it ate through people’s clothes and gave them horrible rashes.

So did Odorno, according to a December, 1915 article in the New York Tribune, “Why Odo-ro-no is in Bad Odor”:

“In the third edition of the Indiana State Board of Health publication, it is listed under the heading 'Medical Frauds,” the Tribune continued. “In his book, 1001 Tests of Foods, Beverages and Toilet Accessories, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley designates Odo-ro-no with the mark ‘D’ (disapproved).”

Dr. Harvey discovered Odorono was “essentially a solution of aluminum chloride with a little free hydrochloric acid, and a trace of bromid, artificially colored ... it may clog the pores and irritate the skin."

The Journal of the American Medical Association, the paper continued, called Odo-ro-no “both fradulent and dangerous,” and the New York Board of Health determined that when the solution came into contact with water (or sweat) it turned into hydrochloric acid. Which not just irritated armpits, but “ulcerated” them. It warned Murphey that her product “appeared to be outside the limit of permissible drug commerce.” She promised to change the formula. And then this happened:

Jessica DeFino of The Unpublishable is one of the best writers out there right now analyzing how beauty brands manipulate our fears and insecurities cow us into buying dyes, creams, sprays, fillers, serums, peels and surgeries we don’t need — and which often harm us.

Edna Murphey wrote the book on that. She’s part the reason you feel like a swamp monster on days when you are running late and forget to put on deodorant. Check out this 1920 ad — designed to look like an article — which ran in the San Francisco Examiner:

“A Chicago girl writes me: ‘Oh, If only I had read one of your articles years ago! Many times I have heard women critize you for publicly discussing such a delicate subject. But I know what I would have bene saved had I known these facts sooner, and I know that manyh of those women who criticize you would benefit by taking your message to themselves,” the copy goes.

“I learned the facts about myself, as unpleansant facts are often learned, by hearing two girl friends talk about me. 'Why don't the men dance with her?' one of them said. Here came a few words I couldn't catch, and then—'of course, she's unconscious of it, poor thing, but she does suffer frightfully from perspiration.'"

"It was the most humiliating moment of my life! I, who had prided myself on my daintiness, had overlooked what men could not.”

The next year, Odorno took the role of those helpful girl friends, nudging ladies in the ribs, and reminding them that being undainty = you, a pariah:

It took some work, but eventually American women decided the use of aluminium antiperspirants, whether or not they ate through skin or clothes, was preferable to being uncouth and socially awkward. Eventually, in the 1950s, chemists developed a buffered aluminum antipersirant that didn’t give people pit rash, or burn through their clothes. Stopette had the added advantage of being a convenient spray; though commercial deodorant had been around for more than half a century, Americans still did their best to avoid touching their own armpits.

People still don’t want to do that, so sprays and sticks and roll-ons have stuck around. Another thing that’s stuck around: suspicions about aluminum. People still think clogging your pores with metal particles is a bad idea, even if it’s not burning your skin, because it traps the toxins that sweat’s designed to eliminate. It’s thought by some to contribute to breast cancer. So we’ve come full circle to folks opting to avoid antipersperiants and use perfumed, natural deodorants in bottles and tins as well as homemade stuff. And now if you wheel down the personal care aisle, big brands are advertising their sticks as aluminum-free.

Natural “clean” deodorants works for some, but not everybody — especially in sweaty, sweaty New Orleans. There’s a sprawling Reddit thread dedicated to solving the problem of finding a nontoxic deodorant that doesn’t leave you smelling like you just ambled off Haight-Ashbury, circa 1968.

“I literally import Nivea deodorant from South Africa for two reasons. 1) it's formulated for South African heat and 2) it's produced in the EU so the quality of ingredients is higher because they have more stringent guidelines,” writes a user named zotts. Another person suggests Botox. “I've tried all the fancy new brands because women's deodorant does nothing for louisiana sweat and they don't help either,” writes xchairmanchao. So Old Spice, despite offending everyone in New Orleans 20 years ago by claiming we are not the sweatiest city, is the only fix.

This is our first year New Orleans, and everyone’s telling us it never gets this hot, this early. Buckle up, ‘cause it’s not going to get better. The southwest is suffering through heatwaves, too. If you’ve accidentally left the house without deodorant today, take comfort that cool kids like The Repulsives just let themselves sweat.

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