Armpits!

June 18, 2007 8:47 AM

Armpits! Strange curiosity of the human body. Sometimes smelly, sometimes stainy, sometimes the origin of things truly weird, sometimes celebrity gossip fodder, and sometimes just the brunt of nasty jokes They're also linked to controversy and danger, but fear not - there are greener (reder?) and safer, natural ways to take care of them.
posted by janetplanet (25 comments total)

Sometimes, when I get nervous, I put my fingers under my arms, and then smell them. Like this!
posted by miss lynnster at 9:05 AM on June 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

That tomato deodorant cream recipe seems to just be a simple soap recipe. Which means that hypothetically you could wash your entire body with your delicious tomato, salt and animal fat soap. I'd add garlic and basil. Then my pits would smell like bruschetta all day. Of course that might lead to incidents like this and I'm not sure how I'd feel about that.
posted by LeeJay at 9:20 AM on June 18, 2007

Deodorant obssession kills boy
posted by hermitosis at 9:27 AM on June 18, 2007

what a wonderful post. janetplanet has a special place in my heart right now.
posted by shmegegge at 9:30 AM on June 18, 2007

I have skin tags in my armpits. Just thought I'd share with everyone.

... The information, not the skin tags.
posted by ODiV at 9:38 AM on June 18, 2007

from the link hermitosis posted:

"You wouldn't have thought that could have been the cause for someone to die. What a price to pay for smelling nice," he added.

This was from the boy's FATHER, he seems a bit dry regarding his son's death if you ask me.
posted by splatta at 9:48 AM on June 18, 2007

The armpit is also a musical instrument.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:55 AM on June 18, 2007

Another tragic tale of a teenager and deodorant.
posted by fish tick at 9:57 AM on June 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

ODiV, just cut 'em off. It only hurts for a little while...
posted by notsnot at 10:04 AM on June 18, 2007

Remember KILLBO PROJECT? The author discovered how to remove strong male body odor for weeks (or at least many days.) His recipe: wash all your shirts with a small amount of bleach, then sterilize your armpits with anti-fungal cream (or just use Michum.) It works. Interesting that near-boiling temperatures in clothes dryers don't stop the odor-causing bacteria. I bet they're thermophiles. Also interesting that clothing is a vector, and just as many suspect, going shirtless makes you less stinky.

See:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/killbo.com
posted by billb at 10:13 AM on June 18, 2007

Oops, that http://web.archive.org/web/*/killbo.com
posted by billb at 10:15 AM on June 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

Then my pits would smell like bruschetta all day.

Well, that's okay. As long as you can pronounce it correctly.
posted by psmealey at 10:22 AM on June 18, 2007

hermitosis writes "Deodorant obssession kills boy"

From that link:

"Companies spend all that money and time on advertising how exotic it smells, but they don't do enough to warn you of the dangers."

I ran the math. Considering that this seems to be the only death by deodorant that year, I worked out how much time the companies should spend warning people:

• Each standard deodorant ad is, let's say, 30 seconds.
• Let's guess there are 6 ads per hour.
• Let's guess that deodorant ads run in 12 hours of each day (they probably don't run a lot during late night infomercial time, etc.)
• That means that, in one year, 788,400 seconds of deodorant ads show on any channel. That's 219 hours of deodorant advertisements.
• This kid died. He is one of 60,776,238 people living in the UK.
• Let's say half of them use deodorant (Babies don't. Children don't. Hippies don't. Linux users don't.)
• That makes 30,388,119 deodorant users.
• One death out of 30,388,119 people is 0.00000329076%.
• If, then, 0.00000329076% of the time used on deodorant ads is used to describe the dangers of inhalation, that means that, every year, 2.59 seconds of advertising time should be dedicated to describing their dangers.

So she's probably right. I've never seen an ad spend the requisite 2.59 seconds to warn people. But, then again, I haven't watched the 4,380 hours of television that it would take to catch that 2.59 second blip.
posted by Bugbread at 10:37 AM on June 18, 2007

Miss Lynnster - that's from one of our fav-o-rite SNL skits. Luv-it!
posted by winks007 at 10:43 AM on June 18, 2007

ODiv, mee too. I hate them and my wife says she is going to make an appointment and have them removed/burned off.

NOTSNOT, are you kidding?
posted by winks007 at 10:45 AM on June 18, 2007

Skin tags? The bestest way to get rid of them is to tie them off with a bit of dental floss (for hard-to-reach places, either have someone help or prepare a slip-loop that can be tightened with one hand). They fall off overnight and the floss acts as a tag so you can pick it up and discard.

My armpit problems lie more along the lines of clogged pores rather than bits of skin that decide to go renegade.
posted by porpoise at 10:58 AM on June 18, 2007

Well, that's okay. As long as you can pronounce it correctly.

I never say bruschetta out loud. I can't handle the stress.
posted by LeeJay at 10:58 AM on June 18, 2007

winks007: I doubt he's kidding. I ripped one half off by accident and then finished the job with scissors. It didn't hurt that much. I didn't think of it until later, but I totally should have chugged some whiskey from the bottle. Not for the pain, just because that's what all those hard core guys do in the movies when they're performing surgery on themselves.

I mostly don't do anything about the tags because they don't really bother me. Maybe I'll save it for my wedding night!

The skin-tag free me, not the actual removal of the tags, memorable as that would undoubtedly be.
posted by ODiV at 11:27 AM on June 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Here is a still open Ask MeFi thread where it is never really resolved that the asker is infested with Trichomycosis Axillaris.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 11:49 AM on June 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Not a single link to an armpit fetish site?
Mefi, you disappoint me.
posted by nightchrome at 6:05 PM on June 18, 2007

Of course he's not kidding; you just cut them off. It hurts for maybe 2 seconds and bleeds for about 30 seconds and by tomorrow, you can't even see the spot.
But, yeah, you defintely want to chug some whiskey out of the bottle, because it's what real men do when performing surgery on themselves. It's tradition. (You could also pour some over the wound, but that would hurt like hell, so you might want to skip that part.)
posted by unrepentanthippie at 7:55 PM on June 18, 2007

The smelly link mentions the two types of sweat glands, the watery eccrine and the gooey apocrine glands. We don't get the aprocrine glands until we reach puberty, which is why kids don't need deodorants. Deodorants keep the bacteria from growing in the aprocrine sweat, which is what really causes the smell, and antiperspirants actually plug the glands, which leads some of us, like porpose (above) and me to get clogged (and infected) pores, which is why we only use deodorants.

The most interesting thing I learned from this link is that the breast is nothing more than an aprocrine sweat gland.

...actually a bit more than that in many ways.
posted by eye of newt at 8:47 PM on June 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

What, no one is going to recommend Certain-Dri?
posted by nenequesadilla at 11:20 PM on June 21, 2007

Never had an infected 'pit gland that I can recall, but I can't help thinking that downregulating a natural excretory gland might be a bad idea: It's designed to excrete. It doesn't just go away if it isn't excreting. And maybe it was excreting something that really needed excreting. And then factor in that the way you downregulate it is by clogging its duct with an aluminum compound ... yeah, deodorant only for me, too.
posted by eritain at 5:53 AM on June 22, 2007

eye of newt - so have you found anything to prevent clogging and subsequent infection?
posted by porpoise at 9:33 AM on July 3, 2007