I Don't Wear Deodorant. Luck and a Razor.

The short version: I do not wear deodorant and have not for years. That is not discipline, and it is not some natural-living choice — it is most likely a gene, and there is a ten-second way to check whether you have it too. Look at your earwax. But the gene was only half of it. The other half was something I worked out at twelve, by accident, and it turns out there is real evidence behind it.

I stopped buying deodorant and never noticed

These days the only thing I put on for smell is fragrance, and that is because I want to smell like something, not because I am covering anything up.

The last time I used deodorant properly I was eighteen or nineteen and playing tennis. At some point after that I stopped, and nothing happened. No complaints, no moments of realizing halfway through a day. It simply turned out not to be a product I needed.

For years I assumed that was down to washing properly. It is not, or at least it is not mostly. It is something I was born with, and I only found out while writing this.

Check your earwax. Seriously.

There is a single gene — it goes by ABCC11 — that controls two things at once: what your earwax is like, and whether your armpits produce the raw material for body odor.

It comes in two versions, and the test is free:

• Dry, flaky, crumbly earwax means you probably have the version that produces very little underarm odor.
• Wet, sticky, yellow-brown earwax means you probably have the version that does.

Mine is flaky. That is the whole explanation for a decade of not buying deodorant, and it is slightly deflating to discover that something I had quietly filed under being clean was just genetics.

What the gene is actually doing

This is the part that makes it click.

Sweat itself does not smell. What produces body odor is bacteria on your skin feeding on a particular compound in sweat and breaking it down into something that does smell.

The gene controls whether that compound reaches your skin at all. The less active version cannot transport it out, so it never arrives, so the bacteria have nothing to work with. There is no odor to mask because there is no odor being made.

That is a different mechanism from washing more or applying something. The raw material simply is not there.

It shows up in behavior, too: people with the low-odor version turn out to be around five times more likely to say they never use deodorant, or use it only rarely. Which describes me exactly, without my ever having made a decision about it.

Who actually has it — and why "Asian" is too broad a word here

This is where I have to be careful, because the sloppy version of this claim is doing the rounds and it could genuinely embarrass someone.

The low-odor version is very common in East Asian populations — somewhere around 80 to 95 percent — and approaches universal in some, Korean populations among them. It is uncommon in people of European and African descent.

But this site is for Asian men everywhere, and Asia is not one thing. The frequency drops considerably across South and Southeast Asia. If your family is from those parts of the world, you are much less safely assuming you have it.

So do not take ancestry as your answer. Take the earwax test instead, because that is telling you about your own body rather than about a population average.

The gene was not the whole story

Because I did stink, once, and I remember it clearly.

It started somewhere around eleven to thirteen, at the same time armpit hair did. It was bad enough that I noticed it myself, which is a low bar to clear given how badly we smell our own bodies. It happened specifically after sport.

So I started shaving my armpits, and it fixed the problem.

That was not a grooming decision and I was not copying anyone. It was a twelve-year-old solving an obvious problem in the most obvious way, and it worked well enough that I have done it ever since and stopped thinking about it.

Shaving your armpits genuinely reduces odor

I assumed for two decades that this was just a personal quirk. It is not. There is real evidence behind it, and it goes back further than I expected.

A study from the 1950s found that men who shaved their underarms had significantly less odor, with the effect lasting a full day. More recent work found the same: removing the hair, by shaving or waxing, produces a measurable drop in underarm odor.

The reason is mechanical rather than mysterious:

• Hair holds moisture, keeping the area damp for longer and giving bacteria a better environment.
• Hair is surface area. More of it means more places for odor-producing bacteria to live, and haired armpits carry proportionally more of the specific bacteria best at turning sweat into smell.
• Bare skin is easier to wash properly. You are cleaning a surface rather than working through something.

I bring this up because most men never consider it. Shaving your armpits still reads to a lot of men as something women do, so it gets dismissed without ever being tried — and it is probably the single most effective thing I have ever done about body odor. I did it by accident, at twelve, for entirely unscientific reasons.

If you have a smell problem and you have never tried this, try this before you buy anything.

So why did I keep buying deodorant?

Here is the honest answer, and I think it is the most common reason anyone uses most products.

By seventeen I no longer had a problem, and I used deodorant anyway — right through the tennis years — because it felt like the hygienic thing to do. Not because I had checked whether I needed it. Because applying it was what a clean person did, and I wanted to be one.

That is not a criticism of deodorant. It is an observation about how most of us buy things: not in response to a problem we have measured, but in response to an idea of who we are trying to be. I have made exactly the same mistake with skincare products, repeatedly — and it took me two years of skipping moisturizer to find out whether I actually needed that one.

The version of me that stopped buying it was not more disciplined. He just eventually noticed nothing happened when he ran out.

Deodorant and antiperspirant are not the same thing

Most men buy one of these believing it does the job of the other. They are different products solving different problems.

• Deodorant goes after the bacteria that make the smell. It does nothing about how much you sweat.
• Antiperspirant works on the sweat itself, forming a temporary plug in the sweat duct so less of it reaches the surface in the first place.

Which means the question is not "which is better." It is what is actually bothering you:

• If the problem is smell, you want a deodorant.
• If the problem is wet patches on your shirt, you want an antiperspirant, and a deodorant will not help.
• If it is both, plenty of products combine the two, and the label will say so.

I sweat easily, though not heavily, and living somewhere hot and humid means that is a fact of life rather than a problem to solve. Nobody in that climate is staying completely dry.

Fragrance is a third thing, not a substitute

Since fragrance is the only thing I use now, it is worth being clear about what it is and is not doing.

Deodorant stops a smell you did not choose. Fragrance adds one you did. They are not interchangeable, and the second cannot do the job of the first.

Spraying cologne over body odor does not cancel it out. The two just arrive together, and the result is worse than either alone — most people can tell immediately when something pleasant is sitting on top of something that is not. If you are reaching for fragrance to cover a problem, the fix is further upstream: wash, change your shirt, and use a product built for it.

Put fragrance on clean skin, or do not bother putting it on at all. That is the whole rule.

It is the same principle as dressing better rather than dressing to hide something. Adding a good signal on top of a bad one does not get you the good one. It gets you both.

What actually works, gene or not

None of this replaces the boring part.

I shower after any exercise, always. That has been true since long before I knew any of this, and it is doing more work than any product would. Sweat sitting on skin for hours is what gives bacteria time; washing it off removes the problem rather than covering it.

The same principle runs through everything else I do — the unglamorous thing done consistently beats the clever thing done occasionally. It is the same reason a beginner's skincare routine is three products rather than ten.

• If you have a smell problem, shave your armpits before you buy anything. It has real evidence behind it, it costs nothing, and most men never try it because of who they think does it.
• Check your earwax. Ten seconds, free, and more informative than any assumption about your ancestry.
• If it is dry, try going without. You may find, as I did, that nothing happens.
• If it is wet, that is not a flaw. It means you produce the precursor like most of the world does, and you need a product. Buy the right one.
• Wash after training rather than reaching for more product. Removing sweat beats masking it.
• Change your shirt. Fabric holds odor independently of your skin, and a re-worn gym shirt will undo everything else.
• Match the product to the actual complaint. Smell means deodorant. Wet shirts mean antiperspirant.

I spent years quietly thinking I was just good at staying clean. I was mostly just lucky, and the difference between luck and skill is worth being honest about — especially when you are giving anyone else advice.