A good friend of mine, a Chinese born in Nanking, China, told me that many Chinese (including himself) do not need to use deodorant. “We don’t have sweat glands under our arms,” he said, “We don’t need to use deodorant.” I’d always thought that all humans were endowed with similar glands and organs. We all have lungs, livers, hearts, lymph glands, etc. Is Mr. Fu wrong? He’s rarely wrong about anything, honest.
Mr. Fu exaggerates, but he’s not completely wrong. It’s not that Asians don’t have sweat glands under their arms; the difference is that they have markedly fewer apocrine glands than black or white people. This doesn’t mean they sweat less–eccrine glands, the other main type of sweat gland, are a thousand times more numerous on most bodies, and Asians have plenty of them. But apocrine glands are the kind that make you stink.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
