Scientists Solved the Ripe Mystery of Why Teenagers Smell So Bad
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Parents think babies smell great, and we all think teenagers don’t smell great (no offense).
A new study quantifies which smells are prominent in each group. Many odors are in both groups.
Teens have way more of the stinky stuff because of steroids, bacteria, and ozone.
In new research, scientists tried to get to the bottom of one of life’s most pressing questions: how do sweet, pleasant-smelling babies become stinky, ornery teenagers? The personality traits remain a mystery, unfortunately, but we now have some clues about the changes in smell. The team’s research on the subject was recently published in the journal Nature Communications Chemistry.
Researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany decided to do this study for a simple reason. “So far,” they write, “only a few researchers have studied the composition of children’s BO. Principles of axillary malodor formation in adults are well-known. However, no one has yet directly compared the chemical composition of BOs from infants and post-pubertal children.”
It seems this smell research is still in its own infancy.
To identify the chemicals in the body odors of both groups, researchers lined their “axillary regions”—their armpits—with cotton pads sewn into regular t-shirts. The pads were then soaked with solvents to release the chemical components for analysis. Those chemicals were subjected to olfactory gas chromatography (GC-O), which allowed the scientists to cross-reference those chemical components with the odor signatures produced. Then, a select few compounds were further analyzed using combined gas chromatography and mass spectrometry (GC-MS).
Here are some of the words describing odor chemicals that were higher in—or even exclusive to—teens: fruity, waxy, earthy, cheesy, musty, goat-like, sweaty, urinal, and musky. The scientists also noted an “unknown odor.” And here are the only two that were measurably higher in infants: flowery and soapy.
There’s a key mechanism at play here that scientists use to explain post-pubescent odor. When we enter puberty, two steroids ramp up that have a dramatic effect on smell: 5α-androst-16-en-3-one and 5α-androst-16-en-3α-ol. So far, researchers have found it hard to measure and isolate these steroids. The same volatility that makes them quickly gas away from your skin in smell form may mean they get washed out during the process of sampling and extracting with a solvent, the researchers explain.
These carboxylic acids stand out to the research team as a major part of post-pubescent odor. That’s because they use our sebum—he oily layer that helps protect our skin—as a broadcasting system.
“[I]t can be assumed that the more sebum is secreted,” the authors state, “the higher is the abundance not only of long- but also of short- and medium-chained carboxylic acids. Further, not only the amount of initially secreted fatty acids, but also the exposure duration of these skin lipids to ambient air can be an influencing factor leading to a higher amount of carboxylic acids.”
In other words, the longer the oily layer stays undisturbed on your skin, the more intense that odor might become as you continue to be exposed to air. And all of this is magnified by the body’s microbiome, as bacteria and other microorganisms are also responsible for many of the chemical changes that create odorous results. Between oxidizing and the bacterial diet, we’re all just emanating a lot of stinky chemistry results.
You may be thinking that this all maps to what we already know: children hit puberty, begin to sweat a lot more, and secrete a lot more oil. But the roundup of existing research in this paper shows that there are some direct comparisons missing from the body of work.
Doing a specific comparison of infant odors to teenager odors also quantifies and reports on the evidence that supports our existing notions of body odor. As technology continues to advance, scientists will have even more ways to chemically smell our stinky human bodies. Lucky them!
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