- 18 minutes ago
Join Mi-Anne Chan as she travels to Secret's odor laboratory to test anti-perspirant.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hey guys, it's me Anne, and this is Beauty With Me.
00:02If you guys have been watching my show for a while, you know that I'm pretty much up for anything.
00:07So when I found out that people go through tons of trials just to test deodorant,
00:12I was like, yeah, okay, I gotta try that.
00:15Lucky for me, Secret invited me back to their clinical testing labs in New Jersey,
00:19where they put my body through the wringer to see how well their clinical strength antiperspirant actually works.
00:25But I couldn't do a video about antiperspirant without addressing the controversy around the use of aluminum salts,
00:31which is the compound that basically plugs your pores so you don't sweat as much.
00:35There's a lot of conflicting information about the use of this ingredient,
00:39because some studies have indicated that aluminum has been linked to diseases like Alzheimer and cancer,
00:45although associations like the American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute,
00:50and the Alzheimer Association have all reported that aluminum is safe to use.
00:54I personally use natural deodorant on the day-to-day,
00:57and then I'll use the antiperspirant on days that I know I'm going to be sweating a lot.
01:00It is all up to your personal preference, what you want to do or not.
01:05To prepare for the test, I wore this deodorant on one arm for three days,
01:10and no deodorant on this arm for three days as well.
01:16What we're doing here is we need to take some data from you.
01:19One, make sure you're healthy, and also take a few data points that'll show what your state is right now,
01:25because we're going to be taking several other measurements on your heart rate, for example,
01:29through the day. Put it in between your cheek and gum there. What we're sampling here is your
01:36cortisol level. So cortisol is a stress hormone, right? And so cortisol levels can increase when you
01:43feel stressed. Put it right in there. Secret's testing process is pretty unique because they test
01:48for two different kinds of sweat. Didn't know there were two different kinds of sweat, did you?
01:54Apparently, there's stress-induced sweat and physical activity-induced sweat. And guess what?
01:59They both smell different. For that reason, Secret has two different tests that they do,
02:05the first of which is the stress test.
02:09Good luck.
02:10Okay. Hello.
02:12Please have a seat.
02:13Okay.
02:14I'll be honest, this test was really terrifying. No joke. It was like something out of Clockwork Orange.
02:21During this exercise, you'll have your heart rate monitored, and you will undergo a moderately stressful
02:25mental and physical tasks. At the end of the test, we're going to keep you here to make sure that
02:30your heart rate has returned to normal. It will also do another saliva test just to monitor your
02:34cortisol. Again, I'm going to need you to follow all of my instructions explicitly. Do you understand?
02:39Okay. I need you to place your hand in the bucket of water, your right hand.
02:44And hold it in there until I tell you to remove it.
02:55Remove your hand from the bucket and place it on the towel.
02:58I need you to count backwards from 2043 by 17s as quickly as possible. If you make a mistake,
03:03you'll have to start over. So please begin 2043 by 17s. 2043 by 17s.
03:102043 by 17s. Minus 20 is 23. Put your hand back in the water. Oh my god. Okay.
03:19This time, I need you to count backwards from 4032 by 13s. Oh, you changed the number.
03:28Oh my gosh. This is just going to make me go so stupid.
03:32Start over. What is happening to this thing right now?
03:35It's all right. Okay. Please continue. Okay.
03:37More than 32. Minus 10. It's 2022. Put your hand back in the water.
03:41Okay. It was, it was the 19 one, right? 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30,
03:4931, 32.
03:52Got it. Okay. You may remove your hand. 2026. Then it's 2000, 2009.
04:02Put your hand back in the water.
04:07That concludes our test. You may remove your hand from the water.
04:10You want to start a timer?
04:15So I'm so sorry. I had to be so mean to you in there.
04:18Why did you have to be so stoic?
04:21That's part of making you stressed is by not giving you any verbal or visual cues
04:26to whether or not you're doing well or whether or not you're doing bad. If I were to say like,
04:30yeah, you can do it or that's correct. Keep going. Or even saying, no, that's wrong. Try again.
04:36Like even any kind of visual or verbal cues would have helped you relax a little bit. And I wanted
04:40to keep you on edge.
04:45I'm going to have you stand there with your arms at your side for about a minute. I'll be timing
04:49you
04:49and then I will give you instruction as to which arm to lift up. Okay? All right. So number one
04:56and
04:56number two, if you would come in, please. Once the test was over, Barry, who's a trained odor grader,
05:02and I got very, very intimate. Do you know how many armpits you've smelled in your lifetime?
05:08Okay, ladies, you're going to lift your right underarm up.
05:16The odor graders have a numeric scale that they grade odor on. Zero being no smell. Ten being extremely
05:29smelling. Tell me what you do here. So I'm the head of sniffing. Okay. So I sniff under people's
05:35arms. I sniff their feet. I sniff their breath. And if we're doing a feminine hygiene product,
05:42I'll be sniffing a used pad. So you literally smell vaginas and penises? Yeah. Yeah. Not penises,
05:49just vaginas. Gross. So if you had to choose between smelling armpits, use pads, breath, and feet,
05:59you could only choose one. You've smelled the rest of your life. What would you choose?
06:04I'd have to go with feet. Feet? I'd have to go with feet. What? Why? I don't know. I love
06:10it. I love
06:11what I do. Every single test is different and every client wants something different. On a very standard
06:17DO study, like you were involved in today, we're looking at the intensity of the body odor. So we
06:24want to see how intense the smell was under the arm that was treated and the arm that wasn't treated.
06:32In your case, it was really low. You only had a marginal smell compared to some of the other
06:37ladies on the study. At that point, the worst was pretty much over and after grading my pits
06:42for odor and sweat production, I moved on to the heat test. We're going to be in the hot room
06:48for
06:48about 50 minutes. You're going to be sitting for 30 and then you're going to be walking around these
06:53chairs for 20. I had to wear these absorbent pads under my armpits to collect all my sweat for analysis
06:59later. It was pretty gross. 40 seconds and then we're going to start walking when the timer goes off.
07:10Okay ladies, you're going to start going this way and you're just going to walk for 20 minutes.
07:16I'm considering this my exercise for the day.
07:23Hey ladies, you can find your seats for me.
07:29What we're actually doing now is, before you went into the hot room, we weighed your vial. Now we know
07:35that the pad weighed 20.647 grams. We want to now see what your sweat added to that pad weighs.
07:45So that we can kind of work out then, if the product's been working for you.
07:49I cannot believe he's doing this math in his head right now.
07:530.4 less on the product side.
07:57I sweat less on the product side.
07:59You did.
07:59You being, I'm guessing you're of Asian descent.
08:02Yes, or Chinese.
08:03So there are certain areas of eastern, coastal, China, Japan, and places like that,
08:10that actually don't make the apocrine glands.
08:13At all.
08:13At all.
08:14And so what happens is, the way that you might notice it personally is,
08:18you would have a different kind of earwax than other people.
08:20So because I mentioned that the apocrine glands are in the ear canal as well.
08:24So they actually.
08:25What does that mean?
08:25So someone who has activated apocrine glands, their earwax is going to be very waxy
08:31and kind of will have some color to it, maybe like a yellow tint to it.
08:35Whereas people who don't have active apocrine glands, it's going to be more hard,
08:40crunchy, crusty kind of a thing.
08:41Wait, that's like TMI, but that's literally my earwax.
08:44Is it really?
08:45See?
08:45Yeah, I have like really like weird earwax.
08:48I guess not that weird.
08:49I always thought it was just me.
08:50You would still, even under stress, create odor.
08:53It would just be odor from the acrine gland sweat, as opposed to the rancid odor that
08:58comes from apocrine gland sweat.
09:00You hear that?
09:02That means I'm not that smelly.
09:06Fresh.
09:06At the end of all the testing, the scientists found that I had a 59% reduction in sweat
09:12production on the arm that I did wear the antiperspirant on.
09:15And I also scored an odor of zero, which basically means the antiperspirant worked.
09:21I have a little microscope with me that I can show you on the tip of your finger,
09:25your sweat glands firing.
09:26Do you want to see?
09:26Wait, yes.
09:27That sounds so cool.
09:30Come on, let's go.
09:30Okay, so here we go.
09:31That one's just now firing.
09:33And if you'd stay with it, you saw it just been reabsorbed.
09:36So what'd you think?
09:38How crazy was that?
09:39All in all, even though I was scared sh**less to do some of those tests,
09:44I'm looking at you oral math, I actually had a really fun experience and I learned a lot.
09:50I mean, I had no idea the science of sweat was so complex.
09:53Zero to ten, what would you give this side?
09:56Like a, like a six?
09:58Yeah, and what about that side?
10:00Like a zero.
10:01Yeah.