Few parents would describe the smells emanating from their teenage children as sandalwood. But A distinctive component of adolescent body odor is a compound that evokes that warm, woody fragrancesays a new study that compared the smells of teenagers with those of babies and toddlers.
Unfortunately, that's where the good news for teens (and parents) ends. Although there were many similarities between the chemicals emanating from teenagers and young children, the differences tended to favor the latter, whose body odor samples had higher levels of a compound with a floral fragrance. The teenagers, on the other hand, produced a compound that smelled like sweat and urine and had higher levels of substances described as cheesy, moldy and “goat-like.”
The study authors didn't go so far as to say that the results showed that teenagers smelled worse than babies. But the differences “may contribute to less pleasant body odor in adolescents,” said Diana Owsienko, who conducted the study as part of her doctoral research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.
Body odor is a mix of airborne chemicals, many produced when sweat and sebum, an oily substance secreted through hair follicles, are broken down by skin microbes or react with other compounds in the air. . The differences in odor between young children and adolescents are likely due to puberty-driven changes in sweat and sebum production, the researchers said.
The study was based on body odor samples from 18 children under 3 years old and 18 adolescents who had gone through puberty.
Odor samples from young children contained most of the same chemicals as samples from teenagers. But two compounds, both steroids, were present only in the adolescent samples. Sweat glands that do not activate until puberty secrete precursors of these compounds, which are converted into steroids by skin microbes.
Careful inhalations of the steroids revealed that one of the compounds smelled of sandalwood and musk. The other also had musk-like qualities, with the unfortunate addition of sweat and urine-like aromas.
The teens also had higher levels of compounds called carboxylic acids. These are contained in sebum, which also includes other compounds that can be converted to carboxylic acids via microbes or various chemical processes. Sebum production increases during puberty. Researchers theorize that the two musky steroids plus higher levels of carboxylic acids may be the reason why teen body odor may be unpleasant to some.
“I think it's difficult to determine that one smell is always pleasant to everyone and another smell is always unpleasant,” Owsienko said. “So this is a guess.”
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