Everyone has a secret hope and prayer that they aren't the person in the room with the BO. That acrid, nose-twitching, recoil-inducing disregulation of your body odour that prompts people to cut a wide berth around you. Yes, my friend, that weird feeling you get that people are enforcing a huge amount of personal space around you is justified. They are. You smell, buddy. And what’s more, nobody is going to tell you. Nobody. You're just going to have to live your socially bewildered and increasingly isolated life in ignorance. And let me tell you, ignorance is not bliss. It's the path to inceldom.
Oh ye involuntary celibates. You may think the ladies don’t like you because you're a weird gamer who's gone down some terrible Reddit hole and plans to farm wives out to all deserving males, and, failing that, shoot up the high school canteen where you first experienced the whiff of trouble at the onset of puberty. But it could all have been circumvented had you just considered the joys of AXE (the deodorant, not the weapon).
You just didn't know. Maybe, just maybe, your mother told you (but did she dare?). And who listens to their mother anyway? As for the rest of us silent types, I can only surmise it’s because we humans are a weird species, finely attuned to gradations of social cues and even more so, it appears, to other things, like smells coming off our fellow homo sapiens. Yet we're not prepared to point out the olfactory sins to the smelly ones. Or the piece of spinach lodged in their teeth since yesterday's lunch. Ever. Not Ever. Ever. It’s just too embarrassing.
That is, unless you are the less smelly of a set of twins. It takes that level of genetic proximity to come clean. If your twin reeks like a three-day-old sock immediately after his shower, you and only you, his twin, his fellow womb dweller, his Janus-faced other, might have the level of comfort and actual guts to tell him. Which, thank the lord, is what led to the scientific breakthrough that holds the key to resolving a lifetime of low-grade misery for the fetid, stinky end of the human fragrance spectrum.
Scientists, bless their medicated cotton socks (to stave off the above-mentioned smelly foot, of course), have a plan. Dr Armpit, a Belgian bioengineer who also goes by the name Dr Chris Callewaert, worked with these unusual twins, with open communication channels based on honest feedback, on the first successful armpit transplant. Don’t run screaming for a cave to live out your final pungent days alone. They're not taking the skin from fragrant armpits and sewing it over the place which used to honk. Instead, they're transplanting the microbiome. Because just as it is in your gut and basically every other surface of your body (inside and out), a mind-boggling number of little beasts live and thrive.
A different subset to the rest of the creatures cohabiting with us at all times thrives in the armpit. Apparently skin bacteria, aptly named Staphylococcus hominis, hang out in your sweat glands lapping up the stuff that emerges from your apocrine glands. They consume the odourless molecules that ooze out of our glands and the waste product of this nutritional exercise for the homo staphs produces a smell. Their “poop”, if you like, is called thioalcohol and it's the key molecule that gives BO its particular rank odour. It smells of sulphur — Eau de Devil — and we humans are primed to smell it at even the lowest of emissions. Other things like fatty acids, which the staphs also like to eat, abound in our armpits, giving off a musky scent. Some people quite like that, for example Napoleon, who would write to his Josephine from the battlefield to command her not to wash till his return so he could get his kicks. Whatever.
Anyway, research on the twins and 18 other couples with an open relationship has proven profoundly fascinating. Not all of the homo staphs are as stinky as each other. So if you can populate the armpits of the olfactorily disempowered with battalions of the lesser evil, you can significantly reduce the stench. It's an alarmingly manual process involving three days of serious Armageddon for the bad okies and a harvesting of the good ones from the better-smelling twin. It’s the kind of microbiome transplant that's becoming increasingly popular in research circles. People are transplanting the gut microbiomes of folks who're considered thin into people who're considered obese — and transplanting similar into people who rate low on the autism spectrum into people who rate high on it.
When I consider that there's more micro life cohabiting on every one of us than there are humans on the planet, I have to pause a little and wonder what we really know about our so-called objective reality. I mean, billions of these creatures are happily living out their days on our person, making us smell pretty or horrid, making us lay on the pounds or drop them, or making us particularly good at remembering prime numbers to the thousandth degree — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We don’t really know how these multiple ecosystems playing out their lives out of naked sight are changing the weather patterns and causing discrete pockets of mayhem and wonder upon our persons, all without us being any the wiser. It’s like homo sapiens and the Earth — we're the bad-smelling homo staph, pooping out offensive BO all over the planet's armpits. I wonder if someone out there is planning an emergency transplant with our better-smelling twin.
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