Monet parents have noticed, children start smelling when they reach their teenage years. The baby has a baby smell. Primary school children don’t smell like anything, but teenagers have a new kind of smell.
Body odor has been studied to play a role in social relationships between friends, lovers and family members. Newborns learn to recognize their mother’s scent, and mothers think their own baby smells better than others.
In some in studies on detected, that parents wean the body odor of their adolescent children of the opposite sex. It is thought that it prevents genital warts.
Published in Communications Chemistry a little research found out what the change in body odor could possibly be.
In adolescence the activity of sebaceous glands and sweat glands accelerates. The change in smell may therefore have something to do with the secretion of sweat and sebum.
There are large sweat glands that secrete smelly sweat, especially in the armpits and genital area.
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Two volatile steroids were found in the teenagers’ armpits.
The researchers collected samples from the armpits of 18 children under the age of four and 18 young people between the ages of 14 and 18.
The samples were obtained with cotton patches, which were sewn into the armpits of t-shirts and undergarments. Subjects wore the patches under their armpits for one night.
Two volatile steroids were found in the armpits of the teenagers, which were not found at all in the children. They are known to affect the smell of underarm sweat.
Researchers describe these compounds as smelling like sweat, urine, musk and sandalwood.
In particular, the absence of steroids may be the reason why many adults think that infants smell better than teenagers, the authors of the report speculate.
In addition Carboxylic acids were found in higher concentrations in the armpits of teenagers, which can be produced from the fat produced by the sebaceous glands.
They secreted more of a few other compounds, the smell of which the researchers described with words such as waxy and suggestive of a goat.
On the other hand, violet and soap-scented compounds were found in small children, which was not found in teenagers.
The samples of all teenagers were analyzed together and the samples of infants together, so the study does not say whether each ingredient was present in the armpits of all representatives of the age group or only in some of them.