The agony of life with chronic body odour: ‘I swear I’ve tried every deodorant’

Modern lifestyles seem to be exacerbating the problem of bromhidrosis – an underresearched condition that is widely misunderstood and devastating for sufferers

I f Hayat goes out to eat, she’ll choose a table far away from other diners, ideally by a door or open window. She likewise tries to avoid people at the cinema or on planes, even if it means paying extra – whatever it takes to avoid being too close to others.

She chalks it up to a persistent past insecurity. “I still have that paranoia … It’s just in my head, because of everything I went through.”

For more than a decade, 66-year-old Hayat lived with bromhidrosis: chronic body odour. Though the term applies to BO from any cause, including poor hygiene, it is more typically driven by a bacterial imbalance or other health issue.

For those individuals, it’s not a question of bathing more often, or switching to a higher-strength deodorant: their body is working against them, and the impact can be ruinous. “Fifteen minutes after a shower, they’ve already started smelling,” says Chris Callewaert, a senior research fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, and one of the few scientists in the world specialising in body odour.

Callewaert describes bromhidrosis as a natural bodily process gone awry, most typically involving the apocrine glands. These are concentrated around the armpits, breasts and groin, and secrete lipids, steroids and proteins. This sweat itself is odourless; BO is produced by the natural bacteria on the skin and inside the hair follicles as they digest the fatty secretion.

In people with apocrine bromhidrosis – that is to say, abnormal or abnormally offensive body odour – some aspect of that process is out of balance, says Callewaert. They may have overactive apocrine glands, perhaps, or an overabundance of specific “smelly bacteria”.

Body odour can come on abruptly: with puberty, a change to the microbiome, a disease affecting the metabolism, or even as a side-effect of medication. But once established, it can prove difficult to shift, Callewaert says. “It’s often multifactorial, and not easy to perceive the deeper origin or to fix it. Sometimes people have been stuck with this for many, many years.”

In Hayat’s case, she developed bromhidrosis along with hyperhidrosis – excessive and uncontrollable sweating, a distinct but often coexistent condition – during menopause. In 2007, when she was 48, she had an ovary removed, which disrupted her oestrogen production. “After that, life started to change. It was absolutely disruptive,” she says.

She was constantly overheated, “burning inside” even during New York’s freezing winters. On the subway, she would be wearing a sleeveless top and sandals, her hair dripping wet from sweat, while other commuters were in heavy coats, boots and scarves. “People were looking at me like I was crazy,” she says.

That was only half of it. She also smelled – from her armpits, under her breasts, her groin. Her fellow New Yorkers did not hold back from letting her know. Some covered their noses as she passed, or moved away from her. “Those were the polite ones,” Hayat says.