Race, apocrine glands and sweat

By JVK from Scent of Eros Book:

From The Scent of Eros (unedited): Chapter 12One readily apparent racial difference in human anatomy is hair color. But the link between anatomical racial differences and physiological differences is often ignored or denied. This subject is so emotionally charged that few scientists dare study it for fear they will be branded racists just for being interested in the subject Similar perils are even more evident when someone tries to take the next step and suggests a link between racial differences and differences in sexual behavior. Despite this sensitivity, a few comments on these differences are necessary to shed some further light on the mysteries of odors and sex.

An observation from Boyd Gibbons extensive review of \"The Intimate Sense\" for National Geographic offers a good springboard for our brief discussion:During the World Wars, German soldiers claimed they knew the whiff of the English, and the English said likewise. More recently, North Vietnamese soldiers reported that they often smelled Americans before seeing them. Jack Holly, a Marine Corps officer who led reconnaissance patrols deep into the triple-canopy jungles of Vietnam, told me, \"I am alive today because of my nose. You couldn\'t see a camo bunker if it was right in front of you. But you can\'t camouflage smell. I could smell the North Vietnamese before hearing or seeing them. Their smell was not like yours or mine, not Filipino, not South Vietnamese either. If I smelled that smell again, I would know it.Anecdotal? Yes, but these experiences are real and supported by research stretching back to Havelock Ellis\'s fine summary of what was known eighty years ago about racial differences in body odors.

Ellis, for instance, reported that many, though not all blacks have a stronger body odor than other races, which is made even stronger by cleanliness, which opens the pores of the skin.Europeans, he reported, are \"considerably more odorous than are many other races,--for instance, the Japanese,--and there is doubtless some association between the greater hairiness of Europeans and their marked odor, since the sebaceous glands are part of the hair apparatus.\"

These differences correlate well with racial differences in the development of apocrine glands. Blacks have more apocrine glands than whites, and whites more than Asians. Some blacks have apocrine glands on the chest and abdomen, both above and below the navel. In contrast, whites rarely have apocrine glands on the abdomen, and when they do the glands only occur below the navel.Japanese rarely have apocrine glands on the pubic mound or labia majora. They also have no apocrine glands on the chest, other than those around the nipples. While men have larger apocrine glands than women, the experts disagree on whether men or women have more apocrine glands.

Racially the most striking fact about apocrine glands is their weak development in the underarm area of orientals. Approximately half of the Korean population have no apocrine glands under their arms. Similarly, underarm apocrine glands are sparse and do not touch one another in the Japanese. The underarm skin of men and women of most races has visible flat, oval structure consisting of many separate but adjoining apocrine glands.The axillary organ is designed specifically to produce and disperse odor-producing substances. When secretions from the apocrine and sebaceous glands mix with the watery sweat of the nearby eccrine glands, the diluted secretion flows over the surface of the axillary skin and hairs. Bacteria then break down this relatively odorless material into aromatic substances.In all races, differences in development of the axillary apocrine glands correlate with the odor of their secretions. All whites and blacks produce axillary odor, but only 10 percent of Japanese and only 2 or 3 percent of Chinese have any axillary odor.«FN1 Odor production in the Japanese is considered to be an inherited trait from ancestors of other subraces who produced more odor.