The thing about breaking wind is that it can be noisy, as well as smelly. Any
seven-year-old will tell you that. Yet, as I let rip on the Tube one evening
— with the kind of reckless abandon of which my primary-school self would
very much approve — I had entirely forgotten this important facet of the
art.
However, even though I had eaten baked beans for breakfast, chicken jalfrezi
for lunch and a lamb curry for dinner, my fellow commuters’ nostrils
remained unscathed. This is because I was wearing antiflatulence pants. Or,
as the UnderTec Corporation calls them, UnderEase protective underwear.
Slogan: “Wear them for the ones you love.”
The commuters awkwardly edging away from me should also not have been able to
smell that I had worn the same socks all week, and been to the gym five
times in the T-shirt I was wearing. Because those items, too, are the latest
in high-tech clothing, part of a widening front in the fight against body
odour.
Do these smell-masking clothes really work? To find out I wore smell-busting
socks, T-shirt and pants for a solid week, pitting them against the worst
smells that my body could muster.
Clothing is fast catching up with the iPod generation. Antismell fabrics are
one small element of an industry whose range stretches from skiwear that
responds to impacts to sportswear with embedded controls for your MP3 player
(see box).
Such clothes are more than a passing fad. Sharon Baurley, a researcher in
textile innovation at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, says:
“Fashion clothing production has gone to China so the textile industry in
the EU and US has either had to close down or go high-tech. From a
producer’s point of view anything that adds value is a positive.” And with
Marks & Spencer’s odour-busting socks regularly listed as their
top-selling clothing item, pong-masking certainly does seem to add value.
AIRTIGHT PANTS
UnderTec’s pants, available over the internet for £12.50 (www.under-tec.com),
aim to eliminate gaseous evil. Stretching nearly down to my knees, they look
like the sort of clothing an incontinent boxer might wear into the ring.
Fashionable they are not. Neither are they comfortable, rapidly accumulating
sweat. But airtight pants can hardly be expected to be breathable. They owe
their odour-beating properties to a large replaceable carbon filter in the
seat, the only part of the pants that is not completely airtight. The filter
has a large surface area for more absorption, removing problematic compounds
from the gas, while elasticated bands help to prevent anything escaping
through the legs. The only way for gas to get in or out is through the
filter.
Antifart pants are not made for convenience, or for fun, or for those who
can’t be bothered to hold it in. The fact is that body odour, particularly
flatulence, can be socially debilitating, as well as being associated with
serious illness. That becomes evident after reading testimonials on the
UnderTec website.There is a long list of conditions that can result in
excessive flatulence, most of them directly affecting the digestive system.
Among the most common are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Crohn’s disease
and coeliac disease “For people with IBS — who may pass wind more often and
more noisily — the humiliation can be so great that they dread going out.
They feel isolated, shamed and alone,” says Penny Nunn, from the UK
irritable bowel syndrome network.
So clothing to combat flatulence can serve a genuine purpose. But does it
work? In the case of the pants, the answer is yes. Not once did a colleague
or friend comment on anything unpleasant, even when kept abreast of my
latest rumblings.
Verdict 9/10 Industrial-strength design for industrial-strength
protection.
ANTIBACTERIAL SOCKS
Were smells from my pants merely masked by the whiff coming from my feet, in
some kind of body-odour dance of death? My socks had, after all, remained
unwashed for seven days.
Coming in a range of colours and styles, and costing about £2.50 a pair, the
fabric of Marks & Spencer’s Fresh Feet socks for men is impregnated with
antibacterial agents which, they claim, work to combat bad odours while
still surviving a machine wash. Odour is caused not by sweat but by the
bacteria that feed on, and breed in, the sweat. It is these bacteria that
the fabric in the socks is meant to attack.
A spokesman for M&S believes that their popularity is as much due to
health concerns as vanity: “Men like products with technology. They don’t
necessarily buy them because they are concerned about what others think, but
because they know it is better for their feet.”
Scientists have raised concerns that trying to combat essentially harmless
bacteria in this way could help to create resistance among more harmful
strains, in much the same way as hospitals are struggling to combat
superbugs. This has not stopped the socks becoming one of M&S’s
bestselling lines.
To test the claims, one of their socks spent a busy week tackling the bacteria
of my left foot. By the end of the week it was not exactly fresh but it was
not toxic, and it certainly outperformed what I’d expect for an untreated
sock.
Verdict 6/10 A fair showing against a tough adversary.
BAMBOO SOCKS
The right foot spent its week trying to defeat a sock made out of bamboo.
Bamboo is the hemp of the 21st century, the fabric of choice for today’s
environmentally conscious consumer. Green groups claim that, unlike cotton,
bamboo can be grown with minimal use of pesticides because it contains
natural antibacterial and antifungal agents.
The UK company Bamboo Clothing goes further. It says that its product,
available for about £2 a pair from www.bambooclothing.co.uk, retains these
properties once turned into a fabric, draws away sweat in seconds, like a
candle wick sucking up hot wax, and combats bacteria to keep you “odour-free
for longer”.
At the end of each day the sock would exhibit a certain je ne sais quoi,
yet, come the morning, it would be as near as I could tell fresh. Whether
this was because of the antibacterial properties of bamboo, I cannot say,
but it certainly worked for me.
Verdict 8/10 Maybe pandas know something after all.
BAMBOO T-SHIRT
My T-shirt was also made from bamboo and, like the socks, looked no different
from normal clothes. Bamboo Clothing sells tops for both sexes, in a range
of
colours and sizes, from £20. To see if they were as effective as the socks, I
took my T-shirt to the gym each day, as well as wearing it under my work
clothes for the week. And at the end? It smelt as if it could have survived
a fortnight.
Verdict 8/10 A bold step towards more pleasant gyms.
HIGH-TECH DINNER JACKET
Marks & Spencer’s odour-beating range does not stop with socks. It also
features dinner jackets enhanced with “Coolmax technology”. The lining of
the suit is designed to draw away moisture, keeping the wearer drier This
claim proved difficult to test. Secret agents aside, there are few occasions
when you can work up a sweat in evening wear. So, instead, I experimented:
if half a cup of water is poured on to the armpit of a normal jacket and the
other half on an M&S dinner jacket, is there an appreciable difference
in drying time? Well after three hours the normal jacket was still soaking,
which, given that half a cup of water represents a lot of sweat, is
understandable. The M&S DJ, in contrast, was almost dry.
Verdict 8/10 High-tech clothing for today’s hygiene-conscious spy.
Clothing at the cutting edge
SUPER SHOES
Nike Air Zoom Moire, £65
A sensor on the sole of the shoes communicates with the user’s iPod, providing
information about pace and distance travelled so that runners can monitor
their progress.
CHILD-PROOF UNIFORMS
Marks & Spencer’s noniron, teflon-coated schoolwear, from £7
No uniform can be entirely child-proof, but this M&S range of
Teflon-coated clothing is the closest on offer. It claims that the Teflon
helps to prevent stains, while the noniron fabric ensures that no matter how
often clothes are piled up in the bedroom they will look reasonably
presentable.
SKI SAFETY
d3o skiwear, from £200
The technology company d3o has made an intelligent textile that responds to
impacts by stiffening to protect the wearer. Skiwear firms such as
Quiksilver (www.quiksilver. com) will have d3o lines next season.
FITNESS BRA
Numetrex sports bra, £90
Electronics in the fabric sense the heartbeat and transmit it to a watch via a
tiny wireless transmitter, helping women to assess their fitness regimen
(www.sheactive.co.uk).
LIGHT FANTASTIC
Luminex fashion, from £40
The Italian company Luminex (www.luminex.it) is the first fashion brand to
successfully integrate fibre optics into its fabric. The result is a
clothing range for clubbers that gives off its own light: a gimmick, yes,
but very pretty.
INTERACTIVE FABRICS
iPod jackets, from £70
The British company Eleksen’s (www.elektex.com) touch-sensitive material
allows electronics to literally become part of a garment’s fabric. The
technology is incorporated into keyboards that you can roll up and clothing
that controls your MP3 player.
Smelly science: Kate Wighton investigates
Everyone has a unique smell; it differs from person to person just as
fingerprints do. We recognise others by their smell and some scientists say
that it has a big part in sexual attraction.
The main smelly areas of the body are the armpits and groin because they
contain sweat-producing apocrine glands. The whiffy smell is due to bacteria
on the skin eating the proteins and fats that sweat contains. Sweaty feet
smell because bacteria and fungi thrive in the warm enclosed environment
that shoes and socks provide.
Sweat from parts of the body other than the groin and armpits doesn’t smell.
It’s made by eccrine glands and has a high salt content, which bacteria
dislike.
Sweat smells can be easily removed by a daily scrub with soap and water, and
by wearing clean clothes. Some unfortunate folk just smell more than others,
no matter how much they wash. A rare genetic condition called
trimethylaminuria, or fish-odour syndrome, causes its sufferers to smell
fishy permanently.
One theory for very smelly people is that their sweat contains a high number
of steroid compounds called 16-androstenes, the components of sweat that
bacteria feed on. The more androstene sweat contains, the more likely that
it’s going to be pongy.
Whether a person’s sweat smells musty or a bit like urine depends on the
balance of two 16-androstene compounds. More androstenol and sweat smells
musty; more androstenone and it smells a bit like wee.
Another theory for excess sweating is that people may simply have overactive
apocrine glands.
The chemicals that cause particular foods to smell strong, for example those
in garlic and spices, can linger in dried sweat.
Medical reasons for odd smells may be poorly controlled diabetes,
undernourishment and renal or liver problems. For this reason, it’s been
suggested that dogs can detect some illnesses before human beings.
