the.com/antiperspirant
Not deodorant's cousin — it's the one that actually blocks the sweat, not just the smell.
means A product that chemically plugs or shrinks sweat glands (usually with aluminum compounds) to reduce how much you sweat, rather than just masking the odor afterward.
from Straightforward Latin-built English: 'anti-' (against) plus 'perspirant,' from Latin 'perspirare' — 'per' (through) and 'spirare' (to breathe), the same root that gives us 'spirit' and 'respire.' Sweat was once poetically understood as the skin 'breathing through' itself, so an antiperspirant is literally a word built to fight that breathing-through, invented in the 20th century once chemists figured out how to actually stop the glands rather than just cover the smell.
- active mechanism
- aluminum salts plug sweat ducts temporarily
- vs deodorant
- deodorant only masks odor, doesn't stop sweat
- best application time
- night, when sweat glands are least active
- fda classification
- legally a drug, not a cosmetic