A new study suggests that wearing an antiperspirant or deodorant substantially cuts down the microbial life that survives on a person, Financial Express reports.
The researchers said that the antiperspirant and deodorant can significantly reduce the type and quantity of bacterial life found in the human armpit's "microbiome".
"Thousands of bacteria species have the potential to live on human skin, and in particular in the armpit," says co-author Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at NC State, according to Cosmos.
"Just which of these species live in any particular armpit has been hard to predict until now, but we've discovered that one of the biggest determinants of the bacteria in your armpits is your use of deodorant and/or antiperspirant," said Rob Dunn, professor at North Carolina State University in the US.
The study was published in the journal the PeerJ.
The study focused on the effect that antiperspirant and deodorant have on the microbial life that lives on our bodies, and how our day-to-day habits influence the life that lives on us.
"When you have all these microbes on your skin, most of them are potentially beneficial, or at least benign," Julie Horvath, an evolutionary geneticist at the North Carolina Central University and co-author of the study, told Quartz.
"They don't do anything, except for maybe create a protective barrier on your skin."
For the study, the researchers recruited 17 study participants for an eight-day experiment in which the researchers took swabs off the armpits of all of the participants.
The researchers cultured the samples and determined the abundance of microbial organisms growing on each participant.
The results showed that once all participants began using antiperspirant on days seven and eight; very few microbes were found on any of the participants. This verified that the use of these products reduces microbial growth.
