A North Carolina researcher is using citizen science and monkey sweat to determine whether the current TikTok and Instagram obsession with skincare routines may be doing more harm than good in terms of human health.
Dr. Julie Horvath is the head of the Genomics & Microbiology Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and also an Associate Research Professor at North Carolina Central University.
She’s studying personal hygiene and its effects on the microbes on our skin – by taking samples from people's arm pits and from the underarms of other primates, “to really understand what lives on human skin, what lives on monkey skin, how might humans and monkeys be similar and/or different.”
She said, “We wanted to look across humans and say, ‘hey, can we engage the public in overall skin health, get them to come into the museum, give us some samples from their skin?’ So, we chose armpits because those are nice and smelly often. And so, thinking about what lives in your armpit, it's a fun way to engage the public, but it's also really relevant to health.”
The team also traveled to sample the sweat of a particular group of monkeys to compare it to human moisture, and to one of the state’s most popular attractions.
“We study these rhesus macaque monkeys that live in Cayo Santiago Island off the coast of Puerto Rico,” Horvath said, “And these monkeys are really a great model to study health, aging, etc. And then we started collaborating with the zoo and we swabbed some animals from the North Carolina Zoo. So, we looked at chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons.”
It was less hands-on with the human test subject in terms of gathering the samples, but there was not necessarily an altogether pleasant scent wafting through the room.
“We would ask them to swab their own armpits,” Horvath explained. “So, often in the room where we were swabbing, it did get fragrant because people had to come in and we asked them to stop wearing deodorant and antiperspirant because those products actually tried to kill off some of the microbes because your sweat doesn't have an odor typically. It's the microbes that drink your sweat. And then the byproducts they give off are what we smell as odor. So, if you don't have microbes, you don't have much body odor.”
And when sampling the chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons, a student drew the short end of the stick and came away with a bit of a reminder of the monkey sweat.
Horvath said, “The primates have a very distinct smell. So, one of my undergrads went to the zoo for a couple of days to help with some of the swabbing and when she came back from that event, she definitely had some fragrance that was similar to some of those animals in the zoo. And so, different animals do have distinct odors and if we look at which microbes live on their skin, they also have distinct microbes living on their skin, not surprisingly.”
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The research, which is ongoing, determined that human sweat is different than that of the monkeys.
“We found that humans looked very different than all of these other primates in terms of which microbes live in our armpits,” she said, “And not surprising, because we take showers, we bathe, we have a lot of different hygiene practices. And so that was contributing somewhat to which different things lived on us.”
And that can impact many things, including dating. Horvath said, “Primates often use scent to indicate if an animal is related to them, they shouldn't mate with it. Or, you know, if it's an animal that's sick, we want to stay away from that animal. And so, both non-human primates and humans actually do use scent to find mates and to look for or identify which mates might be attractive.”
In the samples of the other primates, the organisms were more diverse, and included more fecal material and dirt than in the people who contributed their sweat; Horvath said that may indicate a possible negative impact on human health.
“The non-human primates heal wounds faster than humans. So, potentially some of these organisms that we think of as fecal and soil associated are actually beneficial to wound healing and overall health. And thinking through humans, we take showers and bathe all the time or use products that try to reduce the microbes on us. Maybe that's actually causing us some health problems, leading to more skin infections. Certainly, there are a lot more ... acne and other skin issues across humans. So, some of these microbes that we're removing from us might actually be beneficial, and by removing them, maybe we're causing some more skin problems,” she said.
