If there’s one message we would like people to take away from this piece, it's that SWEAT AND THE SKIN MICROBIOME ARE NOT THE ONLY SOURCE OF HUMAN ODOR—nor are they even necessarily the most important source!

If you do not have access and would like to read the review, please DM me for a PDF.

Read the review for the full story and for more cool tidbits about skin biology! E.g., did you know that…
…acne is unique to humans?
…when you smell something “metallic” you are actually smelling your own skin oils that reacted with the metal ions?
Enjoy! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We ended up pulling together close to a century of research from dermatology, lipid biochem, volatilomics, mol bio, evolution, atmospheric chem, and many other fields, drawing surprisingly clear new insights from old data. So I guarantee there will be something new here for everyone!

I started researching this topic on a whim during COVID lockdown when I couldn’t go to the lab. At the time I never guessed how deep the rabbit hole went. It’s a good lesson in reserving time to think, read, and indulge the curiosity that makes us love doing science in the first place ❤️

Why do we have such odd sebum? It might have evolved in part to help protect our naked skin from UV radiation. ☀️

Sebum and its volatiles are incredibly understudied, but further work could have wide-ranging applications, from vector biology to forensics.

For example, one of the most evolutionarily peculiar sebum compounds we have—sapienic acid—breaks down into distinctive long-chain aldehydes. Incidentally, those aldehydes are key compounds used by human-specialist dengue mosquitoes to find humans (Zhao et al. 2022 Nature). 🦟

You probably think body odour comes from sweat and bacteria. (Sure, some does.) But actually, a lot of it comes from sebum (skin oils) broken down by abiotic oxidation. Turns out humans have very strange sebum, which in turn gives us a very strange scent!