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It's fitting that I am late for my first Alma SweatX treatment and have to run, so arrive perspiring profusely. The procedure – one of a new wave of devices that promise to stop sweating semi-permanently – was designed for those who suffer hyperhidrosis, the medical term for excessive sweating. It is the only non-surgical treatment to successfully tackle the smell of sweat.
The condition is due to faulty nerve impulses sent to the sweat glands, and up to a million Britons are thought to have the problem.
Feeling fresh: Reporter Alice Smellie relaxes as nurse Fiona Doherty applies the Alma SweatX device to her left armpit
Patients describe having to change clothes more than twice a day and are forced to rely on prescription-strength antiperspirants. Even these don’t always work.
More long-term treatments to date have been painful and costly – involving surgery to sever the nerves or remove the glands.
Botox injections are also offered, but these are said to be very painful. Now there is an apparently pain-free option – and I have been invited to try it.
Except that I don’t have hyperhidrosis. Alma SweatX is being aimed squarely at ‘the couture crowd’, who don’t want to ruin their designer frocks with sweat-mixed-with-deodorant stains. As a friend puts it: ‘The too posh to sweat.’
My excuse is that when your surname is Smellie, it is vital to be as fragrant as a daisy at all times.
No sweat: The treatment targets those with such extreme perspiration that normal deodorants do not help
It costs £500 a pop (with up to four recommended). At a potential £2,000, that is a lot of Right Guard. But my friends are intrigued. To really test whether it works, I opt to have one armpit treated, and leave the other without deodorant for a week.
But isn’t sweating something we are supposed to do? Well, yes. We are all sweating constantly. It cools us and removes waste from the body.
We all have up to four million tiny sweat glands located in the skin.
‘There are two types of gland,’ says consultant endocrinologist Professor Ashley Grossman. Most prevalent are the eccrine glands, found 2mm to 6mm below the skin’s surface and dense around the soles of feet, palms of hands and forehead. The second type is the apocrine – 6mm to 8mm below the surface and found in the armpits and groin. These are activated at puberty.
‘Generalised sweat is controlled by the nervous system,’ says Prof Grossman. ‘Apocrine sweat is down to sex hormones.’
When a sweat gland is stimulated – by exercise, temperature or emotion – it secretes a fluid of water, sodium, chloride and potassium, which evaporates to cool the body.
It’s possible to produce three litres of sweat an hour, but the average is half a litre a day. The smell comes from proteins and fatty acids in apocrine sweat reacting with bacteria.
These days, we’re all horrified by our natural smell. The UK deodorant market is worth more than £616 million. But most of us probably don’t smell as much as we believe. ‘I’m quite sure that lots of people don’t need to wear deodorant,’ says Prof Grossman. ‘Odour can be removed by showering. However, wetness can be embarrassing.’ The Alma SweatX emits electric and magnetic energy waves to target water molecules around the sweat glands, heating and deactivating them. As the nurse, Fiona Doherty, pushes the probes round my armpit, I occasionally feel a prickle of heat. Being extremely ticklish, I spend most of the time giggling.
‘It may take a few days to notice a difference,’ she says. The next day I dress with trepidation, skipping my Impulse spray. To my astonishment, nobody flinches on the school run.
Sniffing your armpits while jogging is not good, but after five days there is a definite difference between the two in dampness and odour.
I go to a ball, and in spite of dancing for two hours, not only is my left armpit almost completely dry, but it is as fragrant as a flower. The right one is less lovely. A couple of friends I invite to ‘smell my new perfume’ agree there’s a vast difference between the two.
At a regular medical check-up, when my GP asks me to hold up my right arm, a whiff of personal odour nearly fells the poor woman. I try to explain: ‘I’m not wearing deodorant on purpose, it’s my job.’ But this just makes me sound a bit insane.
The treatment also works on the hands and feet and the effect lasts at least six months. Some women report results lasting more than a year. ‘As it’s in the preliminary stages, we won’t make claims about it lasting longer,’ says Fiona
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