The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer
A taboo-busting romp through the shame, stink, and strange science of sweating.
Sweating may be one of our weirdest biological functions, but it’s also one of our most vital and least understood. In The Joy of Sweat, Sarah Everts delves into its role in the body—and in human history.
Why is sweat salty? Why do we sweat when stressed? Why do some people produce colorful sweat? And should you worry about Big Brother tracking the hundreds of molecules that leak out in your sweat—not just the stinky ones or alleged pheromones—but the ones that reveal secrets about your health and vices?
Everts’s entertaining investigation takes readers around the world—from Moscow, where she participates in a dating event in which people sniff sweat in search of love, to New Jersey, where companies hire trained armpit sniffers to assess the efficacy of their anti-sweat products. In Finland, Everts explores the delights of the legendary smoke sauna and the purported health benefits of good sweat, while in the Netherlands she slips into the sauna theater scene, replete with costumes, special effects, and towel dancing.
Along the way, Everts traces humanity’s long quest to control sweat, culminating in the multibillion-dollar industry for deodorants and antiperspirants. And she shows that while sweating can be annoying, our sophisticated temperature control strategy is one of humanity’s most powerful biological traits.
Deeply researched and written with great zest, The Joy of Sweat is a fresh take on a gross but engrossing fact of human life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everts, a professor of journalism at Carleton University, argues in her fascinating debut that "sweat may be sticky, stinky, and gross," but it's one of humans' most crucial and least understood bodily functions. Blocking sweat and its "smelly consequences" is a big business, she writes: worldwide, $75 billion dollars is spent annually on antiperspirants. To bust sweat taboos, Everts unpacks the function and chemical makeup of sweat, explains that perspiration is "evolution's special heat-loss solution for humans," and takes readers on a globe-trotting tour of oddities; she participates in a smell-dating event in Moscow, and attends the world sauna theater championship in the Netherlands. Her tone is conversational and accessible, even as she describes cutting-edge science on pheromones in sweat, the potential for using perspiration as an early diagnostic tool for Parkinson's, and the chemistry of antiperspirants. Everts has an easy hand with demystifying myths associated with sweat, such as the mistaken belief that it can be used as a detoxifying strategy or that sports drinks, such as Gatorade, are valuable aids to athletes looking to replenish salt levels. Packed full of information and unexpected tidbits, this is hard to put down.
