14 DAY TRIAL // A new paper in the science journal Chemical Communications describes a new perfume that, when worn directly on the skin, smells better the more a person sweats.
Yup, it looks like scientists have finally found a way to effectively rid us of foul body odors forever and for always, maybe even make showering an obsolete endeavor.
The perfume, not yet named, is the work of a team of researchers at Queen's University Belfast. As explained by its creators, it is designed to release more of its fragrance when exposed to moisture.
Mind you, it doesn't just cover bad smells. Instead, the scientists who created it say that the perfume also absorbs the foul odors that are produced by bacteria living on our skin when feeding on sweat.
Well, how does it work?
If you're lucky enough to speak fluent chemistry, you are more than welcome to have a look at the equation below for a complete and detailed account of all the science that goes down when the perfume comes into contact with sweat.
If not, here is a brief: the perfume's recipe includes a raw fragrance piggyback-riding on an ionic salt described as a salt in the form of a liquid. This ionic salt releases the aroma tagged onto it when exposed to the water in our sweat.
As for the perfume's ability to remove bad smells, the scientists say that this is because of the fact that the ionic salt is designed to attract the compounds that cause nasty odors and get them to attach themselves to it, thus losing their potency.
“This is an exciting breakthrough that uses newly discovered ionic liquid systems to release material in a controlled manner,” Nimal Gunaratne, researcher with the University's Ionic Liquid Laboratories Research Centre, explained in an interview.
Ambitious plans for the future
The scientists who developed this one-of-a-kind perfume that smells better the more a person sweats imagine employing the chemical principles behind it to create a new generation of cosmetics.
Interestingly, they say that the delivery system that enables their perfume to release more of its fragrance when coming into contact with moisture could also help advance medical sciences.
Thus, the Queen's University Belfast team argues that ionic salts like the one they used to engineer their perfume could serve to deliver specific substances in the body in a closely controlled and orderly fashion.
As Nimal Gunaratne put it, “Not only does it have great commercial potential, and could be used in perfumes and cosmetic creams, but it could also be used in others area of science, such as the slow release of certain substances of interest.”
