6 Ways To Tell If You Have Body Odor

Body odor can be a source of embarrassment, especially when it becomes noticeable to those around you.

While most people tend to be pretty good about staying on top of their personal hygiene, there may be times when you’ve been emitting a sour scent without immediately realizing it. If you suspect you have an odor problem, there are a number of ways to find out for sure.

And you can start by smelling yourself discreetly, if that doesn’t work, you can ask someone else for an honest opinion or use the reactions of others as an indication.

6 Ways To Tell If You Have Body Odor

1. Smell Yourself

Your first line of defense against troublesome body odor is a keen sense of smell. Take a whiff of potential problem areas, including your underarms, feet and genitals. While your own body odor is typically tough to distinguish, you may be able to pick up on it if it’s strong enough.

Observe your body, see if you can detect any salty, musty or pungent notes. The best time to do this is after the effects of bathing have worn off, since this is when odors will be most pronounced.

2. Check Your Breath

Breathe out sharply through your mouth and into your cupped palm so that the gust is redirected to your nose. Smell your breath as it bounces back toward you. This can usually help clue you in as to whether your oral hygiene might be a source of unwanted body odor.

Perform routine breath checks between meals so that you can rule out a particular type of food as the cause of such smell. Keep a pack of sugar-free chewing gum or mints handy to freshen bad breath.

3. Give Your Clothes A Sniff

At the end of the day, dig through your discarded garments and put them through a smell test. As your body secretes sweat, dirt and natural oils, they can become absorbed into clothing fibers, causing them to stink. In this way, your clothing may be responsible for trapping body odor and making it worse.

Focus your attention on the underarms of your shirts and the crotch region of pants and underwear. Make sure the articles of clothing you check are work or casual items. Workout apparel is much more likely to smell already because of how much you sweat in it.

4. Assess Your Sweat

The bulk of body odor is caused by perspiration, and the way your sweat smells can tell you a lot about what’s going on in your body. It’s not uncommon for body odor to seem worse in the summer months or after strenuous exercise.

If you find that your sweat smells unusually strange or intense, however, it could be the result of some lifestyle change you’ve recently made. You can get a better sense of how your perspiration smells by sniffing yourself in a place with poor ventilation, such as a closed shower stall or inside the neck of your shirt.

New medications, natural hormonal changes, chronic stress and conditions like diabetes are all potential causes of stubborn body odor.

5. Ask Someone You Trust

Entreat a close friend or loved one to give their honest opinion about how you smell. Insist that they be straightforward with you, as their admission will ultimately be doing you a favor.

It’s much better to find out from someone who cares about your feelings than from a stranger. Having someone else smell you is generally the best way to discover that you have a body odor issue.

6. Observe Other People’s Behavior Toward You

Take note of how the people around you react when you’re in close proximity. For instance, if someone sits further away from you than normal or averts their face when you walk by, it might mean that they find your scent off putting. In an effort to be polite, most people won’t broadcast their distaste. Pay attention to subtle cues like a pained smile, exaggerated blinking or an apparent eagerness to create space.

The article above has shown you how to know if you have body odor, once you detect any foul smell it will be advisable to see help and not just keep quiet about it, as body odor can be nasty and can even cause discrimination among peers, friends, co- workers and family. So take note.

Credit: Top10NaturalRemedies