EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.
So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
The real story of antiperspirants
The story of the massive antiperspirant industry goes all the way back to 1912, when a young girl wanted to figure out how to stop sweating.
(Smithsonian, approx 10 mins reading time)
In the 1910s deodorants and antiperspirants were relatively new inventions. The first deodorant, which kills odor-producing bacteria, was called Mum and had been trademarked in 1888, while the first antiperspirant, which thwarts both sweat-production and bacterial growth, was called Everdry and launched in 1903. But many people—if they had even heard of the anti-sweat toiletries—thought they were unnecessary, unhealthy or both. “This was still very much a Victorian society,” explains Juliann Silvulka, a 20th-century historian of American advertising at Waseda Univesity in Tokyo, Japan. “Nobody talked about perspiration, or any other bodily functions in public.”
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