Sweat

Note Profile

Abstract

About

Sweat is an abstract body note, and the sources describe two different smells under the one word. The chemistry sources describe fresh body odour: rancid, cheesy and vinegar-like, driven by isovaleric and propionic acid, the same acids that make strong cheese and locker rooms smell as they do. The perfumery trade sources describe something else, a warm raw skin quality filed with musk and leather. Both are attested. This vector holds both, with animalic first and sour close behind, and the spreads are wide because no source resolves which reading a perfumer means.

Scent Profile

Animalic leads and it is the facet all four sources agree on, though they reach it from opposite directions. The Kingdom Scents lists faint sweat beside leather, musk and smoky tones as an animalic quality and calls the effect raw and seductive, human skin and warmth. Parfinity says the same thing in the same register: primal, intimate, warm, sensual and slightly dirty. Sour is the other reading and it is the literal one. Wikipedia calls body odour pungent, cheesy and vinegar-like, and a biochemistry source names isovaleric acid as the compound that smells like sweat by itself, the same acid that carries strong cheese. Clean_musk is the skin warmth without the dirt, the part of the note that the trade sources treat as continuous with musk. Sulphurous rests on one claim only, Wikipedia's onion-like description of female armpit odour, and it should be checked before it is trusted. Below the naming line, lactonic is the dairy side of the cheese comparison, fruity is the other half of Wikipedia's fruity-onion pairing, and green is 2-nonenal, described as greasy and grassy. Leather is scored at zero because the one source that mentions it lists it as a sibling of sweat inside the animalic family, not as a quality of sweat, and reading it as an attribution would be a fabrication.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~12h lasting

Family Amber · Musk · Leather, Fruity

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Not a material. Sweat itself is nearly odourless when secreted. Wikipedia's body-odour article attributes the smell to skin bacteria breaking down sweat lipids and amino acids, and names the products: propionic acid for the vinegar-cheese sharpness, and different profiles by sex, rancid and cheese-like in male armpits, more fruity and onion-like in female ones. A biochemistry blog names isovaleric acid, 3-methylbutanoic acid, as the compound that smells like sweat on its own. 2-Nonenal, greasy and grassy, appears in increasing amounts with age. No fragrance house or supplier publishes a sweat base or accord specification, so what a perfumer dispenses under this label is unknown and this vector is built from body-odour chemistry plus trade prose about animalic notes.

Usage in Perfumery

13 Fragrantica placements and 2 Parfumo placements across 2 brands. Fragrantica files it under Natural and synthetic, popular and weird. It is a deliberate transgression rather than a building block, used where a composition wants skin and effort instead of clean musk. Trade writing groups it with civet, musk and leather rather than treating it as a material with a dose range, so nothing here says how much is used or against what.