Why talking about sweat stopped being a taboo (long before Alan Carr was on Traitors)

39 minutes ago Share Save Luke Mintz BBC News and Michelle Roberts Digital health editor Share Save

BBC

Listen to Michelle read this article Alan Carr's days on The Celebrity Traitors looked perilous from the start. Just 32 minutes into the first episode, after the comedian had been selected as a "traitor", his body started to betray him. Beads of sweat began forming on his forehead, making his face shiny. "I thought I wanted to be a traitor but I have a sweating problem," he admitted to cameras. "And I can't keep a secret." Professor Gavin Thomas, a microbiologist at the University of York, was watching the episode. "[Alan] does sweat a lot - and it looks like eccrine sweat," he says, referring to a common type of sweat, which comes from glands all over the body that can be activated by stress. Yet it was Carr's willingness to talk about his sweatiness - and the excitement of viewers who were quick to analyse it on social media - that was most striking of all.

'I thought I wanted to be a traitor... but I have a sweating problem'

Alan Carr is not the first. All sorts of well-known people, from Hollywood actors and models to singers, have opened up about bodily functions in ever more brazen detail over the last decade. (Fellow Traitors contestant, the actress Celia Imrie, admitted in an episode this week: "I just farted... It's the nerves, but I always own up.") On sweat struggles specifically, Steve Carrell and Emma Stone have talked openly, and model Chrissy Teigen revealed in 2019 that the perspiration around her armpits was so irritating that she had Botox injections to prevent it.