How Chocolate Stain Helped Scientists Create Antiperspirant ‘Cocktail’

Veena Malik at Water Kingdom  - Sputnik International, 1920, 22.02.2022
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Japanese researchers argue that their invention will be of practical importance and may pave the way for manufacturing clothes that people will not have to put in their washing machines all the time.
The smell of sweat on your clothes is certainly something that hardly makes you feel good, especially when the garment is your favourite polo or T-shirt that you bought in a fancy shopping mall.
No doubt, antiperspirant deodorants can partly resolve the problem, but what about this: Japanese scientists have created a special anti-microbial coating that can destroy the underarm sweat that gives garments an unpleasant odour. Their study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo explained that the new material is sort of “a cocktail” of silver and plant compounds, or polyphenols, which are known as tannins, something you can find in plenty of common foods and drinks, such as coffee, tea, chocolate, and wine.

It's rather funny to know what it was that helped the Japanese scientists create the antiperspirant coating, called AgTA. One of the study's authors, Joseph Richardson, said that the invention came after his son stained his shirt with chocolate one day, and the researcher did his best “to scrub it out”, but to no avail.
“Professor Hirotaka Ejima and I have studied polyphenols for over a decade, but this chocolate incident got me thinking about using tannic acid to bind silver to fabrics”, Richardson noted in the university’s press release, adding that he and his colleagues believe that they have found two methods to apply their antimicrobial silver coating to “textiles, suitable for different use cases”.
Richardson added that the “most exciting” thing about the invention is “not the ease of application, but how effective the coating is”. According to him, the researchers wanted to study the effect of the antimicrobial coating not just on odour-causing bacteria, but also on fungi and pathogens like viruses”.
“With so many variables to control, it was a challenge of time and complexity to test variations of compounds against variations of microorganisms. But through carefully optimising our testing methods, we found that the coating neutralizes everything we tested it on”, he added, touting AgTA as a coating that “could be useful in hospitals and other ideally sterile environments”.

He concluded by stressing that “this isn’t just a hypothetical situation limited to the lab”, because he has tried the coating on his “own shirts, socks, shoes”, and even on his “bathmat”.

His teammates, meanwhile, remain upbeat about their invention, insisting that consumers could wash a garment item covered with their anti-microbial coating multiple times without concerns that the material will lose its ability to wipe out body odour.
According to them, AgTA is both cost-effective and convenient, which they claim means people working from home could continue wearing the same shirt without fearing that it will stink. It remains unclear, by the way, why the researchers said nothing about those working in office and apparently also seeking to avoid sweat smell.
The scientists instead went further in their suggestions about the future of the coating, claiming that fabric producers could simply bathe textiles in AgTA to create body odour-fighting garments. As for individuals, all they will need to do is to spray their clothes with the coating to prevent it from being put in the washing machine too often.
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