Is Weed BO a Thing? Reginald Investigates!
The other day, as I was surfing the Internet trying to discover interesting new topics to write about, a particular thread on Reddit caught my attention. I was going to write about the latest study that suggests that THC remains within breast milk for months, and how the findings were very nonscientific- however, the comments in the thread itself inspired this article.
One of the users said that their body sweat smelled like cannabis. this was then echoed by several other users who said the same thing. For my 22 years of consuming cannabis, I have never smelled like weed due to my sweat. Until reading this for the first time, I didn't even know it was possible.
This prompted me to quickly begin searching for answers, because if smoking weed can make your sweet smell like cannabis then why aren't more people talking about it.
After going down several rabbit holes on the Internet, I can more or less say with certainty that there is a possibility the cannabis can alter your body odor to smell like weed. However, as with most cannabis things “more research is required.”
Nonetheless, in this article I am to share with you that I have discovered in my research.
When you are most likely to produce cannabis-like body odor
The most compelling article I found on the subject matter comes from vice magazine. Written by Nathan Thompson, he speaks about how his girlfriend on a post coital event, notice that his sweat was smelling a bit like skunk. When Thompson smelled for himself, he confirmed what is girlfriend I told him.
While there isn't a lot of research on this idea, he did reach out to a few experts within their fields who essentially confirmed that smoking cannabis can impact the smell of your body. This is because the terpenes within cannabis is fat soluble, and one scientist theorizes that the particular sweat that contains the cannabis smell is “apocrine sweat”.
“It wasn't long before Dr. Shelomi realized the cannabis smell probably comes from apocrine sweat as opposed to eccrine sweat. Eccrine sweat is clear and watery, and used to cool the body down, while apocrine sweat glands, clumped mainly around the armpits and genitals, activate during sex and times of stress.” - Source
Another theory relates to the terpenes found within cannabis, and the overlapping elements found in their sweat. It turns out that your sweat and cannabis share 11 terpenes. This means that even if you don't smoke cannabis you can still smell like cannabis if the number of terpenes is similar to a particular cannabis strain.
Many of these researchers believe that cannabis can in fact alter your body odor, by increasing the availability of some of these terpenes.
Don't just blame the weed though.
One Reddit user did point out that even if you don't smoke cannabis you can smell like weed because food also contains terpenes. Mycrene, limonene and similar terpenes existing a wide variety of other plants. This is why blueberry cannabis, smells like blueberries.
If some of these turbines can be obtained from regular food, then even a unique ingestion of particular foods can alter your sweat to smell more like cannabis.
Additionally, your sweat doesn't smell the way it does solely by the foods that you eat but also by the bacteria that live on your skin. Thus, for some people the particular combination of bacteria coupled with the terpene profiles of weed or other foods- can result in a body stank that stinks like weed.
Does your sweat smell like weed?
This article was meant to educate people on the fact that yes- weed can make your sweat smell like weed. However, as with everything related to cannabis it's not that simple either. The human body is a complex Organism that processes complex compounds but result in unique manifestations within our own organic chemistry.
Yet, if there is one thing that we can learn from this is that there is still so much to learn from a plant that has been actively part of human history for more than 10,000 years.
I'm interested and knowing that some of my readers have experienced this phenomenon. Does your sweat smell like weed? if so, what strain? Let me know your answer in the common section you nug-wreaking stoner!
PS
Some people have claimed that they continue to smell like cannabis even after they have stopped smoking weed, meaning that there is a small possibility that it can alter your smell indefinitely. But if we have to be honest about things, I'd much rather have my sweat smell like Girl Scout cookies than stanky balls!
CBD BODY ODOR, READ MORE...
