Inside the Push to Engineer the Toughest 72-Hour Antiperspirant
LEEDS, England—At a testing center here, for three days in a row 10 women at a time line up with their arms raised over their heads. A technician wearing a face mask and gloves sprays them with antiperspirant for precisely two seconds.
The women then return to the center after 72 hours for what Unilever calls “torture testing." They sit in a room with the heat set at 104 Fahrenheit and a humidity level of 40% for an hour so Unilever employees can collect their sweat. At another site 90 miles west, odor assessors sniff the underarms of people in a separate testing group to rank the intensity of smells Unilever refers to as “meaty" or “cheesy." For more than a decade, Unilever, the world’s largest maker of deodorants and antiperspirants, has been conducting tests like these to develop its strongest antiperspirant technology yet.
The project, code-named Invictus, involved 60 scientists, 50 formulations and more than 200 clinical studies, leading to what Unilever says is the largest change to its antiperspirants in three decades. The company has been rolling out antiperspirants that promise to keep underarms dry and odor-free for three days under its Dove, Degree, Rexona and other brands.
The 72-hour-protection claim, while rooted in science, is essentially a marketing tactic used on and off by companies to sell deodorants and other consumer products for years. Unilever’s new technology has emboldened the London-based company to double down on the claim by promising three days of nonstop protection and going head-to-head with rivals like Procter & Gamble.
“If you rationalize it…you go ‘oh goodness me I shower I don’t need that,’" said Kathryn Swallow, head of Unilever’s deodorants business. “But at that point of purchase
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