'Do you feel on the back-foot straight away, self-conscious, uneasy and completely stressed out?' Then you need to put plasters on your armpits! This is the gist of the new Dandi underarm perspiration patches that I had the honour of testing out.
If you don’t experience sweat patches you can stop reading here and also fuck you. It's not like growing your leg hair or going make up free. It’s not a choice you've made so it's difficult to truly own it. Lucky non-sweaters assume it only happens to people who don’t wear deodorant, or when you get nervous or hot. But as a sufferer I can tell you, I’ll be sat down doing nothing in a cold room while my armpits are hosting a screening of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.
Naturally, I leapt at the chance to test out an underarm patch that stops all that embarrassing being a human that you're doing.
After my initial confusion over the slogan 'Sweat... no sweat!' I unwrapped a pair of these armpit sanitary pads and put them to the test for 8 hours.
I haven’t included a photo of them in action on my skin because a) if you can imagine a plaster and you can imagine an armpit you’re already there, b) you can see what that looks like as demonstrated by this 14-year-old girl on the box and c) I outright ignored the instruction that ‘armpits are to be cleanly shaven’. I believe there are a finite amount of underarm shaves in a woman's lifetime and I'm not wasting one on a winters day when I intend to wear sleeves.
I decided to go balls out and test them during my most sweaty of activities – performing in a comedy gig. Due to my overactive pits I have a borderline phobia of wearing colours. And Morris Dancers but that’s a separate article. Performing in front of strangers in a heaving pub theatre for half an hour wearing a grey t-shirt is my idea of living hell. That and wearing red silk at a Morris Dancing convention.
Luckily ... they worked! They didn't fall out of my top half way through the gig and they genuinely stopped me looking like a lake. To prove how much of an achievement that is, this is me and my sweat patches enjoying a quiet sit-down drink together earlier that same evening:
NO DANDI PATCHES
WITH DANDI PATCHES
And here is me after thirty minutes on a hot stage:
'I’m never fucking taking these off!' was my immediate thought. Then later when I attempted to remove these huge adhesive strips from the sensitive armpit region - 'I’m never fucking taking these off, how do you remove these devil strips, surely this is the most painful thing a human could endure?'Only when you remove them can you really gleam their astonishing success. They are basically now big soggy BO sponges – interestingly the rejected working title. Leaving a used one of these around the house is a surefire way to get dumped or create your own radioactive deadzone.
After their impressive debut, I was excited about day two (and the rest of my life in which I would wear these every day).
Day two was the highly sweat inducing environment of an audition. And I have to say, these bad boys worked again. Not as well though (is my body adapting to them!?). As you can see a tiny sweat patch that has formed around the circumference of the patch, in effect creating a sweat stencil.
DAY TWO
But compared to normal this is miniscule and socially acceptable.
So far full marks for effectiveness. However, they are in fact so comfortable that I forgot they were there and slept in them. I would not recommend this. When I took them off in the morning I had big painful red marks where the glue had been acting as the hoover dam all night. Four days later the red marks were still there. Luckily it's winter and this is of no importance.
I can't in good faith downgrade the rating because I got drunk and left them on for 12 hours longer than you’re meant to. However, it definitely made the Dandi experience less dandy (I'm so sorry).
These are probably more of a special occasion kind of underarm perspiration patch, rather than an every day underarm perspiration patch. But they helped me to achieve my life long dream of wearing a grey t-shirt, and for that I'll happily pay £6.99.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.