Apparently more men are shaving their armpits. Apparently this is a "thing". If it is a "thing", I really hope it wasn't brought into fashion by these guys:
(You SHOW those shaved pits there, honey)
Anyway, the question becomes...why shave your pits. It might interest you to know that humans have a relatively high amount of pit hair compared to other primates. We're mostly hairless, but we've got more hair there. Naturally, scientists start wondering why (you know you're a scientist when you look at that picture up there and think to yourself "hmmm...why does he shave his pits? What EFFECT does that have? I should test this..."). And scientists start thinking of smell.
Smell (in this case the scientists call it 'chemical ecology') has become a big thing recently in studies of humans. Do we smell only what we consciously smell? If not, what DO we smell? And WHY? Do we sense "phermones"? Studies of male sweat and women sniffing it and studies of female strippers in the luteal phase have abounded. And the current answer appears to be...we don't know. There are no yet identified chemicals that could count as phermones. Studies of women sniffing men's sweat have shown effects in what they prefer, but is that only a function of menstrual cycle, or is it a function of something they're smelling? Whatever it is, we don't know what we're smelling.
But we do know we have a lot of armpit hair. And one of the things hair does is trap odorants (doesn't your hair smell nice with all that new shampoo?). And if you've got hair in your pits...well you're going to trap odorants from your pits. And if you DON'T have hair in your pits...well what happens then!? Scientific minds want to know.
Not only that, they want to compare it to the smell of a beaver's butt.
Kohoutova et al. "Shaving of axillary hair has only a transient effect on perceived body odor pleasantness" Behavior, Ecology, and Sociobiology, 2011.
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