When I was 14 my parents sent me to the Mount Sinai Youth Underarm Clinic. At the time I was stricken with excessive underarm sweating due to an overactive pituitary gland. The very sight of Leslie Norman across the playground and I had the Everglades in my shirt. I tried everything: A button-down with special sponges built in, constant masturbation, hours in a 110-degree dessication tank covered head-to-toe in sea salt. It was so bad that my case made it into “letters” section of the New England Journal of Medicine, right under a guy who had balls the size of bocce balls. Lucky bastard.

This was the routine in the clinic: 7AM lights-on, put on fresh paper gowns and armpit cups hanging by our bed, wring out our bedsheets, eat a hearty breakfast to get the glycogen flowing (no citrus allowed–something about the acidity), blood-draw, empty our armpit cups, dodgeball, empty our armpit cups, lunch, empty our armpit cups, dinner, empty our armpit cups, 10PM lights-out. Three times a day they applied the antiperspirant, foul-smelling and iridescent like something not-quite-used-up in a nuclear reactor. That wasn’t the worst of it: Who knew that deodorant could even be applied via a giant syringe? And who could have fathomed that it would be applied directly into the urethra?

This stuff was, you guessed it, Gillette Clinical Strength Antiperspirant. At the time it was approved only for potentially-fatal excessive underarm sweating like mine. How it works is: The deodorant contains a tiny amount of neurotoxin which paralyzes key sweat glands in your underarm. Problem is, it works a little too efficiently and sometimes will plug up every gland. When that happens you begin to fill slowly with unused sweat. Your fingers become swollen and pink and one or other of your eyeballs might pop out of its socket from the pressure. That’s how I met my best friend at the clinic, Paul.

Basically what I’m saying is: Gillette Clinical Strength Antiperspirant worked for me.

GRADE: B+

http://www.gilletteclinicalstrength.com/