لماذا لا تكاد تُشَمُّ رائحة أجساد الكوريين

Many Koreans don't realize their own bodies produce almost no noticeable odor — not until their twenties, when the thought finally crosses their mind. Going without perfume is comfortable; plenty have never touched a deodorant stick. This isn't really about hygiene culture. It's closer to genetics.

ABCC11 — the difference a single letter makes

On chromosome 16 lives a gene called ABCC11. A single nucleotide variant within it (rs17822931) simultaneously decides two things about your body.

First, the texture of your earwax. Those with this variant have dry, flaky earwax. Those without it have sticky, wet earwax.

Second, the activity of your apocrine glands. These are the glands under the arms that generate the distinctive body odor humans produce. People with dry earwax also have much weaker apocrine activity — meaning they barely produce underarm odor.

Among East Asians, including Koreans, the frequency of the dry variant is extraordinarily high — roughly 90 to 97 percent. Peek at your own earwax and odds are you'll find that dry, crumbly texture. The light body odor and the dry earwax come from the same gene.

And yet, they shower every day.

Here's the irony: Koreans, who produce the least odor, shower the most. Once a day is standard; twice a day is common in summer. The shared public bathhouse culture runs so deep it has become a generational memory.

This is cultural paradox. When your baseline odor is nearly none, even a faint smell becomes instantly noticeable. This is why "you smell like sweat" lands as a fairly sharp comment in Korea. A low baseline breeds heightened sensitivity.

Biology may have shaped the cuisine

Some assume that garlic, kimchi, and doenjang must produce body odor — but it's closer to the opposite. The sulfur compounds in garlic and onion do exit through the skin, but you'd need to eat an enormous amount for anyone to perceive a distinct "body odor" from them. Koreans may have been able to enjoy spicy and fermented foods for so long precisely because they had little baseline odor for the strong seasonings to mask.

Biology shapes cuisine. Cuisine shapes culture. Culture reinforces biology. A few thousand years of this loop becomes the unusual identity: a people who barely smell.

A landscape built by genes

Korean streets carry far more cosmetic advertising than perfume advertising. Even the subway rarely carries strong body odor. On a summer subway car whose air conditioning has failed, hundreds of sweaty bodies packed together — and the air is, remarkably, bearable.

Behind this small everyday scene sits a single letter on chromosome 16. The fact that a gene quietly composes the air of a city is something I still find, occasionally, astonishing.