LITTLE girls may be made of sugar and spice and all things nice, but their armpits smell of onions. And while free of slug or snail odours, men’s armpits pack a powerful cheesy whiff.

That’s the conclusion of research in Switzerland that involved taking armpit sweat samples from 24 men and 25 women after they had spent time in a sauna or ridden an exercise bike for 15 minutes.

The researchers found marked differences in the sweat from men and women. “Men smell of cheese, and women of grapefruit or onion,” says Christian Starkenmann of Firmenich, a company in …