East Asian populations don’t sweat noticeably less overall, but they do produce significantly less underarm sweat and body odor due to a specific genetic variant. The difference comes down to a single gene called ABCC11, which controls activity in the sweat glands concentrated in the armpits, groin, and other localized areas. Between 80 and 95% of East Asian individuals (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese populations) carry the variant that dramatically reduces output from these glands, compared to just 0 to 3% of people with European or African ancestry.
Two Types of Sweat Glands, One Key Difference
Your body has two distinct types of sweat glands, and they serve very different purposes. Eccrine glands cover nearly your entire body and produce the watery sweat that cools you down during exercise or hot weather. These are the glands responsible for thermoregulation, and research has not found consistent differences in their density or output across ethnic groups. A study from the University of Massachusetts found that functional eccrine gland density across 72 participants was not significantly associated with geographic ancestry in most body regions tested.
Apocrine glands are the other type. They’re clustered in your armpits, groin, and around the nipples. Rather than cooling you down, they secrete a thicker fluid containing odorless precursor molecules. Bacteria on your skin break those precursors down into the compounds that create body odor. This is where the major population-level difference exists: the ABCC11 gene controls how much of those precursor molecules get transported into apocrine secretions in the first place.
What the ABCC11 Gene Actually Does
ABCC11 acts as a transporter protein in apocrine sweat glands. It moves odor precursor molecules from inside the gland cells to the skin surface, where bacteria can convert them into the familiar smell of body odor. In people who carry two copies of a specific variant (a single-letter change in the DNA, from G to A at one position), this transporter barely functions. The result: almost no characteristic underarm odorants reach the skin.
Research published in the Journal of Chemical Ecology confirmed this directly. Individuals homozygous for the variant produced significantly fewer axillary odorant precursors than those with one or zero copies. In the study, nine out of ten East Asian donors carried two copies of the variant, while all 20 Caucasian and African-American donors carried the standard version. A separate study in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology described the effect more bluntly: the secretion of key human-specific odorant compounds is “abolished” in people with two copies, and steroidal odorants are significantly reduced.
The Earwax Connection
The same gene variant that reduces underarm odor also determines earwax type. People with two copies of the variant produce dry, flaky, white earwax instead of the wet, sticky, yellowish kind. This makes earwax type a surprisingly reliable indicator of how much someone’s apocrine glands produce.
The numbers line up closely across East Asian populations. In Japan, roughly 85% of people have dry earwax. In Korea, it’s about 95%. Among Han Chinese, around 90%. These figures mirror the 80 to 95% prevalence of the ABCC11 variant across East Asian groups. In populations of European and African descent, wet earwax is the overwhelming norm, and the reduced-odor variant is essentially absent.
Cooling Sweat Is a Separate Story
If you’re wondering whether East Asian individuals are at any disadvantage in hot environments, the answer is no. The thermoregulatory sweating system, driven entirely by eccrine glands, operates independently of ABCC11. Early research by physiologist Yas Kuno actually found that people of Japanese descent who grew up in tropical Southeast Asia had more active eccrine sweat glands than those raised in Japan’s cooler climate, suggesting that heat exposure during childhood plays a bigger role in cooling capacity than genetics does. A later study by Toda similarly reported greater active gland density in Indonesian compared to Japanese populations.
In other words, the body’s ability to cool itself through sweating appears to be shaped more by the climate you grew up in than by your ancestry. The genetic difference that affects East Asian populations is specific to the apocrine system, which has little to do with temperature regulation and everything to do with scent.
Why This Variant Became So Common
The ABCC11 variant sits on what geneticists call an extended haplotype, a long stretch of DNA that has been passed down with very little change. This pattern is a signature of strong positive selection, meaning the variant spread rapidly because it offered some advantage. It has reached over 95% frequency in certain populations, which is unusually high for a single genetic change.
The exact advantage remains debated. Some researchers have proposed that reduced apocrine secretion was beneficial in the cold, dry climates of Northeast Asia, where conserving energy and moisture mattered more than scent-based social signaling. Others suggest the variant may have hitchhiked alongside another beneficial trait on the same stretch of DNA. What’s clear is that it became nearly universal in East Asian populations within a relatively short window of human evolutionary history.
The Bottom Line on Sweating
East Asian individuals with the ABCC11 variant produce less apocrine sweat, the kind responsible for underarm odor, but not less eccrine sweat, the kind that cools the body. The practical differences are real: less body odor, drier underarms, and dry earwax. But total sweat volume during exercise or heat exposure is not meaningfully different across populations. The common perception that “Asians sweat less” is partially true for one specific type of sweat gland, but misleading if applied to the body’s overall sweating capacity.