Growing up as a teenager in Gladstone, in the year 2000, three things were essential: a pair of wraparound Oakley sunglasses, a school bag in the satchel style of the Australian Olympians; and an arsenal of aerosol antiperspirants (Vanilla Kisses for the girls, and the latest from Lynx for the lads). Without this weaponry, particularly the propellants, puberty in the tropical savanna promised to be painful and pash-free. The fear of sweat, and its consequences, hung like fog over the school’s timber port racks, punctuated at regular intervals by bursts of chemical clouds aimed down shirt sleeves at sweating armpits.

Decades have passed since. I’m now in my 30s, living in Brisbane’s subtropics, in a house built in the same decade and, bizarrely, in the same style, as my old high school. Like the school, my home is a two-storey rectangle with an almost-flat roof. It is also without mechanised climate control, save for a few hardworking fans, just as my classrooms used to be. Sweat is inescapable, especially in summer. You’re wet from the moment you towel off after a shower; damp even when the deodorant goes on. Head out the door for the commute, and the back of your shirt is already clinging to the streams of perspiration snaking down your spine. This clamminess and its promise of wet patches on work shirts used to spike the same sweat stress that drove my schoolyard body spray obsession – a stress that contributes untold thousands of my own cash to the multibillion dollar deodorant industry.

But something has happened. This summer, I gave up being sweat-scared.

It started when I went looking for a fresh way to stay active during lockdowns, and subscribed to a YouTube channel for dance cardio workouts. The upbeat music mixed by a live DJ and choreographed by outrageously fun instructors had me hooked. But at first, I found the program’s promise to “make sweat sexy” a little odd. I’d grown up thinking sweat was anything but. Sweat was annoying, sweat made you smell, sweat meant you’d probably have no one to hang out with at lunchtime; sweat was a problem. How could it possibly be appealing?

But it didn’t take long before a very sweaty twerk-out felt like a very normal, very empowering, and very sexy start to the day. Finally, I felt like I was giving truth to Colin Hay’s observations about the women who glow in the Land Down Under. Given how much of my adolescent and adult life had been spent avoiding sweat at all costs, this was a fairly radical departure from the norm. And it made me realise how profoundly I’d been influenced by decades of antiperspirant advertising, which connected sweat with smell and loneliness, and emphasised a woman’s need to remain powder-fresh at all times.

Well, as of now, I’m over that. And I’m not alone.

Even before the pandemic hit sales, dominant forces in the deodorant market were reporting downturns, especially among young women, due to concerns about the effect of chemicals on skin or the waste generated by plastic packaging. Cue a boost of products with an “eco” or “bio” edge. A quick squiz of the shelves at the supermarket today suggests refillable deodorants are going mainstream, as well as an expanding range of natural deodorisers and antiperspirants that might also be plastic-free and fully compostable. It all stands in stark contrast to the millennium market, when cans of propellant were propelled to the forefront of the high school must-have list. Is this where today’s teenagers are headed? Back to eau natural?

I kinda hope so.

Hostile attitudes towards what is a natural bodily function can be brutal. Many beautiful menopausal mates have told me of the arrival of an almost ceaseless sweat, irrespective of activity or climate, and their struggles to conceal it at unsympathetic workplaces. Some white-collared workers are so sure the sight of sweat carries negative career consequences, they pay for underarm Botox injections. What if we tried to support, instead of suppress or shun, a sweating body instead? A little bit of sweat won’t guarantee you’ll stink the office out, despite what the industry wants you to think.

As I welcome the relief from summer’s oppressive heat and humidity, and prepare for the joyous respite of winter, I’m planning to stay sweaty. Or at the very least I’m planning not to worry about you or anyone else seeing my sweat. I’ll shower, and change as needed. I’ll check in to make sure I’m not offending your olfactory system. And I’ll let you know next summer whether I too have embraced the deodorant-free life, and if I still believe you can make sweat sexy.

• Katherine Feeney is a journalist and broadcaster who presents Afternoons on ABC Radio Brisbane.