Danny's Weblog

Why Asians sometimes don't like electric fans

Of course, I have always been aware that Asians are acclimatized to their local temperature range, so an air-conditioned environment that's comfortable for an unacclimatized Westerner is going to be uncomfortable and quite possibly harmful for them.

However, I didn't realize until recently why ordinary electric fans can be uncomfortable for Asians.

My theory is that one of the ways in which you need to acclimatize to Asia is by changing the composition of your sweat. In the West, temperatures are cooler and usually much drier, so the skin reacts by forming relatively viscous sweat which resists evaporation in order to maintain optimum skin moistness.

Here, however, it's essential to maintain a high rate of evaporation (and also to minimize non-volatile compounds of sweat remaining on the skin which invite yeasts and bacteria), so the sweat of Asians needs to be thin and volatile. (This theory is obviously testable, but I have never seen any scientific study of acclimatization so I don't claim it's fact.)

The flipside of this is that Asian skin is vulnerable to rapid excessive drying in the stream of air from an electric fan. For an unacclimatized Westerner, whose skin continually feels greasy from the high volume of high-viscosity sweat he's producing, it's hard to understand why the Cambodian wants to turn down the fan: can the Cambodian really be feeling *cold* at over 30 deg C? The answer is that the airflow feels uncomfortable for the Cambodians because it makes their skin itchy.

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