SWEAT CITY

Las Vegas is a sweaty mess.

At least, that's the conclusion of Old Spice's annual "Sweatiest Cities in America" survey. But we're not as sweaty as Phoenix; the Arizona city ranked first to our second place finish on the list.

This makes two years in a row Las Vegas has held this dubious distinction. It's a rare second place finish for a city that's usually at the top of lists. Other surveys named us the fattest city in the nation and the leaders in personal debt.

On second thought, maybe No. 2 isn't so bad.

Who wants a sweaty moniker, anyway? While a lot of Americans "glisten," that's more like a light sheen of dew on an upper lip, not the buckets of sweat that perspiration expert and Old Spice scientist Jay Gooch says Phoenix residents put out. Collectively, those folks produce enough sweat to fill 14,165 SUV gasoline tanks in an hour. We Las Vegans could fill 4,646 SUV tanks.

Gross.

Still, if Oscar Goodman had anything to say about it, we wouldn't even be on the list.

"Anyone who spends one second believing this should be sweating," says the mayor, who claims he hasn't broken a sweat in at least nine years, when he first took office. "I'll come after them and have them whacked."

Scientist Gooch, who says a good sense of humor is a requirement when dealing with intimate bodily fluids, based the rankings on cities' average temperatures during June, July and August. For us, that averaged to 91.1 degrees. That number was used to calculate how much a person of average weight and height would sweat during one hour on a typical summer day.

The result? Hold onto your cape, Captain Obvious: Las Vegans sweat a lot during the summer, 25.3 ounces per person, per hour.

And residents say, "duh."

"Oh, geez," Damon Lang, president of Planet Green landscaping, says when told about the ranking. He spends a lot of time outside and knows a little about perspiring. His hydration motto: "If I'm not peeing, I'm in trouble."

Lang aims to drink about a gallon of water a day. He started doing landscaping 16 years ago and recalls a day in 1998 when he was installing some flagstone. It was about 124 degrees in that yard; some sweating was involved but he barely noticed.

"It's a dry heat. We're not soaking wet," Lang says.

Most people gauge their sweat levels on how damp they feel, Gooch says, but with valley humidity levels often in the single digits, it's harder to perceive sweat.

Then again, it all depends on what you're doing.

Las Vegas summers don't have what Lorena Peril calls "the Chia Pet effect" on her hair, but her job is hot and sweaty; she's a singer with the group Sin City Heat. There's no way to perform live, singing and dancing under stage lights, and not work up a sweat, she says.

"The dancers are beautiful and the band is hot," Peril says. "We're always on fire."

Working in a local kitchen can feel about as hot as a kerosene cat in hell with gasoline pants on.

"It gets pretty hot," says Robert Ruiz, chef at Bob Taylor's Ranch House. "Sometimes you get used to it and sometimes you don't."

Ruiz is from Texas, where the humidity is often higher than the temperature. That's when your clothes can turn into a sticky wet mess and that, he says, is real heat.

As for beating the heat over a grill that puts off temperatures as high 500 degrees?

"We get a bucket of ice, fill it up with water and put towels in there," Ruiz says. "We keep our faces wiped off."

While his constituents seem to embrace the fact that Las Vegans perspire, Goodman resists the label.

"I don't believe it," Goodman says. "We're not sweating ... because we're the coolest city in the world."

Contact reporter Sonya Padgett at spadgett@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4564.