I didn't grow up thinking about how I smelled. I grew up thinking about which shade of lipstick went with which church hat, and whether my mother would let me leave the house in a skirt that short. Soap was soap. You washed, you put on a little cocoa butter, you went about your day, and nobody gave it a second thought.
Then I turned sixty and my body changed the rules without telling me.
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I'm 65 now. Three grandchildren, a two-bedroom apartment I have lived in for nineteen years, and a closet full of cardigans I loved right up until I started to suspect them. Somewhere around my sixty-third birthday I began noticing a smell in my home. Faint. A little sweet, a little like old paper and pennies. It sat in the hallway. By August it had followed me into the car. Worst of all was the bedroom, first thing in the morning, before I got a window open.
So I did what any sensible woman does. I bought candles. I steam cleaned the couch twice. I paid a man $140 to crawl around under my floorboards looking for damp, and he came back up and told me my apartment was fine.
My apartment was fine.
Why I Started Taking The Way I Smell Seriously
It was my granddaughter who told me, and she never said a word.
She was nine. She climbed into my lap the way she always did, and then she turned her face away from my shoulder. Barely. For half a second. Then she settled back in and carried on about her spelling test, and I sat there with my arms around her and my stomach somewhere near the floor.
I knew that turn. I had done it myself, forty years earlier, in my own mother's front room.
Nobody had told my mother either.
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What My Routine Actually Looks Like
A Real Wash, Not More Perfume
The first thing I got wrong was reaching for something to cover it. More body spray. Heavier lotion. A perfume I have worn since 1994, applied twice as often. All that did was stack a second smell on top of the first one, and together they were worse than either had been alone.
What moved the needle was changing what I wash with. One bar, used properly, every single day. Everything else on this list is small and adds up to under ten minutes.
My routine now:
- A persimmon soap bar in the shower, lathered onto a washcloth rather than straight onto skin
- Ninety seconds on the four places that hold it: chest, upper back, behind the ears, nape of the neck
- Pillowcases changed every third day instead of every Sunday
- Cardigans and collars aired overnight before they go back in the closet, never straight onto the hanger
- A cotton undershirt under anything wool or synthetic
- Unscented cocoa butter after, so I am not layering fragrance on fragrance
- A spare bar in the guest bathroom and one that lives permanently in my overnight bag
Nothing on that list is difficult. The hard part was admitting I needed a list.
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Fabric Holds It Longer Than Skin Does
This is the piece almost nobody gets right. You can wash properly and still walk around inside yesterday. Wool, polyester and the inside of a coat collar cling to odor compounds long after your skin is clean, which is why I air everything overnight now and stopped hanging worn cardigans back up beside the clean ones. My closet stopped smelling like my closet.
The Two-Minute Rule
For years I washed the way I always had, which is to say fast. Thirty seconds, top to bottom, out. Two minutes sounds like nothing until you stand there and actually count it, and that gap is the whole difference between rinsing a bar across your skin and letting it do the work it came to do.
The Places I Was Missing
Underarms get all the attention and they were never the problem. The compound that changes with age comes off the chest, the upper back, the nape of the neck and behind the ears, which happen to be the exact four places a quick shower skips. Once somebody finally explained that to me, I stopped wondering why forty years of deodorant had never touched it.
Somebody Has To Tell You The Truth
Here is the hardest part. You cannot smell yourself. Your nose adapts to your own scent inside a few minutes and then lies to you for the rest of the day. I asked my sister, made her promise to be honest, and made her do it again a month later. If there is nobody in your life you can ask, strip the bed in the morning and put your face into the pillowcase before it goes in the wash. That will tell you the truth whether you want it or not.
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The Soap Problem Nobody Talks About
Here is what I did not know until I was sixty-four years old, and I am still angry that I had to find it on my own.
The smell that arrives in your sixties is not poor hygiene and it is not sweat. From around the age of forty the skin produces more omega-7 fatty acids, and as those break down on the surface they form a compound called 2-nonenal. Japanese researchers identified and named it in 2001. It smells grassy and faintly greasy, and it is the reason a room can smell of an older person who has showered every single day of her life.
Ordinary soap does not remove it. 2-nonenal is not water soluble, so it survives a normal wash, stays bound to the skin, and transfers straight into fabric. That is why the deodorant did nothing, why the perfume made it worse, and why I ended up paying a man to look for damp under my floorboards.
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Why SAWUMI Lives On My Bathroom Shelf
Japan has known about this for a very long time. Kakishibu, fermented persimmon tannin, has been used there for centuries and it is the standard answer to this exact problem for Japanese women my age. The tannin binds to the odor molecule and lifts it off the skin rather than parking a fragrance on top of it.
I bought a single bar to prove it would not work. That was eleven months ago and I have not been without one since.
Here is why it stays on my shelf:
1. It goes after the actual compound, not the smell. Persimmon tannin binds 2-nonenal and carries it down the drain. Deodorant only covers. Antibacterial soap attacks bacteria, which was never what was happening on my skin in the first place.
2. I could tell inside a week. Day four was the first morning the pillowcase smelled of nothing at all. Not of soap. Of nothing. I stood in my bedroom at seven in the morning and had a little cry about it, which I am not remotely embarrassed to admit.
3. It did not dry me out. At 65 my skin has no forgiveness left in it, and I fully expected a deodorizing bar to strip me raw. There is shea butter and green tea in it, and my arms are softer now than they were on the drugstore soap I used for a decade.
4. There is no perfume on it. It smells faintly of almost nothing, which after two years of stacking scents was exactly what I wanted. I can wear my own perfume again and have it smell the way it is supposed to smell.
5. One bar lasts me about five weeks. I do that math because I am on a fixed income and I am too old to pretend otherwise. On the three-bar order it works out under a dollar a day, and the subscription takes another 20% off and turns up before I run out.
6. My granddaughter puts her face straight into my shoulder now. She has no idea any of this ever happened. That is the entire point.
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What I Want Other Women Our Age To Know
I do not talk about this out loud very often, because I know exactly how it sounds. She's vain. She's obsessing. She has far too much time on her hands. What I have learned is that none of it was ever about vanity. It is about staying in the room.
Every morning I spend two minutes in the shower is me saying: I am still here, and I will not be smelled before I am heard. Every pillowcase I strip is me saying: my grandchildren will remember my perfume and not my house. Every woman I hand a bar to after church is me saying: somebody should have told you, so I am telling you.
We are women in our sixties and seventies. We were raised to keep quiet about anything below the neck and anything past a certain age, and that silence has cost us far more dignity than it ever spared us.
Nobody is going to bring this up with you.
So bring it up with yourself, and start where I started, at the sink.
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This was written by a 65-year-old woman who worked it out about two years later than she should have. Ask your sister. Check the pillowcase. Then go and do something about it.
