Why showers stop working after 60
If you're over 60 and you shower every day, there's one thing about your skin nobody warned you about. I only learned it when my mother came to live with us.
Home health aide, Pennsylvania · 16 years caring for older adults
Last spring my mother moved into our spare room. She's 74, still drives, still does her own taxes, and has taken a shower every single morning for as long as I can remember.
About a week after she arrived, the room started to smell. Old and a little musty.
I knew that smell the moment I walked in. Sixteen years in home care will do that. I've stepped into hundreds of my clients' homes, and I'd met it in a lot of them. But I'd always filed it under one kind of client: the very frail, the ones who couldn't manage their own bathing any more.
My mother is not that. She's the tidiest person I've ever known.
So I told myself it was her stuff. Boxes that had sat in storage too long, a cheap detergent, a closet that needed airing.
I washed everything. Her sheets, her pillows, every blouse and cardigan. The smell came back.
Then I bought her a brand-new set of sheets. Five days later I washed them, and they smelled exactly like the old ones.
It wasn't her things. My healthy, busy mother had the same smell as my frailest clients.
And I could never say that to her.
She raised four kids, nursed my father through his last two years and kept a spotless house for half a century. Being clean isn't something she does. It's who she is. Telling her that her room smelled wouldn't have hurt her feelings. It would have broken her heart.
So I had to work it out by myself.
What that smell really is
Among care workers, that smell has a name: nonenal. Most people have never heard the word. Japanese scientists first identified it in aging skin in 2001, in a study published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
What I hadn't understood until I read about it properly is that it isn't a frailty thing at all. It happens to almost everyone's skin with age, including fit, independent people like my mother.
She could have showered three times a day and nothing would have changed. Here's why.
2-nonenal was first identified in human body odor by Japanese researchers in 2001. It was found in older adults and was essentially absent in younger ones.
It starts in your 40s
The oils our skin makes change as we get older. When those oils sit on the skin and meet the air, they slowly turn stale. Think of butter left out on the counter for a few days. It starts to smell off.
Skin oils do the same thing, and as they go stale they turn into nonenal. Because skin makes fresh oil every day, a little more builds up every day. For most people it begins in their 40s. By the 60s there's enough of it for other people to notice.
A shower can't rinse it off
Nonenal is oily, and it settles into the skin's own oils. Ordinary soap was made to lift dirt and sweat. It was never made to break down an oil like this one.
It's like washing a greasy frying pan with plain water. You can rinse it for ten minutes and the grease is still there.
That's your shower. The water runs, the soap foams, everything rinses away, and the nonenal stays put. You feel clean because you are clean. But after 60, a shower with ordinary soap just can't reach it.
It rubs off on everything
Because it's oily, it transfers to whatever touches your skin: pillowcases, sheets, towels, the collar of your favorite cardigan. Then it sinks into the fabric, and an ordinary wash often won't lift it.
That's why my mother's room changed within a week, and why her brand-new sheets smelled the same after one wash. It's also why so many older people's homes share that same musty note. It isn't the house. It's years of nonenal sitting in the fabrics.
You can't smell it on yourself
Your nose has a built-in filter. Scientists call it olfactory adaptation. When a smell is around you all the time, your brain decides it doesn't matter and stops reporting it.
You already know this one. You put on perfume, and ten minutes later you can't smell it, while everyone you hug still can.
Nonenal builds so slowly, over so many years, that your brain tunes it out the whole way. By the time other people notice it, you can't smell it at all.
That's why my mother had no idea.
And nobody was ever going to tell her. There's no kind way to tell someone you love that their clothes and their room have started to smell old.
Why your doctor never brings it up, and what Japan does instead
Your doctor won't mention it either. I work next to nurses and doctors every week, so I can tell you why. Nonenal isn't dangerous. There's no test for it and no prescription for it. Even if a doctor caught a faint musty note in a twelve-minute checkup, they couldn't say for sure what it was. So it never comes up.
And it's not a strong smell. It's faint, a little stale, a little dusty. Most of us remember it from visiting grandparents as children, long before we had a word for it. Nobody makes a face. Nobody says anything. But we all connect it with getting old.
Japan treats it completely differently. They have an everyday word for it, kareishu, which means the smell of aging, and ordinary drugstores have a shelf for it. It's treated like needing reading glasses: a normal part of getting older that you simply take care of.
And for a great many people there, taking care of it comes down to one thing: soap made with Japanese persimmon.
The persimmon discovery
Japanese persimmons are rich in natural compounds called tannins, the same family of compounds you find in tea and red wine.
Researchers found that persimmon tannins latch onto nonenal and help break it down. In 2012 a team in Japan had a group of men aged 43 to 75 wash every day with a soap containing persimmon and tea polyphenols. After four weeks, the nonenal coming from their skin had dropped significantly. This came out of a research lab, not a marketing department.
Go back to that greasy pan. If ordinary soap is plain water, persimmon is the dish soap that actually cuts the grease.
And because your skin makes nonenal every day, the answer has to be part of your daily shower. That simply means swapping your usual soap for a persimmon one.
Why most persimmon soaps won't do it
When I started shopping, I found that a lot of persimmon soaps contain very little real persimmon. Some are ordinary soap with a persimmon fragrance and an orange color.
But more isn't automatically better either. Older skin is thinner and drier, and a harsh bar leaves it tight and itchy. What you want is real persimmon, made properly, in a bar that's gentle on mature skin.
After reading more labels than I'd like to admit, I found one called SAWUMI. It's made with fermented Japanese persimmon tannin, called kakishibu in Japan, pressed from green persimmons, which is how it has been made there for centuries.
Around that it uses olive oil, coconut oil, shea butter, glycerin and green tea, in a gentle, sulphate-free base. In other words, it's made for the skin you have now, not the skin you had at 25.
And it's simply a bar of soap. It sat right where her old bar used to sit, so nothing about her morning had to change.
I never told her. I gave it to her as a gift.
I didn't sit my mother down for a talk. I wrapped up a few bars and told her it was a lovely Japanese soap everybody online was talking about, and that I'd bought some for myself too.
She was delighted and started using it that same evening. She never asked a single question.
She still doesn't know why I gave it to her. That was the whole idea.
- Days 1 and 2Nothing to report, and I didn't expect anything. It's a bar of soap. A creamy lather, a soft, natural scent.
- Day 4I carried her laundry in and stopped in the doorway. The smell was still there, but it was fainter than it had been since she moved in.
- Day 7Wash day. I stripped her bed, and for the first time since she arrived, the sheets just smelled like sheets.
- Day 12We were watching a quiz show on the couch and I leaned my head on her shoulder, the way I did when I was little. It was the first time in months I'd sat that close to her. I hadn't even noticed I'd stopped.
Her room smells fresh now, and so do her clothes. When I hug her goodnight, all I notice is clean skin. And she has no idea anything changed. She never has to.
Within that first week I was using it myself, because of what all this taught me.
My mother didn't do anything wrong. She did everything right, every day, for fifty years, and it still happened. Skin changes with age, and ordinary soap was never made for what aging skin produces.
Nonenal starts in your 40s. I'm 54. It's probably already starting with me. My nose will tune it out, just like hers did. And my children will never say a word, because I raised them to be kind.
I never want my kids standing where I stood, trying to fix something they can never say out loud.
I'm not the only one who worked this out
Since all this, I've talked about it with a lot of people, at work and away from it. It turns out half the families I know have their own version of this story, and almost none of them had a name for it.
The questions everyone asks me
If I can't smell it on myself, how will I know it's working?
You won't smell it on yourself, before or after. That's just how olfactory adaptation works. Check your fabric instead. A pillowcase after a week of daily washing, or a cardigan that has hung in the closet for a few days, will tell you honestly. And watch the people around you. A hug that lasts a little longer says a lot.
Will it dry out my skin?
It shouldn't. SAWUMI is made for mature skin, which tends to be drier, so it's gentle on purpose: olive oil, shea butter and glycerin, and no harsh sulphates. I wash my hands dozens of times a day at work, so I notice fast when a soap dries me out. This one doesn't, and my mother's 74-year-old skin hasn't complained once.
Where on the body does it matter most?
Behind the ears, the back of the neck, the chest and the upper back. That's where skin oils gather. Most people already wash everywhere else perfectly well.
Does it have a strong scent?
No. The scent is soft and natural and it rinses away. It comes across as clean, not perfumed, so it won't fight with anyone's perfume.
How is it different from the cheap persimmon soaps online?
That's the question I checked hardest. The cheap ones I looked at had very little real persimmon in them, or none at all, just a scent and some orange coloring. SAWUMI is made with fermented Japanese persimmon tannin, balanced for mature skin with olive oil, coconut oil, shea butter, glycerin and green tea. Real persimmon tannin costs more to make, and that's what you're paying for.
How soon will I notice a difference?
The persimmon is working from the first shower. But the smell has built up in sheets, clothes and towels over months, sometimes years, so give the fabric a little time. In my mother's case, her room was noticeably fresher within a week, and her sheets smelled like plain clean sheets by the next wash day.
What if it does nothing for me?
There's a 60-day money-back guarantee. If it doesn't help, one email to help@sawumi.com within 60 days gets you a refund. I read the whole policy before I ordered, because sixteen years of care work teaches you to read the small print on everything.
What I spent fighting that room, and what actually fixed it
At some point I added up what all the wrong answers had cost me. I did it out of curiosity and then rather wished I hadn't.
| Stronger detergents and scent boosters | $71 |
| A brand-new set of sheets | $94 |
| Room sprays, candles and a plug-in air freshener | $52 |
| Spent on things that didn't work | $217 |
SAWUMI is $51.95 for 3 bars, about $17 a bar, and it replaces a bar of soap you were buying anyway.
If you'd rather never run out, the refill plan sends a fresh set every 28 days at 20% off, which brings 3 bars down to $41.56, and it comes with a free exfoliating soap bag. You can stop or cancel any time.
And the honest reason not to wait isn't a sale. It's that your skin is making this today, and it's settling into your clothes, your bedding and your furniture today. The fabric is the slow part to win back. I know, because I spent weeks and more than $200 learning it.
60 days. Use it and see who notices.
SAWUMI gives you 60 days from the day it arrives. So here's what I'd do. Put it where your old bar sat and use it every day. Give it a few weeks and pay attention to the people around you. If it doesn't help, send one email within 60 days and you get your money back.
If you take one thing from all of this, don't let it be the soap.
Let it be this. There are only two ways anyone ever deals with this. Either someone who loves you quietly hands you a nice Japanese soap one day and never explains why. Or you take care of it yourself now, while there's nothing for anyone to be quiet about.
My mother got the first way, and she was lucky, because I happened to know the smell and happened to find the answer. You're reading this, which means you get the second way. The second way is better.
Sharon Doyle
References: Haze S, et al. 2-Nonenal newly found in human body odor tends to increase with aging. Journal of Investigative Dermatology, 2001;116(4):520-524. Tatsuguchi I, et al. Preventive effect against the aged men's body odor by the soap containing polyphenol. Journal of Japan Association on Odor Environment, 2012;43(5):362-366.
This is a dramatized story based on what SAWUMI customers have told the company; names and photos are illustrative. Individual results vary. Statements refer to published research on persimmon tannins and 2-nonenal. SAWUMI is a cosmetic soap and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
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