Health & Aging  /  Skin

Why Showers Aren't Enough After 70

If you shower every day and you're over 70, there's something your doctor should have warned you about years ago. I found out the hard way when my mom moved in with me last year.

My mom moved in with us last spring. She's 78. She's sharp, she's independent, she still does the crossword in pen, and she has showered every single morning of her life.

Within a week, her bedroom started getting this old, musty smell.

Which made no sense to me. That guest room had been perfectly fine for ten years. And my mom is the most fastidious person I know. Always has been.

And here is the part I have to be honest about. I recognized that smell the first morning I noticed it.

I've worked in home care for 15 years. I have been in hundreds of older people's homes, and I have met this smell in a lot of them. Every care worker in the country is familiar with it.

But in fifteen years, I had only ever met it in one kind of home. The very frail. The people who needed full time care. The people who could no longer manage the washing, the laundry, the bathing on their own.

And like everyone in my line of work, I had a theory about it, even if nobody ever said it out loud. I thought it was a hygiene smell. The smell of someone no longer able to keep up. That is what all of us quietly assumed it was.

Which meant it could not be my mom. There was nothing for her to keep up with, because she keeps up with everything. You have never met anyone who keeps up with things like my mother.

Except the room had been fine for ten years, and she had been sleeping in it for a week. I could do that math. It was not the room.

So I stood in that doorway holding two facts that could not both be true. Fifteen years of experience telling me this smell means somebody has stopped coping. And a mother who has never stopped coping in her life.

I want to be honest about what I did next, because it was not the smart thing.

I did not go looking for answers. I went and got the laundry basket.

I cleaned everything it touched. It came back every time.

I want to walk you through the next month, because I suspect some version of it is happening in other houses all over the country right now.

First, understand that telling her was never on the table. My mom has buried a husband, raised three kids, and kept a spotless home for fifty years. Being clean and well put together is not a habit for her. It is who she is. If I had sat her down and told her that her room smelled, it would not have hurt her feelings. It would have broken something in her.

So I never asked why. Asking why felt like an accusation, even inside my own head. Instead I did what I have watched a hundred families do without ever having a word for it. I went into containment. Cleaning up after someone you love, in secret, so they never have to find out there is anything to clean up after.

I washed her bedding twice a week instead of once. I switched detergents. Then I switched again. I bought mattress and pillow protectors. I aired the room out every morning while she was at breakfast. I put baking soda in the closet. I steam cleaned the carpet on a Tuesday when she was at her sister's. I even checked behind the wardrobe for damp, knowing perfectly well there was no damp. Hope makes you check things you already know the answer to.

And every single time, the same result. Fresh for a day, maybe two. Then it was back.

That two day cycle nearly drove me mad, because of what it was quietly telling me. I was not cleaning something up. I was renting. Whatever produced it came home to that room every evening, and no amount of detergent was ever going to change that arithmetic.

Then came the part that actually scared me. I was hanging up her laundry, fresh out of the dryer, and I picked up one of her cardigans that had been sitting in her closet since the week before.

It was in the cardigan. A cardigan she had worn twice. Over a blouse. Clean when it went in there.

That was the day containment died as a plan. Because you can wash a room. You cannot wash a life. If it was in a cardigan worn twice, it was in everything she wore, which meant it went with her to church, and to her sister's, and to lunch with women she has known for forty years. I was scrubbing one bedroom while she carried it out the front door every single morning.

And standing there holding that cardigan, I finally let myself ask the question I had been avoiding for a month. Not where it was coming from. I had known that since the first week. Why. Why does a woman who has done everything right, every day, for fifty years, have the smell I was taught belongs to people who can no longer cope?

She showers every single day. She does everything right. And it was not making any difference at all. That was the part I could not get past.

What that smell actually is. And why your doctor never mentions it.

Here is something worth sitting with. I have spent fifteen years around this smell professionally. I have done the training courses. I have read the handbooks. And not once, in any of it, did anyone ever tell me what it actually is. Every care worker in America knows this smell. I am not sure I have met one who could tell you its name.

Because it does have a name. That night, after the cardigan, I sat up late and went looking properly, and I found it. It is called nonenal, and Japanese researchers identified it in aging skin back in 2001, in a study published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

And reading that research, I found out something that changed how I think about every home I have ever worked in.

I had the theory wrong. We all did. It was never a hygiene smell. My frail clients did not have it because they had stopped washing. They had it because they were old, and because the soap in their bathroom, the same soap in every bathroom in America, does nothing against what aging skin produces. The washing was never the variable. The age was.

Fifteen years of quietly assuming those people just needed more care with themselves, and the truth is they could have showered three times a day and it would not have made a difference. My mom was proof of that. She effectively was showering her way through it, every morning, and it changed nothing.

My poor mom had no idea. None. I am completely certain of it, because I know her, and if she had known, it would have been gone the same afternoon.

And nobody was ever going to tell her. Not me. Not my brothers. Not the women at her church. There is no polite sentence for it. So everyone around her simply worked around it, the way I was working around it, quietly, with detergent and open windows.

That is what makes this different from every other part of getting older. Everyone around you can notice it. You cannot. And nobody who loves you will ever say a word.

Your doctor will not bring it up either. I can tell you exactly why, because I work alongside medical people every week. It is not dangerous, there is no test for it, and there is no prescription for it. So it belongs to nobody. In an annual physical that lasts twelve minutes, a harmless smell that has no treatment code does not make the list.

In Japan it is different. There is an everyday word for it there, and ordinary drugstores have had a shelf for it for decades. It is treated like reading glasses. A normal thing that happens with age, that you simply deal with.

Which matters, because the Japanese did not just name it first.

They also found the thing that deals with it.

The persimmon discovery

The same body of Japanese research that identified nonenal also identified something that acts on it. The tannin extracted from unripe persimmon fruit.

Japan has used persimmon tannin for centuries, first on wood and fabric, later on skin, specifically because of what it does to odor compounds. This is a household ingredient there, not a discovery someone made for a marketing campaign.

That last line is where I nearly wasted my money, and I want to save you from it.

Because when I started looking for a persimmon soap, I found dozens. Some were four dollars. And when I read the ingredient lists, I understood why. Ingredients are listed by quantity, most first. On most of the cheap ones, persimmon extract sat at the very bottom of the list, below the fragrance. On a few, the word next to persimmon was not even "extract." It was "fragrance." Regular soap that smells faintly of persimmon and does nothing else.

Real concentrated persimmon extract is expensive to produce. It is the one place in this whole category where the price actually tells you something.

So I did some digging, read a lot of ingredient labels, and found one called Swarva that is actually made with real concentrated persimmon extract. Made for exactly this and nothing else. It is a bar of soap that goes where the old bar of soap went, which mattered to me, because my mom was never going to follow a routine with six steps in it. Nobody is.

I never told her. I gifted it.

Here is the part I am probably proudest of, as a daughter.

I did not sit my mom down for a talk. I wrapped the bars up and told her it was a fancy new Japanese soap that people are going crazy about online, and that I had gotten some for myself too. Which was true. She likes nice things and she likes being current, and she started using it that evening, and she never asked another question about it.

She has no idea to this day. That was the entire point.

• Days 1 and 2

  Nothing to report, and I want to be straight about that. It is a bar of soap, it lathers well, the scent is mild. Nothing dramatic happened, and nothing dramatic was ever going to happen on day one.

• Day 4

  I did my usual morning airing of her room and realized halfway through that I was doing it out of habit, not need. I actually stood there and sniffed like a fool. It was faint. Fainter than it had been in months.

• Day 7

  Her pillowcases, on wash day, smelled like pillowcases. I had been washing that bedding twice a week since spring and it had never once come out of a week smelling like nothing.

• Day 9

  The cardigan test, because that cardigan had become my personal enemy. Worn twice, hung in the closet three days. Nothing. I put my whole face in it. Nothing.

• Day 12

  I walked past her room with the door open and it was just a room. That is the whole entry. It was just a room, and I stood in the hallway and got quite emotional about a guest room, which I am glad nobody saw.

Her room smelled different. Her clothes smelled different. She smelled like herself again, and she does not know anything changed, and she never has to.

And honestly, within that same week, I had started using it myself.

Because here is what living through this actually taught me. It is not that my mom did anything wrong. She did everything right, every day, for fifty years, and this still happened, because skin ages and soap was never built for what aging skin produces.

The same thing is coming for me. The difference is that I will not get a warning either. My nose will filter it out, my kids will say nothing, and they will be right not to say anything, because I raised them to be kind.

I never want my kids to be in the position I was in with my mom. Standing in a doorway with an armful of towels, working out how to fix something they can never mention.

I am not the only one who figured this out

Since this happened I have talked about it with a lot of people, at work and away from it. It turns out half the families I know have a version of this story. Almost none of them had a name for it.

The questions everyone asks me

What I spent fighting the room, and what the actual fix costs

At some point during all this I added up what the wrong answers had cost me. I did it out of curiosity and then rather wished I had not.

The soap is $39.99 for 3 bars, which lasts one person about two months. That works out to around 63 cents a day, and it replaces a bar you were buying anyway.

One thing I noticed and appreciated. There is no discount code hiding at the bottom of this page and no countdown clock, because there is no fake sale. If you want it cheaper, you put it on a subscription and it costs 20% less every time. They would rather you never run out than catch you in a promotion. That is the only discount that exists.

And the honest reason not to wait is not a stock counter. It is that your skin is producing this today, and it is transferring into your clothes, your bedding and your furniture today. The fabric is the part that takes longest to win back. I know, because I spent a month and $553 learning it.

If you take one thing from all of this, do not let it be the soap.

Let it be this. There are only two ways anyone ever finds out about this. Either someone who loves you quietly buys you a fancy Japanese soap one day and never explains why. Or you get ahead of it now, while there is nothing for anyone to be quiet about.

My mom got the first way, and she was lucky, because I happened to know the smell and happened to find the answer. You are reading this. Which means you get the second way, and the second way is better.

Denise Kowalski

What other customers say