Getting Old Stinks

World’s first – We developed technology to prevent “Nonenal” (component for a body odor in older people)

Shiseido successfully developed completely new technology that prevents body odor in the middle-aged and old people through joint research with Takasago International Corporation. Now we are in the aging society, more people are bothered by “body odor unique to middle-aged and old people”. Shiseido focused on the change in the body odor caused by aging and discovered “nonenal” which is an odor component that is found in many middle-aged and older people and the level of which increases with age. -source: Shiseido

Although, this isn’t the first time this has hit the news:

It Stinks: The Smell of Aging: Japanese researcher's discovery that older men emit a pungent body odor hit a nerve with the populace. Now companies have jumped in with products to mask the offending scent. July 14, 1999. Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times.

“Shoji Nakamura, whose million-dollar nose is reputedly able to distinguish among some 2,000 different odors, says he first noticed a distinctive smell among middle-aged and older men in 1987 and spent the next decade thinking about it.

"I'm very interested in body odor," he says.

“Now, after painstaking research, Shiseido has acted on Nakamura's evident insight. This September, the company will unveil what it says is the world's first product line of shampoos, powders and air fresheners designed to block, cover and otherwise obscure the unique smell of growing old.”

-source: latimes

Perhaps I belabor this point, but once again I can’t resist. There is something quite different between the skin of Asians and that of Caucasians. White people have more body odor, because they have more of the glands that produce body odor hiding under their skin.

Aside, they also smell like cheese, according to the Vietnamese soldiers who could sniff them out of the jungle. They also smell “like wet dogs,” according to Google’s predictive search algorithm circa 2014 – you can no longer test this; the script must’ve changed; personally I think it was a very typical semantic conflation between wet dog, which is a very specific smell, and wet hot dogs, which actually has something to do with cheese, or at least I’m willing to bet. I’m not an expert here, only an enthusiast.

And to complete the run, the first result for “why do ____ people smell like” went like this:

Why do white people smell like wet dog?

Why do black people smell like crayons?

Why don’t Asian people smell? (I swear, it would rearrange your question to produce this)

And when it came to ‘Indian people,’ the question would get so rearranged that it just isn’t worth adding it to the list. Again, the scripts have changed since, and in 2017 there is no way in hell Google would allow that to happen. Sorry, wish I screenshotted that little piece of anthropological gold.

Back to the point; I bring this up about Asian people having less body odor because it makes it seem more obvious that a Japanese man would be trying to quell old-people odor and not simply (armpit) body odor. Anyway, thanks Shiseido, for reminding me of my inevitable end.

[After some further research]
Then again, in total contrary, check out this study by  Johan Lundstrom, a neuropsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia (Monell is one of the premier institutes for olfactory research). They had a whole bunch of people put handkerchiefs under their arms overnight, and then, after cutting-up and mixing the samples of similar people, they put the smell samples in corresponding jars for willing participants to investigate.

Conclusion: "It turned out that the underarm odor of 75-to-95-year-olds was judged to be less intense and far more pleasant than the scent of either young or middle-aged adults. The most intense — and perhaps not coincidentally, the most unpleasant — odor came from 45-to-55-year-old men. Women in that age group, on the other hand, produced the most pleasant smell of everyone who wore the underarm pads.

"On the whole, men generally smelled worse than women, but that distinction disappeared in old age, the researchers found.

"As you grow older, you smell more and more like a woman," Lundstrom said. That is due to changes in men's hormone levels as they age. "It's almost as if you're going back to what happened before puberty." source: latimes

Anyway, totally to the contrary of the things mentioned via Shiseido. But, kind of reinforcing the Asian body odor/Asian smell scientist theory.

-image source: Shiseido

POST SCRIPT

More Old Folks Stuff –

Old Folks Jokes

Limbic Signal, 2016

Instant Grandpa

Limbic Signal, 2016

Instant Grandpa

Just a nice picture of the late Oliver Sacks

Let me take a trip down memory lane here. I’m no longer a teacher, but it’s moments like these that made it so worth it. It’s not exactly the first day of school, but close enough. It's 9 a.m., I’m crouching down to help one of my students generate visually stimulating linear designs for our first art project. We had already sidetracked into a conversation about drawing cartoons or something. Mid-sentence, she looks me straight in the eye and drops this one on me – “You smell like my grandpa.”

First things first – I was 35 when this happened. Secondly, I’ve been teaching for 17 years and I never heard this one before. Thirdly, my students generally have no idea that their art teacher wrote a book about smells, and rarely do I go down this road with them. But this time, I simply couldn’t help it. And why? Because I knew exactly what she was talking about.

I’ll start with this: old people and old books have a lot in common, odor-wise. Let’s focus on the substance lignin. It's one the main classes of structural materials in the support tissues of vascular plants. It’s very rigid, and doesn’t rot easily. The word itself is derived from a Latin form of “wood”. It’s in books, obviously, and it’s in people, less obviously (until you consider that we eat hella plants in our lifetime, i.e. grasses, i.e. wheat, rice, etc.). To quote a scientist who investigated the smell of old books, their scent is a combination of “grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness”.*

Why vanilla? Because it shares a similar structure with lignin, and although molecular structure and smell don’t necessarily correlate, they tend to, and in this case, they do. Babies, and in particular baby heads, smell like vanilla (Süskind calls it butterscotch). Babies drink breastmilk, which contains vanillin. This is part of the uroboric relationship between mother and child – the baby sniffs for a nipple, which has its own scent, and is rewarded by the milk, which reinforces the behavior by associating the smell and the satiation. Meanwhile the mother feeds her baby and is rewarded by the very specific smell of baby-head, which is then associated with all the other multimodal sensations of a cute, helpless little baby that we are hardwired to enjoy. It’s truly one of those beautiful circles of life that takes the metaphorical and actual physical shape of a yin-yang.

So babies smell like vanilla; and as we age, we smell more and more like a musty old book

***

During the school year I wear white cotton undershirts. During the summer I don’t. The day after the last day of school, I wash all my clothes and put them in the drawer where they stay for the next two months. I did notice that they weren’t 110% dry when I folded them and put them away, as it was really humid that summer day.

My drawers are made of wood, but the insides are what I’ll call particle board. That’s basically wood pulp and glue (i.e. the basic ingredients of a book). But wait, there’s more. The insides are surfaced with faux newspapers from the 19th century, which is simply ink printed on paper and adhered to the particle board. Put a stack of a dozen very, very slightly damp t-shirts in a drawer to marinate for two months in 90 degree heat, and there you have it: Instant grandpa.

*Bleached paper has had the lignin taken out of it, since that’s the reason it oxidizes and yellows, so “white paper” books do not develop the same smell as they age – note to all you self-publishing folk out there.