Thursday, September 6, 2012

Old People Smell



I was given an interesting mission. Find out how to eliminate old people smell to make life tolerable for a friend.

The phenomenon of old man smell is called "kareishu." Steve Levenstein writes:

"Kareishu is caused by a certain type of fatty acid created in the bodies of older people. This substance, called "nonenal", has a distinct scent that is difficult to hide or mask since it is emitted from the skin when humans sweat.

Mind you, a common trend in Japanese advertising is to state some pseudo-scientific information in your spiel so buyers feel justified in buying the product. It should be noted that the term kareishu itself was coined by the Shiseido Research Centre, an affiliate of Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido."


My research turned up interesting information. In 2000, a chemist at the Shiseido company (yes, the cosmetics giant!) researched the problem of old people smell. He discovered that:

"2-Nonenal, an unsaturated aldehyde with an unpleasant greasy and grassy odor, was detected only in older subjects (40 y or older)."

He concluded that 2-nonenal may be involved in the age related change of body odour.

The product they came up with?

Ag+ Deodorant Stick

For the life of me, I could not find what resulted from Shiseido's research.  The best I could come up with is this link, a writeup of a commercial on Japanese TV:


CM of the week: Shiseido Ag+

While snuggling up to a pretty young woman, a handsome man sticks his nose in her underarm area and emerges with a clothespin on his nose. The letters Ag are written on it, the chemical designation for silver.
>Odorologist Betsy Lyons, dressed in a lab coat, appears and says "donkan" in her flat American accent. "Donkan" means "insensitive," meaning that people aren't always aware of the smells emanating from their own bodies, though others are. Lyons has been the "CM character" for Shiseido's deodorants for years, conveying a mixture of technical expertise and Yankee practicality, the implication being that non-Japanese know more about body odor since, as everyone knows, foreigners give off more of a reek. The beautiful young couple in the ad are not Japanese.
But the CM itself is aimed at Japanese women, a demographic that may be paranoid about being sniffed but isn't as likely to stink as the average salaryman, who wouldn't wear deodorant if you paid him.


The company website for the Ag+ product line at Shiseido is really strange, with pictures of models in their early 20s in funky clothes over links to each of the products in the line.  The only nod to old people is the little circular picture here:

ますますGOOD!!!

Isn't she cute?  But smelly.  This product is found on eBay and at online retailers like Rakuten at $12.59 for 20 g.  I have NO IDEA what is in the stuff.

Ecoteam

A company in Korea called "Ecoteam" was formed by Edward Chang, who studied polymer chemistry in university. I enjoyed reading Edward's origin story, how he noticed his neighbours were fighting about cigarette smells and created a spray to eliminate the odour. Other products included: a spray for courage (!!) and a mosquito repellent. Wow.

Ecoteam's blog suggests that 2-nonenal is one of the aromas that "the human nose perceives in old books, beer, buckwheat, cucumbers, lard, and orris (iris rot), orris being used in some cosmetics."

Ecoteam purports to create solutions which break down the odor causing chemicals, rather than masking them. Of interest to me was "Deodorant Silver Spray" which is "the world’s first deodorant for eliminating the smells that appear as one gets older. Spray two or three squirts of Silver Spray in the room, on clothes and on bed linens and these smells miraculously fade away." Sounds promising, at $32.80 for 500 ml and free worldwide delivery by Express Mail Service (EMS).

So... what is in Silver Spray? It is a complete mystery. There is no ingredient listing on the website, but whatever the heck it is, it has a "mild and elegant wood scent."

Mirai

Another company is called "Mirai", "the only product in the U.S. that eliminates Nonenal, the source of aging body odor." The secret ingredients to control nonenol are: persimmons (!) and astaxanthin, an anti-oxidant, the "world's most powerful anti-oxidant." The solution is offered in the form of a liquid "purifying body wash", 150 ml for $19, a pencil sized body spritzer (for the non-pencil sized price of $14!), and a clear amber (similar to Pears soap colour) bar of soap for $19. In the ingredient list, the anti-oxidant appears 5th last, and persimmon is the 3rd highest component.

What is in that stuff?

Most of the proprietary products I've already mentioned do not list their active ingredients.  My research found that a chemical that helps decrease aldehydes like nonenal, and thus deodorize, is cyclodextrin.  This according to the article, Effects of Cyclodextrins on Deodoration of "Aging Odor", co-authored by Koji Hara, Katsuhiko Mikuni, Kozo Hara and HItoshi Hashimoto in the Journal of Inclusion Phenomena and Macrocyclic Chemistry, 2002, Vol. 44, Num. 1-4, Pages 241-246.

Now please excuse me if I don't remember how to cite journal articles properly as it has been many years since I nabbed my degree in Pharmacology from university!

An example of a product containing cyclodextrins as the chief active ingredient is Proctor and Gamble's Febreze!  The New York Times article "How Companies Learn Your Secrets" describes how Febreze was initially a failure and this resulted in visits to people's homes to discover why:

The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman’s home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.’s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.
According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, “What do you do about the cat smell?”

“It’s usually not a problem,” she said.

“Do you smell it now?”

“No,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!”


So, if you stink, you have no idea you stink because you are habituated to the smell.

Unfortunately, I could not find an inexpensive or readily available natural source of cyclodextrins for odor neutralizing other than Febreze.  Cyclodextrins are produced by the enzymatic conversion of starch.

Not everyone stinks the same


For your further reading pleasure on the subject of smells, I include this writeup from 1999 in the LA Times by Mark Magnier: 
"Nationalities Vary in Their Odors
...Since when does body odor respect national boundaries? For Americans, it would seem the ultimate aging-boomer product.
Shiseido executives say they're open to that. But when it comes to bodily aromas, marketing across international borders isn't that simple. Chief perfumer Nakamura says body odor is determined by several factors, including species, genes, age, sex, physical condition, diet, drugs and level of stress, along with national and possibly racial components. Among North Asians, Koreans exude the least body odor, he believes, followed by the Chinese and then the Japanese.
"The Japanese have a fishy odor," he adds."






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