Siamese are always a threat – not because they sense death, but because they want to kill you!
Exactly
No need for the scare quotes - Shannon Klingman is a real doctor and a real board-certified OB-GYN with a couple decades actual experience.
People at different ages smell differently. This is in part due to hormones (think pre-pubescent kid vs. teenager. Even with showers there is a difference). Older/elderly people are likely to have a different hormone profile than people in the midst of the child bearing years. In addition, all sorts of bodily processes change with age, and the elderly may not have as good a sense of smell and might think they’re smell fine when others may disagree. You aren’t usually aware of your own body odor but it is possible to offend yourself in some circumstances. Others are likely to be offended before you are.
That said, people vary enormously in their sensitivity and reactions to normal human odors. Some people are trained from a young age to regard any natural odor as anathema, to be obliterated without mercy. Others are more tolerant (think Napoleon telling Josephine not to bathe before his return).
If you like the smell of Ol’ Granny and the nest odor of her home then that’s perfectly valid. Someone else, though, might react in horror to the same smell.
youtu.be/_w2KFoTc1xg?si=1jbgxgn18yh4rWWl
Sorry. Had to.
ISTM a lot of “old people smell” is fading hygiene. e.g. when your flexibility and dexterity is poor, it’s just darn hard to wash the middle of your back well. So there’s a slowly growing area of skin that may get rinsed each time you shower, but not really washed.
Toilet hygiene is similar, in that it gets harder to do a good job of that as one gets less flexible. I’ve had a couple of good friends who were wheelchair users in their middle age. Particularly when the chair use was new to them, figuring out how to keep their hygiene up was challenging. Not that they smelled of fresh poop or pee, but they had a persistent stale mustiness that is derived from old poop and pee.
I also know that some old folks economize (either on money or on effort) by re-wearing clothes more than they might have 20 years ago when they were still working. “After all, I’m just sitting around the house doing nothing all day” they’ll rationalize. So the same pants or shirt or even undies are worn for a few days at a stretch. Not a great idea.
Starting about when I was 60 I occasionally noticed a whiff of “old man smell” on me, despite daily showering. In fact I sometimes smelled the smell immediately after showering. Mostly from armpits.
I tried an experiment of rubbing both pits vigorously with isopropyl about once a week right after showering and before using deodorant / antiperspirant. No more smell. If I skip that for a month or two, the smell begins to return. Something is growing in there that even vigorous showering & soaping isn’t curing. Isopropyl does it quick and easy.
I think it’d be unhealthy to do that every day, but once a week is a) plenty often, and b) easy to remember.
What is it about pre-teen boys that makes them so odoriferous? I mean even when they shower, etc… they still seem to be on the verge of smelling awful. Foot stink, BO, etc… all are in play for 9-12 year olds.
There’s nothing that triggers my finger on the remote’s mute button (or gets me to change the channel) faster than a Lume ad.
Getting stuck on an elevator with the odiferous Lume spokeswoman is a nightmare prospect.
Pits are supposed to be funky. They, along with other parts of the body, are supplied with apocrine sweat glands, which secrete an oil-and-protein fluid rather than just salt water like the eccrine glands over most of your skin.
You’re sterlizing your armpits and killing the benign bacteria that would be metabolizing that rich food into your distinctive odor profile.
Dag, in light of your forthcoming passing, which I alone can smell, you should put out a month’s worth of food and treats.
-cat
Lume always struck me as a solution in search of a problem.
You’ve never smelled funk until you’ve had 30 high school freshmen in your classroom for 90 minutes a day. I had to spray air freshener or the next class, usually juniors, would complain nonstop. It’s not that freshmen had some odor peculiar to them, it’s that some of them came directly from PE and hadn’t started wearing deodorant yet. (The days of showering after PE were long gone.) The juniors did not smell, unless you counted the occasional kid who doused himself in Bijan for Men.
My nose has never registered “old people’s smell,” but could it be partly a result of bad breath from ill-fitting dentures or poor oral hygiene?
Sure it could - my mother used to have epic bad breath due to gum disease, smoking, and alcohol.
Kidney or liver disease, and probably some other things as well, can also change body odor for the worse.
Incontinence might also play a role, resulting in lingering stale urine odors or … well, it could be a factor.
Ok. She has a new ad.
Well, sez Dr.Klingman, mdphdobygn yada yada (whichever you are) now says if you’ve EVER had sex, seminal fluid may seep out for THREE days, creating a horrific event of shame and embarrassment at you’re own BODY odor.
First off, I do not believe this. Unless your lover is uber-Tarzan on 'roids. And you have abysmal hygiene.
No dang way. Sez I.
She’s crossed a line,this “Doctor” inventer, sales pitcher. And her nasty commercials.
#1 She says my Granny was a big Stinko. And furthermore I, to will enjoy this privilege in my dotage. Not even smelling it on myself. Yeah, right. I know stink when I smell it.
#2 Now she says doing funzies with a male will have a person walking around like a dumpster hoe. Making wet messes and smelling up the joint.
Mr. uber-Tarzan can just wear a condom. Anyway. Safe sex and all.
Or, or…he could shell out the big $$ for her New product. Mando
Mandoooooo. Not Man-doe. Like it reads. Man-doooooo.
Is this a commentary as where uber-Tarzan needs to apply said body condiment?
Nope nope nope.
I will not buy* your product.
I may have. To try it.
You go too far, Doc.
(*I did actually buy a sample size. Smelled bad and is very waxy. Gave it to the lil’wrekker.)
On the verge? They do stink! This isn’t limited to boys though. My niece that lives with us also doesn’t smell so great but hers is more cheap stinky “perfume”, plus food in room, dirty clothes everywhere, etc. Her younger brother has the young teen boy stink and he showers every day and has a much cleaner room. Both of them live in their rooms so they do have that animal den like smell.
I would go so far as to say preteen boys have an organic odor. In a perfectly clean room and clean clothes they still make odors.
Odors. And more odors.
Anyway they can.
My brothers were the same.
I raised one boy. He was often forced into the bathroom and told to not come out of the shower for at least 20min.
I bought him the strongest soap and deodorant product I could.
He grew up, found out girls don’t like stinky boys. Joined the Marines and got really fastidious about his personal hygiene.
We were never so happy.
The grandsons are in the learning phase. Mom’s on top of it.
We don’t allow food in the bedrooms unless you’re a -bed/ill and can’t get to the table.
We don’t leave dirty clothes in
bedrooms. Stray socks or a T-shirt gets through the net occasionally.
We refrain from telling them they’re just nasty pigs. We just push them in the shower telling them the health benefits of cleanliness.
Stink still shows up. We deal.
We’ve fought the food battle, along with keeping a clean room. We inherited them when they already had long entrenched bad habits. A lot of the food makes its way into their rooms in the wee hours of the night when we are sleeping. We’ve also fought against their nocturnal ways…and lost.
Might you need mediation, with this?
It sounds horrible. A way to attract pests and probably not very good for the kids, health wise.
And the germs. Eeek.
I’m kinda germaphobic. And preach it when ever I can around here. To varied success.
If they’re nocturnal and can eat they can clean.
That’s where I’d start.
ETA: don’t buy the snacks and sodas. If you gotta have them for yourself lock 'em up.
We banned food upstairs when the kids were growing up - not only for them, but for us adults as well. It was so very ingrained in all of us that after we turned a spare bedroom into a sort of auxiliary living room, it took us all a month or two to decide that yes, it was all right to eat up there when we’re watching tv. As for adolescent funk, while I’m eternally grateful that we didn’t have to deal with boys much, the shoes of thirteen-year-old girls are also no picnic. I used to have them leave their shoes on the front porch if the weather wasn’t too cold.
I don’t know if Dr Lume is doing it this year (I fast forward the instant her face looms 
up in the camera) but I seem to recall that last Christmas she was pushing Lume as a stocking stuffer. That seems to me to be the perfect description of a passive-aggressive “gift.”
This may be TMI, but you asked the question.
My grandparents in FL, 45 years back, did have a smell which mostly was in their bedroom and their bathroom. Not in the main house so it might have been their laundry. I can’t really describe it. Not pleasant, but not ordinary B.O. either. Closest I could come might be the stench of old wet laundry that was left in the washer for a week. Not pleasant, and quite strong. It had a pong.
People sometimes lose their sense of smell in old age.