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Can You Smell Your Own "Old Person Smell"? How to Check Without Asking Anyone

The people most worried about it are often the ones who can't detect it. Here's why your nose isn't a reliable judge, and a quiet way to find out anyway.

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“How do you know if you need it? Can you smell yourself?” That question, from a Reddit thread about persimmon soap, gets asked in some form almost every time the topic comes up. It’s the right question, because with this particular smell, the answer is often no.

Why you probably can’t smell yourself

Two things work against you.

Your nose tunes you out. Your brain filters constant, familiar smells so it can notice new ones. It’s called olfactory adaptation, and it’s the reason you stop smelling your own house. You live with your own skin all day, so your brain files its smell as background.

Your sense of smell may be fading, and you probably can’t tell. This is measured, not assumed. A 2002 JAMA study tested the sense of smell of 2,491 adults aged 53 to 97 in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Impaired olfaction ran at 24.5% overall and reached 62.5% among the 80-to-97s. The part that matters for this page is what happened when the researchers also asked people: only 9.5% reported a problem, and in the oldest group the sensitivity of self-report was 12% for women and 18% for men. Put plainly, among people in their eighties and nineties whose sense of smell tested as impaired, roughly seven in eight women did not know it.

That sits on top of the timing. Research published in 2001 found 2-nonenal only in people aged 40 and older, and a 2016 study found emissions from the neck rising with age. So the people most likely to produce the odor are the least likely to notice it — and the least likely to realise their nose is the reason. Everyone around them notices first.

Other people really can tell. In a 2012 Monell Chemical Senses Center study, volunteers could pick out body odor from people aged 75 to 95 by smell alone. Interestingly, they rated it less intense and less unpleasant than odor from younger adults. “Old person smell” is distinctive, but it isn’t necessarily strong.

What if you can smell it?

Plenty of people can, and the advice to “ask someone else” is useless to them. In an r/OverSeventy thread started this August, a reader in her seventies described separating out several different smells on her own body, one at a time, and working out which washed off and which didn’t. The replies were full of people doing the same thing.

That isn’t a contradiction of the science. Adaptation works on a smell that is constant and familiar. A smell that is new, that comes and goes, or that hits you when you walk back into a room is exactly the kind your nose has not filed away as background yet. So:

• A smell you notice on yourself after a shower hasn’t been adapted to. Something is still there, or something is re-depositing it.
• A smell you notice when you come home, or pull on a coat that’s been in the closet, is usually a fabric or a room, not your skin. Readers in that thread found it in stored winter coats and in sheets before they found it anywhere else.
• A smell only you can detect, with other people insisting there is nothing, is a different problem, and it’s covered further down under “When it’s not nonenal”.

One more thing worth saying, because a brand-owned site is the last place you’d expect to read it: a fair few people in those threads pushed back on the whole premise, arguing that we are trained to worry about smells that nobody else has noticed. If nobody has mentioned it and your pillowcase is fine, that’s a legitimate answer too.

Can you smell it more than other people can?

This is the version of the question people actually type. Not can I smell myself, but do I smell myself more than everyone else does — Google’s own suggestions carry “can you smell your own body odor more than others”, “can you smell yourself better than others” and “can you smell yourself before others”. The r/OverSeventy thread above got there on its own: one reader suggested the woman who started it had either developed a new superpower or simply had more time on her hands to notice smells, and she agreed it was probably the second one.

Two experiments have put this to a test, and they disagree in a way that is worth knowing about.

In a 2017 study in Perception, 72 people (mean age 24) were given six samples of underarm sweat from strangers plus one sample of their own, and asked to pick out their own. They could not do it. What did differ was the verdict rather than the recognition: other people’s sweat was rated as more disgusting than their own, and that gap was widest in participants who scored high on disgust proneness. The nose failed the identification task while the judgement stayed quietly self-flattering.

An earlier experiment got a different answer and split it by sex: 59.4% of the women tested could identify their own underarm odor, against one man out of eighteen. Eighteen is far too small a group to carry much weight, and the authors could not explain the ability from how people rated the odors they were given. Put the two together and the honest reading is that recognising your own smell is weak, inconsistent and not something to base a decision on — and that when you do judge it, you are likely to go easier on it than a stranger would.

Neither study was about nonenal, and neither asked the other half of the question: whether anyone’s nose had become sharper. On that there is now one real measurement. A 2020 study in Chemical Senses followed 131 people — trans men and trans women through their first four months of gender-affirming hormone treatment, plus controls — using standardised Sniffin’ Sticks tests of odor detection, discrimination and identification, with blood estradiol, testosterone and SHBG measured at each visit. Olfactory performance did not change significantly, there was no difference between the groups at any time point, and hormone levels did not correlate with odor perception. The authors are careful to say this does not rule out hormonal effects on odors outside their test battery, body odors among them. It is still the closest thing to evidence anyone has, and it points away from “my hormones gave me a better nose.” What hormone therapy does and does not change about how you smell is a longer story, and we go through it in does HRT cause body odor.

The quiet signs

You may not smell it on your skin, but you might notice:

• Your pillowcase smells stale soon after washing.
• Shirt collars and knitwear have a musty or “old cupboard” smell even when they look clean.
• Your car or favorite chair has a smell you can’t place.
• Family behavior: someone cracks the car window, or a grandchild wrinkles their nose at a hug.
• You “phantom-smell” an older relative. One Reddit user kept smelling her mother or grandmother before realizing the smell was her own.

People describe the smell as greasy, grassy, dusty, musty or stale, and occasionally “vinegary.” It’s different from sweat, which is sharper and sour. If you are trying to match words to what you can smell, we have collected every published description of the molecule, and the smells it gets confused with, in what does nonenal smell like.

The 14-day pillowcase check

Fabrics collect this odor, and a pillowcase gets hours of contact with your neck and scalp every night. That makes it a better test than your nose on your own skin.

1. Day 0: start clean. Wash all your bedding with an unscented detergent, and put on a fresh pillowcase.
2. Day 3: sniff it away from the bed. Take the pillowcase to another room (ideally one you haven’t been sitting in) and smell the area where your neck rests. Fresh air resets your nose, so step outside first if you can.
3. Day 7: swap and note. Put on a clean case, and write down what you noticed: stale, grassy, dusty, or nothing.
4. Day 14: compare, and ask for help if you want it. If you started a new routine (like persimmon soap on your neck and scalp) on day 7, compare the two cases. If you have someone you trust, let them do the sniffing and don’t tell them which case is which.

If both pillowcases smell fine, great. You may not have nonenal odor at all. If the smell is sharp or sour rather than stale, it’s more likely sweat or bacteria. Our guide on why persimmon soap sometimes doesn’t work covers the other causes, and if this started alongside hot flushes, perimenopause body odor explains why you may be dealing with two different smells at the same time.

If a pillowcase still smells stale straight out of the wash, the problem is the wash rather than your nose. See how to get old person smell out of clothes.

What the pillowcase check can’t tell you

It is a good test, and we’d still rather you ran it than guessed. But it has three blind spots, and all three produce the same misleading result: a case that smells when it shouldn’t, leaving you to blame your skin or a new soap.

The pillow underneath is the bigger reservoir. In the study that first identified 2-nonenal in human body odor, the compound wasn’t produced by bacteria — it came from the oxidative breakdown of ω7 unsaturated fatty acids in skin oil, with lipid peroxides getting the reaction going. That matters because it means a surface doesn’t merely hold the smell, it goes on generating it from whatever oil has soaked in. Years of neck and scalp contact pass through a thin cotton case into the pillow itself, which almost nobody washes. A fresh case over an old pillow is a clean surface laid on a loaded one. The same problem defeats people cleaning upholstery, and we work through it properly in getting old person smell out of furniture.

What to do: run the check over a pillow you have just washed or just replaced, or put a washable pillow protector underneath and treat that as part of the bedding. If you can’t do either, the test still tells you something — just read a stale case as “skin or pillow” rather than “skin”.

Keep the fabric constant. Fibre changes how much oil a textile takes up. A 2021 study in Microbiology Spectrum found that polyester, being more hydrophobic, adhered more bacteria and absorbed more sebum than cotton. (That work was about sweat odor and bacteria rather than nonenal, and its authors include researchers at an enzyme company, so treat it as evidence about fabric rather than about this smell.) Since nonenal rides in sebum, swapping a cotton case for a polyester-blend one halfway through a two-week comparison changes the collector as well as the sample. Use two identical cases.

Nothing scented goes near it. Step one says unscented detergent for a reason, and the same applies to dryer sheets and fabric sprays. A fabric refresher does not take the odorant out — at best it traps it, and its own fragrance deposits on the fibre and stays there, which is the opposite of what you want from a measuring instrument. We set out what those products actually do in does Febreze remove body odor.

If your own sense of smell is weak or gone

The pillowcase check assumes you have a working nose. Some people don’t, and it’s a question that comes up in these threads — someone with little or no sense of smell being told by family that they smell, with no way to check anything for themselves.

If that’s you, the check still works; you just can’t be the one doing the sniffing. What changes:

• Recruit one honest person, and test objects rather than yourself. Hand them two pillowcases, or a worn cardigan and a freshly washed one, and ask which smells different. They don’t need to comment on you at all.
• Work by schedule instead of by nose. If you can’t tell when a towel, pillowcase or shirt has turned, change them on a fixed rota rather than when they smell. Towels and bedding are the usual culprits, and a towel used after every shower re-deposits whatever is in it.
• Change one thing at a time. Without your own nose as the judge, running two changes at once means you learn nothing from the result.

This cuts both ways, and it is why reports about who does and does not have this smell are so unreliable: the people best placed to notice it within their own generation are often the least able to, which is one reason the age this smell starts is argued about so fiercely. The NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders lists aging among the causes of smell disorders. A sense of smell that has faded, gone, or started distorting familiar things is worth raising with a doctor in its own right — it isn’t only an inconvenience for this particular question.

Is there an actual test for nonenal?

Not one you can buy. It is a fair question, because 2-nonenal is measurable, and has been measured repeatedly — just never outside a lab:

• A 2016 Japanese study used a passive flux sampler on the nape of the neck feeding a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer.
• A 2021 method paper collected skin samples by simply wiping with gauze, then analysed them by headspace solid-phase microextraction and GC-MS, detecting as little as 22 picograms on the gauze.
• A 2023 group built enzyme-based “bio-sniffers” for 2-nonenal vapour, reporting a detection limit around 0.23 ppm, and saw a difference between participants in their twenties and their fifties.

All three need laboratory instruments and trained operators. There is no home kit, no patch, and no meaningful at-home number, and we have not found any consumer product that measures nonenal. That is why a fabric check is the practical option: the pillowcase is the sampler, and your friend’s nose is the detector. We keep a full plain-English index of what has and hasn’t been measured in the 2-nonenal research page.

Asking someone (kindly)

If you’d rather just ask, choose someone close who will be honest, like a partner, adult child or close friend, and make it easy for them:

• “I read that skin chemistry changes after 40. Would you tell me honestly if you ever notice a stale smell on my pillow or clothes?”
• Ask about things, not you: “Does this cardigan smell musty to you?”

If you’re the one who has noticed it on someone else, the most common advice in community threads is to lead with the fix and skip the diagnosis. Quietly put a new soap in the shower, change the pillowcases more often, and wash the collars. Where that is not enough — an ageing parent, or someone who has stopped washing — we have written a longer guide to telling an elderly parent they smell, including why the person often genuinely cannot detect it.

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If you have asked people and still believe it

There is a point where this stops being a question about soap, and a site that sells a bar is the one place that ought to mark it clearly rather than quietly.

In the r/OverSeventy thread this page keeps returning to, the woman who started it came back into her own comments to say she had asked people directly, had been given no answer that worried her, and was still uneasy enough to wonder aloud whether she was imagining the whole thing. Another reader in the same thread described her thoughts about her own smell running nonstop, close to an obsession. Those posts are not rare. They turn up often enough in these threads to deserve a straight answer instead of another product suggestion.

A persistent, distressing conviction that you give off a bad smell, when the people around you do not notice one, has a name and a research literature. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 includes olfactory reference disorder, and researchers who built a questionnaire around those criteria reported in 2024 that among 225 German university students surveyed anonymously online, 86.6% of those meeting the self-rated features for the disorder also met the self-rated criteria for current social phobia. Greater social-phobia severity went with poorer insight into the odor beliefs, more avoidance of intimate relationships, and more shame and fear of rejection because of body odor. That was a self-rated student sample and the authors call their findings preliminary, so it describes how the two things travel together rather than giving a prevalence figure. A separate clinic study of 142 patients found the condition concentrated in people who had both social anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder rather than either one alone — eleven cases in total, so small again.

The useful part is the shape of the thing, not a label anyone should hand themselves from a blog post. Checking once, getting an answer and being able to put it down is ordinary, and most of this page is written for exactly that. Checking repeatedly, not being reassured by what you are told, avoiding people because of it, or finding that it takes up a large share of your day is a different problem — and it is not a problem a soap addresses, ours included. If that description fits better than the pillowcase check does, the next conversation worth having is with a GP or a mental health professional rather than a shopping decision.

When it’s not nonenal

If the smell is sharp, sour or oniony rather than stale and greasy, you are probably dealing with bacterial odor from sweat, which is a different molecule and a different fix — we set the two side by side in persimmon soap vs Lume, and explain why a hypochlorous acid spray, the other answer these threads reach for, is aimed at that bacterial smell rather than this one.

Two other profiles come up repeatedly in the same threads, and neither is nonenal. A yeasty or sweetish-sour smell coming specifically from skin folds — under the breasts, in the groin, between rolls — is the one readers most often describe separating out from everything else, and it has a different cause and a different fix; we go through what is and is not known about it in can a fungal infection cause body odor. A sharp ammonia note, which readers managing incontinence often assume has become “ingrained” in their own nose, is manufactured after the urine leaves the body and responds to something else again.

And if you are the only person who can smell it, consider your nose rather than your skin. The NIDCD describes phantosmia as the sensation of an odor that isn’t there, and parosmia as familiar things smelling wrong; its list of causes for smell disorders includes aging. No soap addresses either. There is a third version of this, milder and far more commonly described: not a smell with no source, but every smell arriving too loudly. Detection and perceived intensity are measured separately and have been recorded moving in opposite directions in the same people, which is why self-assessment fails here too — see heightened sense of smell in menopause.

The bottom line

Not being able to smell yourself is normal, and the evidence says you probably can’t judge your own nose either. It doesn’t mean you smell, and it doesn’t mean you don’t. Your pillowcase gives you a private answer in two weeks, as long as the pillow under it and the detergent you wash it in aren’t answering for it. If it turns out to be nonenal, it’s common, it isn’t a hygiene failing, and it usually responds to a targeted routine — the bars differ on scent, price and refund terms, which we set out in our best persimmon soap comparison.

Frequently asked questions

Sources