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How to Get Old Person Smell Out of Clothes: A Laundry Guide to Nonenal

A caregiver on r/laundry put it perfectly: the soap fixed the smell on the person, then the laundry came out of the washer still smelling. That's not a hygiene failure. It's chemistry.

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A caregiver posted on r/laundry with a problem that comes up constantly. The elderly relative they look after is meticulous about hygiene, has started using persimmon soap, and no longer smells at all. Then the laundry came out of the washing machine still carrying that stale, greasy note.

That gap between the person and their clothes catches almost everyone out. Fixing the skin doesn’t fix the fabric, because the fabric is already holding months of the oil the smell lives in. Here’s why, and the wash that gets it out.

Why nonenal survives a normal wash

2-Nonenal is the aldehyde behind what people call “old person smell.” It was identified in 2001 by researchers at Shiseido, who found it in the body odor of subjects aged 40 and over but not in younger ones, and traced it to the oxidative breakdown of omega-7 unsaturated fatty acids in skin surface lipids (Haze et al., Journal of Investigative Dermatology). In other words, it is made from skin oil, by oxidation, on the surface of the skin — and from there it transfers to everything you lean on, sleep on and wear.

The chemistry explains the laundry problem. PubChem lists 2-nonenal as insoluble in water and soluble in fixed oils, with an XLogP3 of 3.1 — a fat-loving molecule. Water alone has almost nothing to grab. What carries it off the fabric is the removal of the oil it’s dissolved in.

And that oil accumulates. A 2025 review of laundering and body odor in Textile Research Journal describes how sebum — cholesterol, triglycerides, wax esters and fatty acids — deposits on textiles and becomes the food supply for the bacteria that generate further malodor, and notes that it’s the enzymes in detergent that break sebum down (Waqar et al., 2025). Miss the oil and you leave both the smell and the thing that keeps making more of it.

Two things people argue about in these threads are worth settling before you start washing. The first is whether any of this is real — the same r/laundry thread contains a flat assertion that nonenal is an invented concept with nothing behind it, and that complaint deserves a proper answer rather than a brush-off, which is why we wrote one into the research index. The second is age. The figure everyone repeats is 40, and it comes from a gas chromatograph rather than from anybody’s nose; what age this actually starts has two defensible answers about thirty years apart. Neither changes the laundry, but both change how much to expect.

Readers describe exactly this without the vocabulary. One r/laundry post about a 60-year-old husband’s shirts talks about sheets with a greasy body outline and fabric that feels “stiff and coated.”

Modern laundry habits make it worse

Three things have changed in the last two decades, and all three favour the smell.

Wash temperatures came down. A review of laundry hygiene in the Journal of Applied Microbiology points out that the drive for energy efficiency has lowered domestic washing temperatures across Europe, while convenience has pushed people toward liquid detergents that contain no bleach — and that both changes reduce the antimicrobial effect of a domestic wash (Bockmühl, 2017).

Cycles got shorter. In a controlled study washing contaminated cotton swatches at 20–60 °C, the temperature required to decontaminate them depended on both the wash time and the detergent: adding activated oxygen bleach improved the result even at the lowest temperatures, and longer cycles compensated for cooler water (Honisch et al., 2014). The practical reading is that time, temperature and detergent chemistry trade off against each other — you need enough of at least two.

Wardrobes got more synthetic. When researchers at Ghent University had 26 people cycle in cotton and polyester T-shirts, then had a trained odor panel assess them after 28 hours, the polyester shirts were rated significantly more intense and less pleasant, with a different bacterial population (Callewaert et al., 2014). The reader threads match: the garments people give up on are almost always poly-spandex pyjamas, athletic tops and fleece.

The wash that actually works

1. Isolate the offenders first. One heavily loaded shirt will share its smell with a whole load in the wash and again in the dryer — a widely repeated experience in r/CleaningTips threads on nonenal. Pull out the pillowcases, collars, sheets, undershirts and the chair-blanket, and treat them as one batch.

2. Soak them, properly. A long soak in hot water with a good powder detergent — several hours to overnight, in a tub or a bucket rather than the machine — is the single step people credit most. It gives the enzymes and surfactants time to lift oil that a 40-minute cycle never reaches. Use a container you can leave undisturbed, and don’t pack it tight.

3. Wash long, warm and with powder. Choose the warmest wash the care label allows, the longest or “heavy soil” cycle, and a powder detergent containing enzymes and oxygen bleach (sometimes labelled as an oxi or activated-oxygen booster). Powders are where the bleach chemistry usually lives; most liquids don’t carry it. Add an oxygen-bleach booster if your detergent doesn’t include one.

4. Don’t overload, and add a rinse. Fabric needs room to move for the oil to actually leave. Run an extra rinse, or a second short cycle with no detergent, so nothing sits back down on the fibres.

5. Check while it’s damp. This is the step people skip. Smell the collar and the underarm before the item goes in the dryer. If the smell is still there, wash it again — it will not improve with heat. If it’s gone, dry it however you like; line-drying in fresh air costs nothing and several readers report that air-drying alone rescued a load that a tumble dryer had made worse.

Why the same routine works in one house and fails in another

The caregiver who started that r/laundry thread noticed something odd: the same items, washed in their own machine with their own routine, came out fine. The largest argument in the replies was about water — hard water, undersized softeners, and the people who add a separate water-softening powder to every single load.

That argument has a clear answer in the detergency literature, and it is not really about limescale.

Researchers at Nara Women’s University washed cotton swatches soiled with a mixture of carbon black and oleic acid — oleic acid being one of the fatty acids in human sebum — using four different surfactants, with water hardness set according to the IEC 60734 standard. As hardness rose, soil removal fell and redeposition rose. The reason is that the anionic surfactants that form the backbone of most laundry detergents combine with the calcium and magnesium in hard water to form insoluble precipitates, and the precipitates have no cleaning power at all. Electron microscopy showed calcium–surfactant precipitate clinging to the fibre surfaces and still sitting there after washing (Gotoh et al., Journal of Oleo Science).

Read that against the chemistry at the top of this page and the problem gets worse than “the wash is a bit weaker”. Hard water converts part of your detergent into a water-insoluble, fat-loving film and deposits it on the fabric. A fat-loving film is not a good place to be putting a fat-loving odour molecule. The one surfactant whose surface tension was unaffected by hardness salts was the nonionic one — but it also had the lowest cleaning performance of the four, so “just use a nonionic detergent” is not the escape it sounds like.

What to do with that, practically:

• Find out what your water actually is before buying anything. Your water company publishes it, and cheap test strips exist. If you are below about 100 mg/L of calcium carbonate, stop reading this section.
• Add builder, not more scent. A water-softening additive or a scoop of washing soda in the wash gives the calcium something to bind to other than your detergent. This is the mechanism behind the softening powders people in these threads swear by.
• Use more detergent per load in hard water, not less. Part of the dose is being consumed before it reaches the oil.
• Citric acid in the rinse compartment is the step most worth adding, and its job is the finish rather than the clean: it neutralises residual alkalinity and helps keep mineral and detergent residue from being left behind.

Which enzyme, and what it can and cannot do

“Add a lipase” is the most confident single recommendation in these threads, and it is the best-aimed one. It is worth being precise about why, because the precision tells you what not to expect.

Lipases hydrolyse triglycerides — the fats that make up much of the sebum deposited on fabric — and they are activated at an oil–water interface, which is exactly what a greasy collar presents. Detergents and textiles are among the established industrial applications of microbial lipases (Sutaoney et al., Enzyme and Microbial Technology), and the 2025 laundering review is explicit that it is the enzymes in detergent that break sebum down (Waqar et al.). A protease handles skin and body proteins, an amylase handles starches; lipase is the one pointed at the fat.

But 2-nonenal is an aldehyde, not a lipid. No laundry enzyme is aimed at the odour molecule itself. What a lipase does is dismantle the reservoir the molecule is dissolved in — which is the whole strategy of this page, but it means the enzyme is working on the carrier, one wash at a time, and not on the smell directly. Enzymes also need warmth and time to work, which is the real reason the long warm cycle matters more than the brand on the box.

It is worth saying plainly how thin the direct evidence is. A PubMed search for 2-nonenal alongside laundering, detergents or water hardness returns three records, and not one of them is about laundry — they are papers on 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal, a different molecule that shares part of the name. Nobody has published a measurement of 2-nonenal coming out of a washing machine. Every laundry recommendation on this page, ours included, is reasoning forward from sebum chemistry rather than back from a measurement of this compound in a wash.

Can something in the rinse stop it re-forming?

A more interesting idea circulates in these threads, usually attached to scent-bead products: that the real active is not the fragrance but an antioxidant delivered to the fabric, and that it works by slowing the oxidation that creates odour in the first place. Commenters pass the molecule around by its chemical name.

The molecule is real. PubChem lists methyl di-t-butyl hydroxyhydrocinnamate (CID 62603) as C₁₈H₂₈O₃, molecular weight 292.4, with an XLogP of 5 — a hindered-phenol antioxidant, and even more strongly fat-loving than 2-nonenal’s 3.1. A molecule like that would partition into an oily film on a fibre rather than rinse out of it, which is at least the right address.

And the underlying idea is not silly. It is the same shape as the argument for a tannin soap: 2-nonenal is produced by oxidation, so something that interferes with oxidation, or that traps reactive carbonyls once they form, is aiming at the mechanism rather than the symptom. We go through the published chemistry for that family of claims in the 2-nonenal research index.

Here is the problem. Nobody has measured it. There is no published work on 2-nonenal levels in fabric with and without an antioxidant rinse additive, and the literature is unusually hard to search here, because a search for antioxidants and 2-nonenal is swamped by thousands of papers on 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal — a marker of oxidative stress in the body, and not the compound in your pillowcase. So this is not a case where we can even show you a clean absence of evidence. It is a plausible mechanism with nothing measured behind it.

Two further limits are worth stating. An antioxidant can only slow new formation; it does nothing about the oil already sitting in the fibres, which is the backlog the soak is for. And these additives arrive attached to fragrance, on laundry you are trying to de-scent — which is its own problem, covered as reason 7 of why persimmon soap seems not to be working.

Things readers try, and how much to expect

• Vinegar or citric acid soak. Frequently disappointing on its own for this smell — one r/CleaningTips poster soaked in vinegar to no effect. As a rinse it earns its place, for the reasons in the hard-water section above. As the treatment, it isn’t one.
• Borax. A common booster, used by several people in these threads. It raises wash alkalinity, which helps oil removal, but it isn’t a substitute for enzymes or oxygen bleach.
• Ammonia. Widely recommended in these threads as an additive for rancid odours, and it does work as an alkaline builder — but read the safety note above before you use it.
• Rubbing alcohol soak. Reported to help on stubborn secondhand fabric, and it makes sense for an oil-soluble molecule. Test on a hidden corner, keep it far from heat and flame, and don’t use it on anything delicate or dry-clean-only.
• Extra fabric softener and scented beads. These add scent over the problem and can leave their own residue. If anything, use less.
• Fabric refresher sprays and laundry sanitisers. Two different claims, neither of which is removal: a refresher traps odour molecules in cyclodextrin, and a sanitiser reduces bacteria. We work through what each one does, and why the smell returns once the garment warms up, in does Febreze remove body odour.

Don’t forget the machine itself

If everything you wash comes out faintly stale, suspect the washer. German researchers who sampled 13 domestic washing machines found distinct bacterial communities in the detergent drawer, door seal, sump and wash fibres, and note that low-temperature washing and bleach-free liquid detergents help microbes survive the process and colonise the machine — with machine and laundry malodor among the consequences (Jacksch et al., 2019).

Run an empty maintenance wash at the hottest setting with an oxygen-bleach powder, wipe the door seal and the detergent drawer, and leave the door ajar between loads so it dries.

Stop the resupply

Laundry is downstream. If the skin is still making 2-nonenal every night, a fresh pillowcase is re-loaded within days. The people who solve this properly do both ends at once:

• Wash the odor hot spots on the body — the neck, behind the ears, the scalp line, the chest and the upper back — rather than scrubbing everywhere. Our guide to how to use persimmon soap covers where and how often.
• Change pillowcases more often than feels necessary: every two or three nights while you’re getting on top of it.
• Don’t ignore the furniture. One reader described an office chair so saturated that their own clothes picked the smell up during a shift. Fabric chairs, car headrests and throws re-contaminate clean laundry, and a chair you cannot put in a machine needs a different method — see how to get old person smell out of furniture. If the whole room smells rather than just the wash, work through old person smell in a house instead — the soft furnishings are usually the reservoir.
• Check whether it’s working with the pillowcase test, since almost nobody can smell this on themselves.

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Bars vary a lot on price, ingredients and whether they’re scented. Our best persimmon soap comparison lines up the five we consider worth looking at, including what each brand does and doesn’t disclose. And if you’ve already tried a bar and nothing changed, eight common reasons persimmon soap doesn’t work is the place to start.

These threads also keep producing the same follow-up question — which bar, and whether a given listing can be trusted at all, given how much of the enthusiasm online comes from people who were sent the product free. That is a separate and more answerable question than whether the chemistry works, and we take it apart in is persimmon soap legit.

When it’s worth seeing a doctor

Nonenal odor is a normal, gradual, oily-stale smell that builds with age. What doesn’t fit that pattern is worth mentioning to a clinician. The NHS advises seeing a GP if body odour hasn’t improved with self-care and it’s affecting your self-esteem, if you notice a change in how it usually smells, or if you suddenly sweat much more than usual (NHS: Body odour). A sweet, fishy, ammonia-like or otherwise unfamiliar odor, or one that appears abruptly, can have medical causes and deserves a proper look rather than a better detergent.

It is also worth checking that you are washing for the right smell. Asked to describe “old person smell”, readers in these threads reach for mothballs, mildew and urine as often as they reach for anything oily — and those are three different problems with three different fixes. A sharp ammonia note on bedding or underwear is not nonenal and will not respond to any of this; it is made after the urine leaves the body, by bacteria, over hours, and the fix is contact time rather than detergent. Musty and mildewed is a moisture problem in the fabric or the machine. Only the stale, greasy, cooking-oil note is the one this page is about.

The bottom line

Old person smell in clothes is an oil problem wearing an odor costume. 2-Nonenal doesn’t dissolve in water, so it leaves with the sebum or it doesn’t leave at all — which is why a cold, quick, liquid-detergent wash can return a pillowcase that still smells. Soak it, wash it long and warm with an enzyme powder and oxygen bleach, rinse it twice, and smell it damp before it ever reaches the dryer. If you have hard water, deal with that first, because it is quietly spending your detergent before it reaches the oil. Then keep the skin side handled so you’re not starting over every night.

Frequently asked questions

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