Japanese Firm Combats Smell Of Middle Age

SHISEIDO'S new line of shampoos, powders and air fresheners is designed to neutralize the body odor of what it says are the stinkiest human beings - aging males

YOKOHAMA, Japan - Do middle-aged men smell worse than everyone else?

Shoji Nakamura, chief perfumer with Japan's exclusive cosmetics firm Shiseido, certainly thinks so. And he's out to change that.

Nakamura, whose million-dollar nose is reputedly able to distinguish among 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 over and otherwise obscure the unique smell of growing old.

The crux of the problem

His latest olfactory innovation has apparently struck a powerful chord with the cleanliness-conscious Japanese - if all the media hoopla is any indication - as newspapers, magazines and TV programs here proclaim the merits of his revolutionary discovery.

For researchers at Shiseido, the largest cosmetics maker in Japan and the fourth-largest globally, the bottom line is that people older than 40, particularly men, produce much more of an unsaturated aldehyde called "nonenal" than the rest of society. That, the company says, is the crux of the problem.

Nonenal is described as a key ingredient in traditional body odor, but Shiseido says it generates a more distinctive, diffuse smell in older men and is not limited to places like the underarm, where traditional deodorants are effective.

At Shiseido's research lab in Yokohama, three men and a woman in white coats carefully handle two small glass jars of what they say is concentrated older-male odor before sliding them across a table to give a visitor a whiff. Along with the unique opportunity comes a warning not to get too close.

In language worthy of a wine connoisseur on a tear, Shiseido goes on to describe its newly isolated old-age smell as an "unpleasant and greasy odor with a grassy nuance."

Describing the smell

Segments of the Japanese public are chiming in with a cacophony of criticisms of the body odor of "ojisan" - a Japanese term that literally means "uncle" but carries an unpleasant connotation of an older man out of style, socially inept and now smelly.

The magazine Weekly Bunshun in a recent issue highlights several women in their 20s complaining about their older male relatives and co-workers under the headline: "Ojisan's smell will be gone! Could this be true?"

Asked to describe the ojisan smell, the young women liken it to fertilizer, dead leaves, "squished aphids" and "a cheap, sleazy hotel."

Gunze, a clothing company that has capitalized on this strongly held sentiment with a new line of "Deogreen" underwear designed to inhibit microorganisms blamed for the dreaded middle-age smell, recently surveyed 278 young women ages 16 to 25 on the distasteful topic of "men's perspiration and body odor."

Gunze found that 92 percent believe "something must be done about this problem," while 65 percent said they find the smell of their boss particularly offensive.

A TV commercial for Gunze's no-smell underwear taps into this over-arching, underarming anxiety. In the 30-second spot, a young woman listens to a Walkman on a crowded commuter train, her face jostled at the armpit level of several older men. Eventually the smell gets so bad she screams, tears off her headphones and jams the two earpieces into her nostrils.

Unpleasant odors are processed by the left side of the brain, which sends an urgent signal to escape from the odor, according to the Japanese book "Nose and Human Relations." Talk about a testament to the brain: Humans can detect some 100,000 smells, the book says.

For his part, Tetsuya Ishizaki, a 52-year-old local-government official dressed in a gray suit and carrying a brown briefcase, says all the social railing against ojisan is unfair. "I don't understand why middle-aged men get so much criticism," he says. "I get offended when young girls on the train wear too much perfume, but I don't complain."

Takahiko Furata, a professor and the director of Tokyo's Modern Social Research Institute, says the anti-ojisan campaign and attendant publicity mirror an underlying societal shift. In many people's minds, middle-aged Japanese men are linked with the fortunes of Japan Inc., he says. And as the economy has deteriorated, the group's social standing has diminished.

Finding the culprit

Back at Shiseido's research institute, in an apparent trick of the trade, chief perfumer Nakamura jerks the bottle of concentrated ojisan odor in front of his nose several times in a sequence vaguely reminiscent of an epileptic fit before confiding that his usual research specialty is the gentle waft of roses and orchids, not body odor.

Nakamura, who rarely forgets a smell, says that when Shiseido finally decided to pursue his discovery, the first step was to call on 23 company employees and relatives between the ages of 20 and 70 to sleep in the same undergarments for three consecutive nights.

Targeting the stronger-smelling, over-40 male samples, the research team then spent several months isolating various component "fatty acids" extracted from the clothing. They eliminated these one by one until they found the culprit: a fatty acid that mixes with air to form something called nonenal, which was reportedly two or three times more concentrated in middle-aged and elderly men than in other groups, although "we don't have exact figures."

On the day it was isolated, researchers rushed over to Nakamura and proffered him a big whiff.

"Yes! That's the one I remember from 1987!" he said. Another sniff test by a ranking female manager at the company evoked similar squeals of latent recognition. Eureka!

Having identified and isolated nonenal, it was now time to counteract its power, which the team did using a secret process that nose-neutralizes these sands of time. Then it was time to test up to 200 different ingredients needed to mask whatever bits slipped through the nonenal net, including lemon, jasmine and peppermint.

Researchers say that throughout the process, they had to walk a bit of a stinky slope. They wanted to hide the offensive smell but didn't want some overpowering perfume that would seem unnatural. "Body odor is really an individual's signature," Nakamura says.

The resulting products let older people, especially men, "feel clean and refreshed without people knowing there's something different right away, a subtle change that allows them to feel like themselves," explains senior perfumery scientist Shinichiro Haze.