The 5 Things I Tried After What My Granddaughter Said in the Car (#1 Is the Only One That Stays on Your Skin)
You can't smell it on yourself. They can. I learned that the expensive way: $134.94 on four fixes that wash, scrub, cover or rinse off, and the smell was still there. #1 is the only one that goes after the oil this smell actually comes from, because it's the only one that doesn't go down the drain.
CW
In my purse
The ingredient
My granddaughter is seven, and seven-year-olds don't have a filter. We were on the way back from her swim lesson when she leaned over the console and said, "Grandma, you smell like your house." She didn't mean anything by it. I drove the rest of the way home with the window cracked an inch and didn't say much.
I shower every morning. I have my whole life. So the first thing I did was decide she was wrong, and the second thing I did, about three days later, was go looking for a fix.
For the better part of a year I tried everything I could find. Some of it helped a little. Most of it cost money and changed nothing, and the whole time I was doing the thing I'd guess you've done too, which is lifting my collar to my nose in the hallway mirror and getting no answer. When I finally pulled the receipts out of the kitchen drawer and added them up, the number was $134.94. I'll show you the receipt further down, because the number taught me more than any of the products did.
These are the five that did something, ranked from the one that helped least to the one that ended it. My favorite by far is #1, because it's the only one on this list that stays on your skin instead of going down the drain.
5. Showering Twice a Day (Right Instinct, Wrong Target)
This was my first move, and I'd bet it was yours. Morning shower, evening shower, a clean washcloth every time, and I scrubbed behind my ears like I was ten and my mother was going to check.
Here's what nobody told me. Soap is made for sweat and dirt, and this smell is neither. It comes from the natural oil on the back of your neck and behind your ears, and somewhere after 40 that oil starts breaking down into a compound with a faint greasy, musty edge. Water and soap slide right over oil. That's why the second shower bought me an hour, maybe two, and then it was back.
4. Antibacterial Body Wash and a "Clinical Strength" Deodorant (Stronger Soap, Same Miss)
When the extra showers didn't hold, I bought the orange antibacterial body wash and a clinical-strength deodorant, the kind with the extra label on the cap. A lot of women do this, judging by the reviews.
Two problems. The body wash is still soap, so it rinses off the same way the regular kind does, and now the thin skin behind my ears was dry and tight on top of everything else. And deodorant goes under your arms. This smell doesn't start there. Deodorant was built for sweat, and after 40 this isn't a sweat smell. The compound builds in the oil on the back of the neck, behind the ears and across the upper chest, which is exactly where nobody puts deodorant and exactly where a grandchild's face lands in a hug.
3. Perfume Over the Top (The Default Answer, and the One That Makes It Worse)
This is where most of us land, because it feels like the polite fix. A spray at the collar before church, a dab of the good perfume before the grandkids come over.
The trouble is that perfume removes nothing. It sits on top of the oil, so for the first hour you smell like perfume, and after that you smell like perfume over something. My daughter, who is 41 and kind, told me months later that the days I wore the most were the days she noticed the most.
"The scented soaps only masked it."
That line, or one just like it, shows up over and over in the reviews of every persimmon product on Amazon. Women my age figured out the same thing I did: covered is not the same as clean, and people can tell the difference.
2. Persimmon Soap (The Right Ingredient, the Wrong Delivery)
This one taught me the most, and it's the closest thing on this list to a real answer. Persimmon tannin is a large plant molecule that grabs onto the oil compound and clears it instead of covering it. The bars work. The reviews are full of women my age saying the smell is gone after a week or two.
The problem is delivery. The tannin only works while it's on your skin, and soap goes down the drain. The directions on mine said to leave the lather on for about three minutes, the bar has to be kept dry between uses or it turns to mush, and it's small enough that I was through one in a few weeks. By the second month I was skipping it on busy mornings, and the busy mornings were the whole point.
But sit with what this means for a second. The ingredient was right. Every time I used the soap it worked, and every time I rinsed, the thing that worked went down the drain. So the question stopped being "what do I use" and became "how do I keep it on me after the shower is over."
Four of the five things on this list are on that receipt. Every one of them rinsed off, sat on top, or went on in the wrong place.
And the #1 Fix That Actually Ended It…
Before I tell you what it is, you need the one fact that made the four above finally make sense. I went most of a year without anyone telling me, and I'd been asking.
The answer to all three: after 40, the smell is in the oil, and soap was built for sweat.
"You can't check it on yourself. So the fix has to be something you do once and trust."
In 2001 a research team led by Shinichiro Haze published a paper in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. They collected body odor from people of different ages and found one compound, 2-nonenal, in the subjects over 40 that was absent in the younger ones. It forms when the natural oil on the skin breaks down, and that oil is thickest on the back of the neck, behind the ears and across the upper chest.
That explained the whole receipt. Washing works on sweat and dirt, not oil. Deodorant goes under the arms, not behind the ears. Perfume sits on top. Soap carries the right ingredient and then rinses it away.
And here's the part that stung. Your nose stops registering any scent you live with all day, which is why I could lift my collar a hundred times and get nothing, and a seven-year-old could pick it up from the back seat. There was never going to be a day I'd smell it myself. So the fix had to be something I do once in the morning and stop thinking about.
A leave-on persimmon stick. The same tannin as the soap in #2, in a solid stick you swipe behind the ears and along the back of the neck after your shower, so it stays on the skin all day instead of rinsing down the drain. Two spots, about ten seconds.
That first row is the whole game. Showers, body wash, perfume, soap. Every fix on the receipt failed the same way, which is that nothing stayed on the skin. I swipe it on after I dry off, behind each ear and across the back of my neck, and it takes about ten seconds. Within a couple of weeks at my house the collar check in the hallway mirror just wasn't part of the morning anymore. Every woman is different and results vary, but I stopped wondering, and that was the thing I was actually buying.
The persimmon bar never left my shower, by the way. The bar is for the shower and the stick is for the rest of the day, and Corda sells the two together as a kit on the product page if you'd rather not buy them separately.
Current sets below ↓
Why the sale? Corda makes the stick in small batches and sells it direct, so there's no store markup to begin with. The fall batch is priced to move before the holidays, when the hugs, the church dinners and the houseguests all come at once. The October batch is 89% claimed; the next one ships early November.
The math that made it easy
I'd already spent $134.94 on body wash that dried my skin out, a perfume I didn't want to wear, and a soap I kept skipping. At $24 a stick lasting four to six weeks, a single stick works out to somewhere between 57 and 86 cents a day. On the Buy 2, Get 1 set it's $16 a stick, so under 60 cents a day even at the short end. The Buy 3, Get 2 set is five sticks for $72, which is about half of what that receipt came to, and it covers you from now to spring.
And it's covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're the one woman it doesn't work for, you get your money back, even on a used stick.
What other women noticed
My daughter said I "smelled like flowers" one day and I hadn't told her I'd started using anything different. That felt like a real sign it was working.
I'm in my early seventies and started noticing a smell in my bedroom I couldn't place. Then it hit me, it reminded me of my father's assisted living room in his last few years. Started dabbing this behind my ears every morning and the smell is just gone.
I didn't even know I needed this. I was getting concerned that maybe my nose wasn't picking up on it. After using the stick, I was quite pleased to see I was getting back that clean feeling. I'm hooked.
Glides on smooth, no sticky residue, and a little really does last!! I'm still on my first stick after two months. Only reason it's 4 stars and not 5 is the price for the size.
One thing before you go: if the change in your scent came on suddenly, is strong, or shows up with a rash, broken skin or anything else new, that's a visit to your doctor, not a stick. A sudden change in body odor can be a sign of something a dermatologist should look at.
I still keep the persimmon bar in the shower most mornings. I still wash the pillowcases more often than I probably need to. But the thing that actually ended the collar check is the one fix on this list that's still on my skin at dinner, and the one that wasn't on that receipt.
Last month my granddaughter fell asleep on my shoulder in the car on the way home from the same pool. If you've been washing harder and it keeps coming back, start with #1.
See If CORDA Is Right for You →P.S. If you only remember one thing from this page: after 40 it's in the oil, and soap was built for sweat. Once you know that, the showers, the body wash and the perfume stop looking like answers, and the $134.94 stops being a mystery.