Old people smell. So do babies. Like milk. (Ask the dog, who keeps stealing booties.) So do children, of that indescribable ‘kid scent’. (If you don’t know the one I mean, visit a primary school locker room.) Adolescents smell. Though their natural aroma may well be masked in mists of cheap aerosol deodorant. Apparently that stuff can kill you. Anyhow, the fact that old people and young people have their own odour is probably an evolutionary precaution that ensures people of child-bearing age can sniff out other people of child-bearing age. Pheromones, blah blah.

One group of people who don’t smell much at all to me are the Japanese. Get onto a crowded Japanese train in a humid South East Asian summer and you’ll be overwhelmed at the scent of…. nothing. Perhaps a few hair products. But no strong perfume. Strong perfume is for ‘Americans’ (read: Westerners). When I lived in Japan ten years ago it was hard to even find ‘anti-perspirant’. You had to search for it in the way you have to search for whole legs of lamb and gravy mix. The Japanese just don’t use it. I think it’s because they don’t have much bodily hair. Disgusting as the thought may be, I think hairy people trap scent more effectively. Our dog is very hairy, and it’s no coincidence that he’s also very smelly. (He doesn’t have a problem with it.)

To move on from that lovely thought, I was examining the meat at the supermarket today when it appeared I’d parked my trolley in front of the very section that an overalled middle aged man needed to get to. Invading my personal space, he reached over and grabbed a corned silver-side and left. Not before I’d almost vomited. He reeked. It was the kind of BO you get from wearing the same pair of overalls two days in a row while working in heavy labour job with no shower and no deodorant. In Africa I rode in a taxi with the window wide open and my head hanging out of it to avoid vomiting at the overpowering scent of the driver. It’s true: different cultures have a different BO tolerance. I’m sure my own ancestors ponged before antiperspirant was invented and when bathing was a once-per-week affair.

It appears the Japanese have a very low tolerance for body odor. Older men are being told that they smell of ‘old people’ and are thus persuaded to fork out yen for stink busting suits.

Shiseido Research Center, a laboratory affiliated with Japanese cosmetics maker Shiseido Co Ltd, sparked the trend to anti-odor products for older men when it discovered eight years ago a substance that it named “kareishu”, or ageing odor.

The lab identified nonenal, a type of fatty acid, as the cause, saying unsaturated fatty acids and oxidative decomposition increase from around 40 years of age.

“Increasingly, people are becoming concerned about their body odour,” said Tsuneaki Gomi, a plastic surgeon who runs a clinic on body odor in Tokyo.

          - news.com.au

Apparently stress levels have something to do with your body odor. I knew that stress played a part in bad breath (rising bile). More significantly, I think, is diet. People who eat a traditional Indian or Chinese diet definitely have an odor to me. You know what this means – I have an odor to them. And if you eat a typical Western diet, you should know that you probably smell ‘oily and buttery’. A Japanese friend told me this when I quizzed him about what Westerners smell like.

So, there’s no such thing as ‘odorless’ just as there’s no such thing as ‘accentless’.