The idea that babies smell good seems to be shared around the world, and their scent is described as resembling soap, milk, or citrus.
Why Do Babies Smell Good?
If you search in Japanese, you will find several websites saying, without citing sources, that nonanal is responsible. In English, however, various papers appear, and the subject has been properly investigated. Incidentally, nonanal is a type of aldehyde, like undecalactone (in Japanese), the peach-scented material familiar to perfume enthusiasts.
A paper published in Nature in March 2024 (Body odor samples from infants and post-pubertal children differ in their volatile profiles) investigated the odors of babies and adolescent children to find out which components affect their smell.
The conclusion seems to have been that there was not much difference in nonanal between the two groups. Or rather, there was little difference in most of the components they had in common.
However, the team noticed something.
It was that components called steroid compounds were present in adolescent children but not in babies.
These are compounds produced when sweat from sweat-releasing openings called apocrine glands is broken down by resident skin bacteria. They are behind what is often described as strong underarm odor and are also associated with axillary malodor.
In other words, perhaps it is not that babies smell good, but that their odor does not contain unpleasant-smelling components?
Conclusion
My thought is that, if you want to smell like a baby, it may be better to wash your body to keep unpleasant odors away rather than wear perfume.
Perfume masks odors, so although it smells good, the unpleasant smells are still there at the same time.
Babies were showing us what it means to smell good. For now, get in the bath and get rid of the unpleasant odors on your skin.
That’s all.
