Mystery Solved

I don't know whether I'm an idiot or Nancy Drew.

After several months of wondering why there was an odor in the shower that only I could smell, I have found the source.

To recap for new readers, I began smelling something that smelled to me like an old sewer drain when I showered. The odor did not linger. 

Only I smelled it. My husband smelled nothing. I was starting to think I was having some kind of weird hallucination in the shower.

Nevertheless, we began trying to figure out what the issue was. My husband was afraid we were going to have to tear the shower out because something was leaking and there was mold.

We cleaned the shower thoroughly with bleach; we ran a drain snake down the pipes and the septic cleanout, we found a plug for the shower drain and tested to see if anything leaked.

There was no leak.

The smell occasionally eased up but then it would grow worse. It was "this makes me want to vomit" bad at times. But only for a short period while I was in the shower, and then the odor would go away.

We began looking at other sources, like the water heater, because I only smelled the odor when the hot water was on.

But that didn't seem to be the issue. The hot water didn't smell at the kitchen sink, only the shower, for one thing. We ran bleach through the hot water tank and the pipes to kill any bacteria that might be lurking there.

The odor continued.

And then Sunday night, for whatever reason, I passed the bar of soap - Dove Sensitive Skin which I have used for over 30 years - in front of my nose.

It stunk. It smelled horrible.

It was the bar of soap. And not just that bar of soap, but every bar in a 12 pack of Dove Sensitive Skin bar soap.

I was smelling it when I was washing my upper body and then the smell dissipated as I moved downward, and then of course it was gone once the hot water was off of it and I had rinsed it off.

There were three bars missing from the 12 pack, and I go through a bar about every 3 weeks. The smell was very bad in the current bar, which had been in use a while, so the odor grew stronger the longer I used the soap, I assume. That would explain why there were periods when the smell wasn't so strong - new bar of soap - and then it worsened as the soap dwindled.

After I figured out that the soap was actually the source of the odor, I could smell it on each bar, faintly, even without putting it in water.

I tested this theory by not washing with the soap, and of course everything smelled just fine.

I used the soap again and phew! The odor was back.

Dove Sensitive Skin soap was a victim of shrinkflation after the pandemic, with the bars shrinking from 4 oz to 3.75 ozs.

The 4 oz bar, one of which I still happen to have, was made in the USA.

The new soap is imported from Canada.

I called Dove and told them about my issue. Their solution was to promise to send me a coupon for a free 12 pack of soap.

I wasn't sure I wanted to keep using Dove if it was going to smell, because I need a fragrance-free hypoallergenic soap, but a four-pack that I had under the kitchen sink smells fine. I keep a bar of soap at every sink. My husband doesn't use the bars - he uses my Dawn dishwashing liquid - but I grab the bar of soap at the kitchen sink every time I come into the house after having been out in the germy old world.

The customer service rep at Dove told me that sometimes the soap would be stored improperly during transit and "turn bad." 

I have no idea if that is what happened to this soap, but I wasn't entirely happy with Dove's solution to the problem. We spent several hundred dollars on bleach, drain snakes, and new hot water heater elements, not to mention the angst and worry we have had for over a month while we tried to determine what this odor was.

And perhaps not coincidentally, once I tossed out that soap, I started to feel better. I am still not well, but I am a heck of a lot better than I was. I may have had a virus, but I suspect that bad soap didn't help me at all and may have been poisoning me for all I know.

So that's the update on the shower. We don't have to tear the house apart.

But I wonder, dear reader, would you have suspected a product you'd been using for 30 years to be the culprit? Was I an idiot to take so long to realize what the problem was, or a detective?