Reason 2

This is why it's back an hour after you shower.

After the shower

Getting dressed

By lunch

By evening

Here's a normal day:

• After the shower: Soap and water take the smell off the surface. For a few minutes, you're clean.
• Getting dressed: The fold closes. Skin sits on skin. Within minutes it's warm and damp again.
• By lunch: The colony was never washed out. It's back to eating. The smell is back, right on schedule.
• By evening: You've added deodorant, wipes, maybe powder. The fold is still wet. The smell is still there.
• Next morning: You shower, and it starts again.

Soap removes what's on the surface. The colony isn't on the surface. It's in the fold, and it was there before you got in the shower.

Reason 3

Soap can't reach it.

Soap is made to lift dirt and oil off skin and rinse away. It does that well. But yeast isn't dirt. It's alive, and it's in the crease where skin meets skin. That's the one place a washcloth barely reaches.

Antibacterial soap doesn't help either. Yeast isn't bacteria. You can scrub until the skin is raw. You'll have taken the smell off for twenty minutes and left the colony exactly where it was.

Worse, scrubbing a fold every day breaks the skin down. Now it's raw, it's wet, and it still smells.

The shower isn't the problem. It just can't do this job.

Reason 4

Deodorant and wipes cover it. For about twenty minutes.

This is the next thing most women reach for. A body wipe in the purse. Deodorant under the breasts. A "whole body" spray.

They do one thing: put a stronger smell on top of the smell. The colony doesn't care. It's still there, still eating, still making more.

And most of them go on wet. You've added moisture to a fold whose whole problem is moisture. By the time the perfume fades, the yeast has had a better afternoon than you have.

Reason 5

Powder and cream make it a better home.

So she tries to dry it with powder, or treat it with cream. Gold Bond. Cornstarch. Desitin. Whatever's in the drawer.

Powder soaks up sweat for about an hour. Then it turns to paste and holds the wet against the skin. Cornstarch is worse. Yeast eats starch. You've put food on the colony.

Cream goes on wet and stays wet. Diaper cream seals the moisture in. Every one of them leaves the fold damper than it found it.

The smell by the afternoon isn't the product wearing off. It's the colony, back to work in a fold you just made wetter.

Reason 6

Three things are happening in that fold.
Soap touches none of them.

Moisture

Friction

Yeast

Once a fold stays wet, three problems run at the same time in the same inch of skin:

The smell is the third row. But you can't fix the third row without the first. Yeast lives in wet. Take away the wet, and it can't stay.

Nothing in the shower does that. Nothing in the deodorant aisle does that. It takes something made to kill the yeast and dry the fold at the same time.

Reason 7

One thing kills the colony and dries where it lives.

Healora Intertrigo Relief Cream isn't a soap, a wipe, or a deodorant. It's an antifungal that dries to a powder. It goes on like a cream, so you can get it into the fold. Then it dries, and it stays dry all day.

• Phase 1 - It dries the fold

  (the first 60 seconds)

  

  Witch hazel pulls the moisture out on contact. Silica and tapioca starch turn the cream into a dry powder finish that doesn't cake and doesn't turn to paste. The colony just lost its home.

  

• Phase 2 - It kills the colony

  (days 1-5)

  

  Undecylenic acid (10%) kills the yeast at the root, not just on the surface. Microencapsulated tea tree oil takes the last of the smell with it, without stinging skin that's already sore.

  

• Phase 3 - It keeps it gone

  (day 5 and after)

  

  Zinc oxide (15%) leaves a breathable barrier between the two sides of the fold. Skin stops rubbing skin. Sweat can't pool. There's nothing for the colony to come back to.

  

Goes on like a cream. Dries to a powder in 60 seconds. Stays dry all day. No steroids. No added fragrance. Dermatologist tested.

The smell gone the first night. Kept gone every day after.