Well, this stinks.
Kristen Bell says her family is so gassy that their collective farts masked the odor of a serious problem.
The “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window” star shared the very unsettling story on her husband Dax Shepard’s podcast, “Armchair Expert,” on Monday.
Bell explained that the couple allows their two daughters, Delta, 7, and Lincoln, 8, to sleep in their bedroom every night on the floor, while she and Shepard sleep on an Ooler mattress pad, which uses a water-based system for heating and cooling (and costs about $1,200 for the queen size on Amazon). Bell said that earlier during the week, the family was settling in for bed when she caught a whiff of “a really raunchy” smell.
“And I’m like, ‘Who’s farting?’ All three of them are like, ‘It’s me,’” she said. “So, my whole family has gas, big [deal].”
But the next morning, Bell noticed that the rancid odor persisted.
“I wake up in the morning and I go, ‘Wow, nobody’s gas has dissipated, but it also smells like it’s burning,’” she said.
Bell noted that it was so bad that she felt like she “needed oxygen,” and quickly opened up the french doors to their room.
Shepard admitted that initially, he felt like his farts were to blame.
“I felt guilty because, minimally, I knew I contributed to it and perhaps was the leader of it,” he said.
Bell said that oddly enough, the smell still hadn’t gone away by the next morning. So she aired out the room again, washed her sheets and lit some candles. But when she settled into bed that night, the stench was still pungent.
“I’m like, ‘Does anybody else smell this, like, rotten garbage? Like burning garbage smell?’”
Bell said that the only other family member who smelled it was Delta, who is “smell sensitive.”
“Lincoln and Dax can’t be bothered, so Delta and I are, well, being gaslit,” Bell said.
The couple had their daughters help them search the room for dog poop or rotting food, but they came up empty. The next day, Kristen enlisted Lincoln to help her find the source of the reek.
Finally Bell decided to check the bottom corner of the mattress where Shepard sleeps, which she described as his “feet corner,” and said she “almost passed out” from the odor. It turns out it was their Ooler pad that was responsible for the ratchet stink.
Bell explained that the bed needs to be filled with water on occasion for it to cool or warm the bed — and it ends up that Shepard accidentally filled it up with a protein shake. Shepard explained that he usually keeps two glasses of water on his messy nightstand every night. But he grabbed an old protein shake he had there instead of a glass of water when the mattress needed to be refilled in the middle of the night.
The couple did everything they could to flush the protein shake — which Shepard admitted had probably been sitting in the system for about 10 days — out of the pad. Shepard said he even used a power washer to get the liquid out. By the time the couple had done all this, they were exhausted, and actually slept on it — even though they said the pad still stunk.
Shepard said he did not sleep peacefully and kept having nightmares about the pad, including dreaming that it was filled with maggots. He woke up in a panic.
The couple said they’ll probably have to buy a new pad.
Bell and Shepard are a popular and influential Hollywood couple. But they do have a history of oversharing details about their private life.
In July 2021, they helped spark a cultural conversation about how often someone should bathe when they had Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher on “Armchair Expert.” Kutcher and Kunis’ remark that they only wash their kids when they see “dirt on them” spurred several celebrities to unnecessarily share their showering habits with the public.
In conclusion: This is all very gross.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated that the mattress pad was filled with maggots. That particular disgusting detail seems to have actually been part of a nightmare Shepard had while smelling the rotten pad in his sleep.