I recently saw some YouTube clip about the marriage of George IV to Caroline of Brunswick. Apparently Caroline did not believe in bathing or in cleaning her underwear and her smell was reportedly so appalling that wedding guests were nauseated - this at a time when few people bathed regularly and bad smells were common.
Washcloth cat spit bath once a month, whether I need it or not.
I have often thought if you had to hand pump the water you bathed in you would get the perfect amount of bathing.
Dirty Dick.....
Nah.....too easy 😁
We don’t bathe in California because no water comes out of our faucets!
You gain a protective shell of filth and stink that keeps others away.
IDK. Here in the south we will sometimes shower twice in the same day.
I was behind this guy at the grocery store the other day. I couldn’t tell about his girlfriend/mother who paid for everything because he was in the way.
Boy, did he stink!
Shower in the morning. Shower before bed. Can’t sleep without it.
As an Infantry guy that at one point in Iraq, didn’t shower for over 30 days in June weather...I can attest that nothing happens other than you clothes get stiff, riddled with salt, and everyone smells like ammonia.
Other than that...you can smell someone who HAS taken a shower or shaved, if the wind is favorable, from a 50 yards away.
Aristotle discussed the concept of moderation primarily in his work Nicomachean Ethics, where he introduced the idea of the “Golden Mean.” According to Aristotle:
Virtue as a Mean: Aristotle posited that virtue lies between two extremes, which he referred to as vices. These extremes are excess on one side and deficiency on the other. For example, courage is the mean between rashness (excess) and cowardice (deficiency).
I spent most of my life in South Florida. Two showers a day, especially in summer, were not unheard of.
Moved to New Mexico almost 20 years ago. I was shocked to hear that people around here often only shower twice a week.
now thats a serious coat of fumunda cheese...
And then there's the French.
You save money on bars of soap and shampoo.
Certain odors cause women to distance themselves - thus saving you lawyer's fees for defending you from "girl power."
You have more time to read FreeRepublic.com, watch sports, fix things.
That’s my son. My daughters are always hounding him to have a bath more than once per week.
Bottom line: The wife tells me I smell fresh all the time. Sorry for all the specifics.
A conundrum about skin cleaning has a bunch of variables.
To start with, Staphylococcus epidermidis makes up to 90% of the normal or non-pathogenic skin bacteria. But there are also other bacteria, yeasts, viruses, and arthropods. This varies a lot by where you are looking.
From the knees to the navel is the “coliform zone”, with many bacteria that are essential to digestion, but anywhere else on the body are pathogens. Touching this area with the hands is the real reason to wash your hands after going to the restroom.
Importantly, washing with just water can remove most of the contamination. With water and ordinary soap, a much higher percentage. Antibacterial soap just removes a bit more. However, many bacteria actually live *in* the skin, and will repopulate the area fairly quickly after washing.
An important point is that bacteria contend with each other for physical area, both inside and outside of our bodies. And if they are related to each other, that is, of the same genus, a non-pathogenic species can be used to take up the same ecological niche as a related pathogenic species, pushing the latter out.
The Japanese discovered this phenomenon years ago, using the harmless Clostridium butyricum, to “push out” the very harmful and contagious Clostridium difficile, which causes a month long, painful dysentery, that is very hard to treat with antibiotics.
The smart Japanese company that discovered this patented the idea, so is still the sole manufacturer. And getting a mail order from Japan does take a while. But the principal of pushing out one type of bacteria with another is sound.
So back to the skin. After washing our hands, it would be a great idea to rub a bit of liquid non-pathogenic bacteria on them to refresh your skin colony and push out pathogenic bacteria. But it’s likely beyond our modern mindset.