Posted on 02/26/2020 1:21:19 PM PST by rickmichaels
A third of French people don’t wash their hands after going to the toilet and less than half before eating, while a fifth of Frenchmen change their underwear twice a week at best.
These are some of the unsavoury findings of a new study into personal hygiene in France, which researchers and Gallic doctors say leaves a lot to be desired. The findings stand to reinforce stereotypes that the French take a laisser-faire approach to cleanliness.
The survey by pollster Ifop found the French continued to display “ignorance of basic sanitary rules, despite public health messages and the current [coronavirus] context.”
Only 37 per cent wash their hands after using public transport and 71 per cent after going to the lavatory.
The study was commissioned by Diogène France, a group specialising in cleaning insalubrious housing from sufferers of Diogenes syndrome- a disorder characterised by extreme self-neglect, domestic squalor and compulsive hoarding.
A quarter of the country failed to take a “complete wash” every day, it found.
Women were less negligent than men, with 81 per cent washing every day compared to 71 per cent of males. Rural Frenchmen only managed such daily ablutions in 60 per cent of cases while the worst offenders were the over 65s, on 57 per cent.
Matters have improved since a landmark Ifop study in 1951 for Elle magazine that asked “Are French Women Clean?”
Back then, just over half performed a full toilette daily, but 14 per cent did so less than once a week. At the time, the French used less soap than almost any other country in the developed world – 6.38kg per year compared to 11.09kg per Briton.
A mere 17 percent claimed to change their underwear every day, and 30 percent changed it only once a week or less.
However, 80 per cent wore lipstick. “French women, in sum, knew a lot about beauty; they just did not associate it with being clean,” wrote American academic Steven Zdatny in his 2014 work, “The French Hygiene Offensive of the 1950s: A Critical Moment in the History of Manners.”
Doctor Frédéric Saldmann, a cardiologist and nutritionist said the French no longer deserved their lingering reputation as a smelly nation. “But more needs to be done,” he told Le Parisien.
He said a nationwide drive in schools to educate young French on personal hygiene in the 1960s had changed habits but that bad habits were creeping back in.
For example, the nail brush seems to have disappeared from the French bathroom, he lamented, adding: “Under the nails, it’s a jungle!”
The post ‘Unclean’ French continue to flout basic personal hygiene rules, study suggests appeared first on The Telegraph.
The virus will love France, and our hygiene will save us here.
Is that because at least 1/3 of the French people are from a protected group that doesn’t think washing their hands after they use the bathroom is necessary because the rock they used was sufficient?
Peach
If you think you have to do a survey of hygiene habits...you do!
Over one hundred years ago my late grandfather served as a US Army sergeant in France in 1918 with the American Expeditionary Force. Although he never talked about being in combat, at least not to us grandkids he did often remark how ‘’filthy’’ he found the French people to be. Looks like much hasn’t changed in over one hundred years.
Pepe LePew.
Yuk.
Would not surprise me if people provided joke responses.
Zut alors!
I have no doubt this news is not news to HG.
Most bloggers are French.
My Grampa said the same thing about the Frogs. He was Army.
the French no longer deserved their lingering reputation as a smelly nation
Sacrebleu! Working hard to regain the former number one position.
One bar of soap per year. It’s why they invented perfume.
FRENCH perfume anyone????
Spot on. Just the most basic thing of washing hands after the loo and before food handling etc can help enormously. I rembember reading something about Queen Elizabeth the 1st. Said she ‘bathed once a month, whether she need it or not’. Be on the nose after a day, let alone a whole month
They don’t wash their junk.
Those people only use their left hand, so the right is perpetually clean
That great-grandfather of mine who emigrated from France to Wheeling, West Virginia? This was probably why.
This is not really going to make the french that much more susceptible. The virus moves easily through the air. Physical contact is not necessary. The Japanese are ultra clean. They do not shake hands, and yet it moves through Japan. So expect the virus to move through most crowded countries.
[Is that because at least 1/3 of the French people are from a protected group that doesn’t think washing their hands after they use the bathroom is necessary because the rock they used was sufficient?]
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