Comment on Anon scentmaxxes
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 4 days agoDid I say pure luxury, or did I say it makes it easier?
I did forget that something is obviously 100% vital and indispensable or entirely worthless and void of functionality.
Early soaps were used for the preparation of textiles rather than personal hygiene.
As early as we invented soap, we actually had the notion that festering in your own rancid body oils is bad far, far earlier. As such, we had ways of dealing with that well before we had soap and people didn’t just immediately switch.
So go ahead and use soap. I certainly do. But if you’re looking to have your mind blown, take a shower and just scrub your skin with a brush, loofah or the palm of your hand and be amazed when you still get clean. If you’re really grimey, you can do what the Romans did and rub yourself with olive oil and scrape it off with a scraper before doing that.
addictedtochaos@lemm.ee 4 days ago
now try doing that with hair. or your hands after vivisecting a corpse, and then delivering a baby. clean up feces and vomit, and then try to get rid of the smell without soap.
every farm worker that works with life stock knows what i am talking about.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
You’re taking “it’s possible to be clean after bathing without soap” as a way stronger statement than it is.
Do you think I’m saying soap is bad?
No one is talking about hygienic hand washing practices for medicine, food prep, after defecation, or after being coated in tough substances.
We’re in a giant pile of people talking about routing bathing to prevent body odor and the skin issues caused by poor bodily hygiene.
Washing with running water and a scrubbing action is sufficient for that purpose for many people. Bathing without soap is not a guarantee that you will have BO, a rash, skin lesions, or acne.
The Africa point isn’t really the gotcha you think it is. Soap working better faster doesn’t mean that a lack of soap doesn’t work. As you said, when they didn’t have soap they still washed. People are generally interested in being clean, and pragmatic. They’ll clean themselves, and if something helps them get cleaner faster, they’ll use it.
And yup, that passage does document that the Roman empire eschewed soap for personal hygiene until roughly year zero.
addictedtochaos@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Yeah, romans began to use soap at roughly year zero. I wonder why. I wonder why people use deodorant every day, when they just can spray water under their arms.