Stuff You Should KnowEver wondered when and why people started caring about body odors and cleanliness? Well look no further than today's episode.
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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and Welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're all sparkling, clean, spotless and not smelly at all for this edition of Stuff, don't you know?
Actually I'm a little smelly today.
Are you smell? Pull? I think you're you're nice, I would say ripe, but not in an unpleasant way.
Oh wait, you didn't scratch. You're supposed to scratch then stuff.
Oh oh oh wait, oh yes, that is quite unpleasant.
That tickles. All right, that was my joke.
That was a great joke. Chuck, now you think so too, But she's on mute so we can't hear her laughing.
I am a little bit smelly, but that was not in preparation to record it. Just haven showered in a couple of days.
You know, a couple of days for real?
Yeah, I mean yeah, like two days.
Okay, yeah, I mean I'm not being judgy. I'm just surprised. I do every day.
Oh I'll skip. I skip days all the time.
But when I do it, it's all over the place. Like if I have an appointment in the morning, obviously I'm taking a shower before that. If I don't have an appointment, I'll probably take a shower before bed. If we go to dinner, it might be in the middle of the day. Who knows it based on my schedule. But there's rarely a day that goes by where I don't take a shower. Not because I think it's dirty to not take a shower, sure, but because I feel like I think I just sleep better if I've had a shower that day. If I don't, I think I sleep worse.
Yeah, I mean, well, a shower is a great, wonderful, relaxing thing when you're an adult, when you finally appreciate bathing. And I certainly do appreciate bathing, but you know, sometimes you just or maybe you don't because you do it. But sometimes I just don't want to feel wet. I don't want to get wet.
Oh yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. I that doesn't actually happen to me. Mine is I do. I don't feel like going to the trouble of taking a shower. I just feel like feeling like I feel after the shower. So that's my motivator. I have no problem with being wet, now that you mentioned it.
Shower before bed, that's nice. I should do that.
Oh yeah, chuck, you don't know what you're missing. Shower before bed, wrap yourself in some fresh linen that you throw away the next.
Day and it doesn't wake you up too bad.
No, well, I would not recommend taking a cold shower before bed. I recommend taking a cold shower throughout the day, but not before bed. You want to take like a nice, tepid to warm a shower, and it's like it's like it's like dipping yourself into a warm glass of milk rather than drinking it.
All right, Well, at the risk of still going on and on here at the beginning, I have a five second story of living in Athens one summer in my friend's place who had moved out, and he was like, you know, my parents paid the rent. You don't have a place to stay. You should stay there, And I did, but he could off the utilities. So I lived by candlelight and took cold showers for three months, because that's what you do in college. Sometimes that's so colonial. It was very fun.
Actually, that's cool. Yeah, so you basically glamed.
Yeah. I didn't hang out there a lot, you know, I just slept there, basically.
Slept there, and the cold showers. That's amazing. Yeah, so Chuck, you taking cold showers and sleeping by candlelight really kind of dovetails with a large section of this episode. Yeah, which is around, like I said, the colonial era, which we'll get to later. I don't really have a very good segue other than this because we actually don't want to talk about the colonial era yet, so let's start further back.
Yeah, we're talking about the history of hygiene. And this is another great one from Olivia. I've been not obsessed, but just really interested lately in histories of commonplace things, and exercise was one, and now we're doing bathing. And as Olivia points out, and as many anthropologists that pointed out, and animal behaviorists, you know, animals before human beings have a lot of practices that we would then probably can call hygienic, like bathing type of things, using communal toilets within a species, stuff like that.
Yeah. Absolutely. There's a behavioral scientist named Valerie A. Curtis who wrote a book or not a book. I'm sorry, it was a paper about I can't remember the name of it. I'm sorry, I thought I wrote it down. But basically Curtis makes the point that you could trace hygiene and hygienic behaviors back to unicellular life, Like, that's how old it is. Is Wow, you look at hygiene and hygienic behaviors as a means of either ridding yourself of disease or preventing disease, because those unicellular bacteria or bacteria, they had ways of like getting rid of parasites and pastigens. And that's essentially what you're doing. You know, when you're washing yourself off, you're ridding yourself of parasites and pathogens. So, yeah, it's a really ancient impulse that we have. It's just now we don't think of it as like disease prevention. We associate it mostly with beauty. Yeah, so we've kind of divorced it from its original roots, but we're still doing the same thing. We're just not thinking of it the same way.
Yeah, And it's interesting you'll notice as we go through this stuff. At different times in the history of humans, we bathed for different reasons, and sometimes we were right on base. Sometimes we were off base. But it wasn't always like to get clean. Sometimes it was social reason. Sometimes the side benefit was you got a little clean. Sometimes they didn't bathe because they thought water was bad. So it's really interesting how we've i don't know, kind of been all over the map throughout human history as far as bathing goes, starting with hair.
Well also, but even before that, like it's kind of waxed and waned, which I didn't realize. I thought it was just a steady progress towards the point we're at. Now that's not the case. There were a shower every night, Yeah, they were right exactly. There were chunks of time where we bathed, and then that just kind of went away, like you were saying, it just at different times and places. It wasn't just like a linear progression. And one of the ideas that we're I guess going to kind of get rid of in this episode is that the people in the days of your historical people were not just dirty, gross people who had never even occurred to to groom or bathe or whatever.
Like.
The stuff they had available to them and the ways that they were grooming seems not quite enough, probably did those of us in the West today, but it was still the same impulse, it was still the same thought, and they were still very fastidious in their own way. So the idea that everybody was gross back then is wrong. It actually they were in a real minority. And most people who are purposefully gross, especially during the medieval era, we're doing it to punish themselves to be better Christians. Essentially, everybody else was like, we're gonna just figure out how to take a bath in the river or comb our hair.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, on the note of not yucking yems, there are plenty of people, and I think even sub movements of groups of people who don't like to bathe or you soaper deodorant and embrace the natural odors of the body and may not even wash their hair because that's the thing they're trying to do. Like that's your jam. That's fine, it's you know, certain things are more acceptable than others in certain societies and cultures. But like, if that's your deal, we're not poopooing it. We're just telling you the history of this stuff.
Yeah, I feel like you're subtweeting the French right now.
But I mentioned hair, and one of the first things we can debunk, I think anthe in part to an anthropologist named Judith Berman from a nineteen ninety nine paper that Judith wrote was that cavemen, even going all the way back then, and we'll use that in quotes, cavemen were just these wild, messy haired beasts that had like you know, basically birds nest in their hair. And that wasn't necessarily the case.
No, I mean, look at even as recently as Unfrozen caveman Lawyer. He had a huge, wild mane of hair. But yes, she points out in this great titled paper Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic that people have probably been cutting their hair for a very long time, millions of years, and that even I think Berman pointed to Venus figurines saying like they even had different hair styles back then, Like this is literal prehistory. These are prehistoric people, and they were cutting their own hair, they were creating hairstyles. And if you look at some cave paintings, some of the figures are beardless, others have beards, So that shows that they actually also cut the bes and trim their their body hair, probably because they were combating lice at the time.
Yeah, lice comes back quite a few times, so yeah, they're probably If you're triggered by that itch inducing word, then just get ready.
And also just real quick lice. By the way, are there a type of wingless insects who feast on human blood, typically at the scalp. But there's also body lice, which you can find a chest hair and aren't pit hair. And then there's pubic lice also known as crabs. Either way, you don't want them anywhere on your body, but if you don't bathe a lot, you can have them on your body pretty easy.
Yeah, And if you grew up in the seventies and eighties, do they still do life checks?
No?
Yeah, we had lice checks in school.
There's a big controversy about it about whether they should or not, and they're like, no, this is unnecessarily excluding kids, and other parents are like, uh, these kids are gonna spread lice. So there's just like everything else, there's problems in debate at the board of education about that.
There's debate at boards of educations.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So combing hair, you know, shampoo hasn't been around that long, and we'll get to sort of where that came from, Thank you Proctor and Gamble, But combing hair was one way that they sort of cared for hair before there was things like shampoo because we have this sebum which we'll talk about on the skin and in the hair. That's the oil, the hair oil. And if you comb that sebum out of your hair, you are helping to protect your hair, can get rid of some odors, it will, you know, you know, when you don't want your hair look and get kind of greasy. But I get the feeling that greasy thing is more of a modern thing that we want to get rid of. And back then it was just like, at least comb the sebum through the hair to help protect it.
Yeah, it helps protect it. It also breaks up areas where dirt and dust and grime and light lice can collect and feed. So you're kind of you're doing like a one two punch with combing. And we figured this out a very long time ago. There's a comb from Syria from the well a little more recent than that, but from the Bronze Age. We found a comb that had an inscription that said, may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and beard. So clearly a lice comb. But I think they, like you were saying, they found a comb that was at least ten thousand years old, all the way back in Syria.
It's an old comb.
I mean, if you think about it, also look at the flintstones. People used to use fish skeletons for combs, Like it just makes sense, you know.
Sure Simpsons always. I never was cool enough to carry the comb in the back pocket. But that was a big eighties look was that?
H m hmm?
What was the brand? I want to say, Goodies? Was that it?
Yes, you're right, yep, good was it?
So they make headache powder and combs two different things.
It could be two different things, but it's also possible. But they're like ge they they do a lot of different stuff.
They bring it things to light.
So yeah, those combs with the handle and then like the comb on the side just above where your fist holds it.
Yeah yeah, sure yeah.
And then you also had the afropick too.
Oh yeah, with the black power fist. Those are great. So pre shampoo though, besides combing, there was washing going on. We talked about this stuff in our soap episode. We're going to go over a little bit of it today. But ash, which has lye was used to wash hair, It was used to wash skin. We'll get into the animal fat stuff a little bit later, but if you were well to do prior to the French Revolution, you might powder your hair, and I never knew what that was. I thought it was some kind of talk, but I think it could actually be flour, like wheat flour.
Well, yeah, supposedly. One of the I guess inciting ideas of the French Revolution was that the aristocrats were using flour in their hair when other people couldn't even have for bread. That really ticked some people off enough to like chop the heads off of the people who had flour in their hair. That's right, So you mentioned LII. I saw that you could wash your hair with it, and it has a conditioning effect too, which is weird because it also goes in and breaks up all of that seabum pocket I heard the pockets. But I just have to say this on a very personal note. I have been in a strange tunnel where things that I'm seeing reading, watching on TV I immediately see in real life. I want to give you two examples. One on our exercise episode, I was driving around qaing it.
When you saw a guy jogging.
No, listen, that would have blown my mind. No, this is even crazier than that. I mentioned what I couldn't even remember the name of but people have since written in the abroller, that little weird thing that helps you do crunches. I couldn't even remember the name of it, let alone. I can't remember the last time I saw one. Within an hour of queueing that episode and hearing that part, I drove past a garbage can near my house that had an abroller sticking out of it.
Did you grab it?
No? I was too astonished. I think I almost like ran into a stop sign. It was so nuts. And then the other one that The reason I brought this up is I watched a video on medieval hair washing and it was this medieval person leaning over a basin washing her hair with like the water kind of going down her hair kind of dangling in front of her like. Less than an hour later, I go across the street to the park where there's like travelers that camp there. One of them was washing her hair that way. I've never seen her there before. I've never seen anybody wash their hair at this park. But within an hour of watching a medieval woman wash her hair like that, I saw a real life woman at the park doing the same thing.
Wow, I mean this has been These.
Are like two of just fistfuls of examples that have been happening to me. I don't know what's going on.
I love it podcast imitates life or life imitates podcast.
Yeah, pretty much.
Well with body hair, I'm curious to see what else comes true with this one. But with body hair, it kind of depends on the time and place in the world, on whether or not people thought it was should be on your body or should not, And that continues today with some people. But when the Europeans came over and met indigenous Native Americans, the Europeans are like, boy, you guys are really hairy, and Native Americans were like, no, bruh, you're really hairy. We actually pluck a lot of our hair and are not known to be very hairy as a people. And that really confused me because I've always thought that Native Americans had less body hair, just you know, sort of genetically or whatever I think they do.
And I think they're like, what this is saying is that they get every last one whenever they have the airant hair come up.
Well, why would the Europeans call them, Harry, I.
Think this is wrong, Harry, that there were a lot of dumb Europeans who traveled there and were confused with buffalo skins. Oh really, that's my hypothesis.
Wow, all right, man, if you see a guy wearing a buffalo skin tomorrow.
That would be I will be reporting back on that.
What about you know, removing hair like you know, pubic hair and stuff.
Actually that goes back to ancient Egypt. Did you know that?
I did not know. That doesn't surprise me, but I didn't know that.
There's a technique called sugaring. It's like waxing, but you use basically this kind of thick, honey colored paste and it does the same thing. It just pulls the hair out in a different direction. The Egyptians used to do the exact same thing.
Yeah, I believe it because, as you'll see, Egypt comes up a lot. They were big into you know, what they thought of as hygiene at the time.
Hygiene, but also beauty too. They were the ones that kind of established it. Like they they would pluck their eyebrows. I saw in different places in different times, people used to use mouse skin to cover their eyebrows so that you basically didn't have eyebrows, because that would give the effect of a high forehead. Which was viewed as aristocratic. That dates all the way back to the Egyptians too. There's nothing hygienic about that. You're actually you want your eyebrows because they trapped the dirt and the grime and stuff that keeps it that gets in your eyes.
Yeah, that's why they're there, right, Yeah.
So to pluck it. It's strictly a cultural beauty standard.
Right exactly.
Uh.
And I think doesn't the word shampoo come I think it was originally a verb that the well, I guess the Native Americans didn't use it, but we use that word to describe what they were doing.
Right, Yes, they would. They would anoint their heads with essential oils.
Play. Yeah, and shampoo was a verb, and then it became a noun once they bottled it, I guess exactly.
So, I guess we're kind of jumping around a little bit from Inci and Egypt to the twentieth century United States. But that is where we come upon the safety razor created by King C. Gillette, I think all the way back in like nineteen oh four, and this was I think for men at first. Yeah, it was for men at first, and men used to go to the barber and get shaved every week. Yeah, And the Gillette company said, no, no, no, you want to do this every day or else you look like a total slob. And by the way, by our refillable razor cartridges. And then about two decades later, women started wearing clothes that showed their like underarms and legs and all this, and Gillette saw another chance to double their market and they did.
That's right, all right, should we take a break? Yes, all right, we've gone through hair and we'll jump into the bathtub next.
Okay, so we're jumping into the bath chuck cold hands, jump in together.
I gotta hold my nose with my other hand, so okay, fair enough.
So bathing is a really, really old thing. Look at elephants, look at hippopotami. They bathe. Humans bathed to all of the same impulse. But we kind of like it took us a very long time to get from bathing to the kind of bathing that we get to today. Bathing back then was just either submersing yourself in water or using a very little amount of it, depending on where you were in the world and what time of the what period and history you're talking about.
Yeah, and it was often a social thing, and not even necessarily for for cleaning your body, I guess, just like I said earlier, sort of like a secondary benefit. But they have found baiting pools, like a nine hundred square foot a great bath in Mohino Dharo, which was an Indus civilization in third millennium BCE, and they also had washrooms and homes and they had for the time pretty good sewage system going on. So they're looked at as the people that you believed that hygiene was an important thing.
Yeah, and bath houses just kind of kept going from there, not just in the Middle East, China. Rome was very famous for bath houses, and wherever the Romans went, they brought bath houses with them, so bath culture spread along with the Roman Empire as well. And I think there was an estimate that around one thousand CE, so just over a thousand years ago, Baghdad supposedly had sixty thousand bath houses. And that is a little bit of any exaggeration, most historians guess, but it does kind of go to show like there were a ton of bath houses in the Middle East at the time. It was just a part of life.
Yeah, and that you've probably done this right somewhere in the world.
I went to the oldest Turkish bath in Europe in well, no, I guess Turkey's part of Europe now the oldest Turkish bath at least in Hungary. It was in Red Heat at the beginning of Red Heat with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And it was awesome, man, Like the old stones are like, you're still sitting in the same place that people sat in for, you know, the last four hundred, five hundred years.
I think Emily went to that very bath sure on her trip last year to Hungary. And this is just like the social thing. I mean, it's like a big hot tub, like you're not bathing, right.
It is like a big hot tub, and then it's like a big sauna. And like, this bath house was unusual because it was essentially coed, like throughout right, most bath houses weren't at the time. They either had separate bathouse for men and women, or they had a single bath house that men used at one time and women use at a different time. I'm not sure why this particular one bucked the trend because it was such a traditional bath Turkish bath, but it was it was definitely coed, and it was you know, just yeah, you were just sitting there bathing with tons of other.
People you want to swimsuit?
Yes, yes, yes you were because it was coed. But if you go to like a place like jay ju In, I think shambily. Have you ever been to that?
No, I'm not into this.
It's amazing, dude. If okay, start taking showers before bed, and I'll bet you'll be into bathing, like in not too long. But this is like separate, separated men and women. Uh so you're basically naked around a bunch of dudes. You don't know. I didn't do it, but listen, you just you just get used to it, and it's when you do, it's amazing. Like the whole the whole scene is just so chill and like there's just so much warm water everywhere. It's just so relaxing. It's nuts.
I'm having a panic attack.
Well okay, I'll give you another one. Then if next time you're in New York, go to Queens. There's a place called Spa Castle and it's almost exclusively co ed, so everybody's wearing bathing suits. But it is it. It has like all the same stuff and it's it's really great. Yeah, I would say try start with spacastle.
Okay, well, and just to be clear that this is uh has nothing to do with like homophobia obviously, I'm just I was raised Southern Baptists, and I just I don't like to be naked with myself.
Oh no, I'm with you.
I don't know.
I do not either. I basically had to force myself to just get over it, and once I did, I was glad I did.
But I do know it's like, are you Josh fum stuff?
You should know, right, and I just the helicopter and I'm like you, no, I.
Am oh man, I need that kind of confidence. So you mentioned earlier different times where people you might think were dirty and maybe weren't, and that is medieval times. We had this idea probably that it was just everyone was disgusting, But they actually bathed fairly regularly back then, but for the odd reason that they thought it would help your inside problems, like if you had poor gut health or digestive issues. They thought bathing might could help that, which is you know, they're off base.
Yeah, they were a little off base. They also thought that the that washing your hair would help more than just bathing, because that's where those digestive issues emanated from your scalp, and that's why your scalp would get dirty. It's because you're you have poorly digested food. So they were a tad bit off. But again, this is where we get to the point where this is This is where bathing kind of fell out of favor in the fifteenth sixteenth century Europe. Before that, you know, the twelfth and thirteenth and I think fourteenth century, like, people actually bathed more then than they did from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in Europe. They were way way more into bathing and cleanliness and fastidiousness than they were in the starting in about the fifteenth century. But one of the things that these people in the later years did if instead of bathing. They were still concerned with cleanliness, but like you said, they were way off and in their ideas about how to be clean. So they like they would wear linens as undergarments and change them fairly frequently.
Yeah, and that you know, that makes sense a little bit, because they thought that it was like the cloth absorbed bad things and that it would clinge your skin and it does have that gauzy sort of medical feel and look, you know.
And also chuck all of those that whole look from that era, the Sir Walter Ali and like Pilgrim era, and I know they're not quite the same era, the like having frilly cuffs or frilly collar. Those are showing your undergarments and they're saying, like I'm wearing undergarments. Look at how clean it is. I'm a clean person. That's what those that's what those were for. I always thought they were just fashion, but they were. Yeah, they were a display of hygieneity.
Yeah.
I hate that word hygiene more than I hate the word moist.
Oh yeah, hygiene is kind of gross.
I got two words for you that are even worse than just hygiene alone. You're ready, okay. Hygienic utensil.
Oh. I thought you were gonna say sebum pocket again.
No, sebum, I mean, I get it, it's not a very very pretty word, but it's at least rounded. Hygienic is just it's somehow clinical and clean and gross at the same time. I don't get it.
So what did you say, hygienic tool, hygienic utensil oh, utensil. Yeah, because they would use those, there were like scrapers and things that you know, if you didn't want to take a bath, you might I think King Louis the what is that fourteenth Yes, supposedly never took a bath or very few and he would I know, we talked about aqua vite on some episode, but that's the non e proof ethanol alcohol, So he would he would scrape himself with these scrapers and wipe himself down with alcohol instead of just taking a bath.
Yeah. So again they were clean and trying to be clean. They were just clean in ways we don't really recognize or think are just kind of ridiculous today. But again, if there's one thread throughout this whole episode, it's that humans have basically always had the impulse to groom themselves somehow.
Yeah, and especially as different theories of disease come along, like once germ theory came along and that kind of semi coincided with plumbing getting better and better, all of a sudden, people are like, all right, if you've got a little status, then you can afford baths, and you can afford to stay clean and therefore healthy.
Yeah. The first shower it's called a shower box that you could buy and install at your house, was from like the mid eighteenth century, so we've had showers for a while. And apparently the United States outpaced Europe in adopting indoor plumbing and bathroom fixtures because we were basically building this new nation and industrializing at a time when Europe was already still well established. So it was easier for us to install pipes rather than retrofit.
Yeah, that's so funny. That makes perfect sense.
It does. It's hilarious. Now we need to retrofit everything because our sewers are falling apart, as is most of the infrastructure in the United States.
Oh well, speaking of soapboxes, we promised a little bit at talk of soap. We have a really good episode on soap and its history. But as a recap, the Mesopotamians used rendered fat and lye from wood ash, and that was sort of a primitive soap. But a lot of this early soap was used to wash clothes and blankets and stuff like that, and it wasn't used for washing the body until later.
No, it was once we figured out and we I mean, we learned from the Middle Easterners during the Crusades that you could make soap from vegetable oil rather than pork fat soap. Yes, that's when we started using it on our bodies for sure.
Yeah, I imagine it was a lot of that. Early soap was very filmy and kind of greasy. Yeah.
And when you put a fat together with a with lye, so you derive lye from wood ash and then fat from either animals or plants, a process called sopontification happens chemical reaction. You get glycerol and I can't remember the other thing, Oh, fatty acid salts or soap salts, and that's there's your soap right there.
I was about to say we could go grab Emily for specifics, but for sure, that'd be great if she just was like, no, I don't remember any of that stuff. My business is done, right. Civil War, all of a sudden people were like post Civil War, I guess, or actually during the Civil War, you know, they realized that good health could come from bathing, regularly cleaning your body. And that's when like real like commercial soap came onto the scene thanks to Procter and Gamble, who introduced ivory soap finally to the world, the floating ivory soap.
Yeah, the whole it floats thing was a reference to river bathing, which most people still did at the time. Like, even if you had access to water, you probably didn't have a shower, which meant you had to heat up water pour it into a tub and it was a big process. So it was probably easier to just take cold bath in the river, and if your ivory soap floated, you could find it more easily than having to dig around on the river bottom. Yeah, river bathing just sounds really great to me. But nineteenth or earlier nineteenth century or earlier river bathing, I would not want to bathe the most of the rivers in America today.
I've done it.
Do you not know about our infrastructure?
I've done it on camping trips, And you know, it's always important to use the I don't know what you call it, but the soap that's okay for rivers. It doesn't hurt you know, fish.
Oh oh sure, without phosphates, I think yeah.
But even then I'm like, is this really okay? I don't know. They say it is, yeah, I.
Think fairly natural soap is fine. It's the industrial soap that's the problem, because there's so much easier to create chemicals that stand in for the natural version. Yeah, so that's usually the problem. The natural versions probably just fine for the river.
I guess ari. I wouldn't do me wrong, right, no way. Shampoo also came along thanks to Procter and Gamble, the shampoo that we think of today, and that was a dream. Dr E n E was I think one of the first ones, and that was in the nineteen thirties and that's when they said, all right, like you were kind of talking about, we've developed these synthetics for factants now that clean your hair really good. And prior to that, people were using boiled soap shavings and that was sort of filming and gross. So they eventually came up with the synthetic stuff and it worked.
Well, yeah, good enough. At least.
Do you wash your hair every day? You don't wash your hair?
Yeah? Almost every day?
Oh wow?
All right, yeah, I have to really watch it. I've got to use like good shampoo because it's really easy to dry out and strip. And I didn't use conditioner for a while because I think I used bag conditioner, so it just like my hair would just be flat and limp and lifeless on my head and I'd be like, I'm not using this, but Now I found that if you use good conditioner and use it every couple of days, oh boy, my hair looks amazing.
Yeah, I mean different hair. People's hair is different, and different hair does better sometimes washing it a lot, maybe in conditioning, and sometimes not washing it as much. And I know, like hair styling, Like my hair styles better after a couple of days without washing it. Sure, so I only only wash my hair like once a week.
Maybe you have a thick, nice mane of hair and like I do not, I've got anthony heatous hair.
I have a lot of hair, but it's it is thin. It's not a I mean thin. I think thin. Is that the hair strand it's thin?
Well yeah, and then collectively they're thin.
Yeah. Maybe that's it because I never it looks like I have a lot of hair, but I don't like in college my little ponytail speaking around as a ring finger. Maybe I was always jealous of these guys that had those big, beefy pony tails.
Yeah, no, I'm with you, like a horse's tail or a pony. I guess the carry Scot did he have a ponytail.
He grew his hair out once when he lived in l A for a while he grew his hair out, and of course he you know, he looked like a combination of Chris Chris Cornell and wonder Woman Linda Carter.
Only Scott could pull that off.
Oh, I know, he looked good.
Let me, I want to I want to correct myself too. Your hair could be thin individually, and also it can be thin in number.
I think I both.
So it sounds like you have thick hair that's thin in number. Oh, all right, that'd be my guess. Okay, either way, your hair looks magnificent all the time.
I thinks you're testing. I like it. It's good. Uh. Should we take a break or should we keep going? Should we talk perfume and then break?
Yeah, let's do that, and we should direct people to our perfume episode. You know, we've done an episode in almost every section in here.
I know it's funny. Yeah, we really haven't. Do we do deodorant?
Yeah? The difference between anty person and deodorant very well A long time ago.
Yeah, that's an old one. Perfume though, is you know I've talked about it plenty of times, and how much I hate colonnes and perfumes and getting in lift cars and elevators and just ended up smelling like someone else. I think it's I don't want to Yu young, but you're making someone else smell. So I feel like it's okay to stand up and say please stop doing that. Sure, because that smell gets on you. But ancient Egypt and places like that would have been a nightmare. And like the Versai, like all these places, all they did was just cake perfumes and smells onto everything instead of really bathing and watching, right.
Because then you have like all these crazy floral and sweet sense on top of body odor, which means it's kind of intermingled with body odor. So it's not Yeah, it would not have been pleasant for me either.
Yeah, it's no good. Ancient Egypt they use ostrich egg apparently in tortoise shell.
Yeah, I could not find anything on that.
Yeah, that must have I don't know what kind of odor that would have. Maybe that was a stabilizer or something, and they.
Smell like tortoise.
I don't know.
Well, the thing is, I think we must have mentioned this in the Perfume episode two. With distillation in the thirteenth century, you finally get alcohol based perfumes, and that like revolutionized everything. I don't think we talked about because this was news to me. The first known or recorded alcohol based perfume was called Queen of Hungary Water, supposedly hails from the thirteenth century, named after the thirteenth century Queen Elizabeth or Isabelle of Hungary at the time.
With an.
Yes, yeah, that's very Hungarian, and it was scented with rosemary.
I like rosemary. Sure do you ever stroke a rosemary plant on a dog walk from a neighbor?
My friend, we have long branches of rosemary like sitting around our house in vases and stuff.
Yeah, it's great.
Stay answer your question every time.
I mean, we have our own rosemary. But yeah, when we're on walks and we see rosemary, basically everyone in the family just runs their hand along one of them and then kind of wipes it on their shirt or something.
And for that reason, you should never use rosemary that you grow in the front of your house that people can contact in your foot.
Oh man, they didn't think about that.
I mean, that's on them. If they're using it, you can go ahead and walk in touch, that's what people do. But if they're using it to cook with, that's their fault. They need to grow it in the.
Back, so someone's marinating steak might have a little.
Chuck on it, a little bit of chuck.
I like to think that adds a little certain something.
It doesn't icy.
So we talked about germ theory of disease for a while. That was called the miasma theory of disease Anetinc.
Episode.
Yeah, and that's when they thought that, you know, the nasty smelling air could be a carrier of disease. And I guess what they were talking about was airborne illnesses, which could happen for sure, But going around and spraying really sweet smelling herbs and things I don't think really helped much.
No, definitely not. Their treatment for it didn't make sense. But it's always it's puzzled me why people just poo poo this like it's idiocy, Like it makes a lot of sense. Actually, sure, there's probably even I think there's diseases that you that have like distinct smells that humans can detect, So it makes sense to me. And I mean there's actually something called tularimia, which is a type of disease. I can't remember exactly what kind it is, but you can get it from inhaling the decay of a rotting rabbit or cat carcass.
Oh my gosh, and it's bad.
It's bad news because that's actually the worst version of tularimia. You can get it all sorts of ways, like through touch and all that stuff too, but when you inhale it, the respiratory version is really bad and it stinks. Obviously, the carcass of the cat or rabbit stinks at that point, but you're actually getting yeah, exactly, you're getting disease from an offensive smell that's mixed with those odor molecules. So I mean, there's at least one disease that miasma theory holds up with. All right, I think we've talked about that dying on this hill.
All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll talk about deodorant and wind it down with bad breath right after this. All right, So deodorant. The first commercial deodorant that really sold was called Mum Mum all the way back in eighteen eighty eight, and it was a cream that you applied that would kill odor producing bacterias. It was kind of greasy. Nineteen oh three surprised me, ever, dry that was the first antiperspirant, all the way back in nineteen oh three.
Yeah, and it used the same stuff that they used today, aluminum salts that plug the pores that keep you from sweating. That's how antipersperants work. So, speaking of this stuff, deodorant, anti pursprant, it's significant and unique in that this is not an ancient type of grooming. This is actually really new, Like this doesn't have its roots in Greece or Egypt unless you count perfumes. The actual attempt to counter body odor with theodor and antiperspriant is twentieth century I mention basically.
That's right. And a teenager invented something called odor rono like odor oh no, named Edna Murphy. She was the daughter of a surgeon and he had apparently sweaty hands, so she invented this anti perseprint to keep daddy's hands dry and then started selling it door to door and pharmacies and stuff. It did not catch on initially because people are like, oh, I've got these dress shields to soak up my underarm sweat and keep my shirt from getting pit stains.
Rubber dress shields.
Yeah, no, I can't. They still make dress shields people wear my guests rubber ones. I don't know about rubber, but I mean dress shields are a thing I didn't know that. Yeah, look up dress shields isn't there. You can buy them on a you know, dress shields dot com.
You can buy cat based dress shields.
But the odor Rono wasn't going well until advertising really picked up on it and marketing and a guy named Jane Eames Young, who was a copywriter ended up being very successful, started doing something that would become a hallmark that I think someone argue still goes on today, which is selling beauty products and hygiene products out of fear, most notably targeted toward women. And you'll see this over and over from here on out, which is your breath might stink and you won't get a man. Your body probably stinks so you won't get a man. You got underarm sweat on your dress, so you can't get a man. And it was all based around this thing, like you know, ladies, unless you clean up your act literally, then you're not going to get that husband.
Yeah, and this guy is patient zero, James Young, the guy who created this whole thing, and they still do it today. It's crazy, but he had a I guess for odor Ono, he had an advertising campaign called Oh, I Think the Curve of a Woman's Arm, And it looked like an article in the Lady's Home Journal. It had like a headline and the sub subtitle was a frank discussion of a subject too often avoided, and it was basically about, like, do you think you're dainty? Are you sure you're dainty? Do you know it's possible you smell? And if you smell, you probably don't detect it yourself. Other people do And this is like huge, Like people did not talk about that kind of thing. And there's this whole one page ad in the Lady's Home Journal And apparently two hundred subscribers canceled their subscriptions and cited that as the reason. But as far as Oderono was concerned, it worked really well because their sales increased I think one hundred and thirteen percent year over here.
Yeah, that's a big jump, and just to keep people from emailing. Oderono was also the name of a WHO song, Oh really from the band of Who. It was on the Who sell Out, which was that one record they did. It's kind of a concept record, I guess where there were like little fake It was supposed to be like a radio station, so they made these little fake radio commercials. And Oderono was one that Pete Townsend wrote in saying about the deodorant Oderono, and he has a big giant stick of Oderno on the album cover that he's putting on.
I mean, that's a great one to choose, because that was the one that changed everything. That really kind of created marketing to people's worst fears and self consciousness about themsel, you.
Know, and all of the ads kind of from here on out for a long time. And like I said, still today there are ads that sort of poke around that they're not as overt like the one I think it was. I think, oh no, it was Oderono again that said beautiful but dumb. She's never learned the first rule of long lasting charm, which is, you know, don't stink right exactly.
And again it was women that were targeted at first, because, like you said, you're never going to get a man because you smell, so you odor ono. And then eventually men fell under the spell of James Yelling and his ilk. And there was a deodorant called top Flight, which was first sold in the thirties, and I think another one called Seaforth marketed to men that you know, we're in the Great Depression and everybody's job is insecure, So do you want to be the one at the office that stinks because you're going to be the first one they cut when layoffs come around? Like, that's nuts. And when you look at it historically, it's like that's crazy. And then you look at our ads today and it's like, this is the same thing. It's just more sophisticated.
Yeah, the Sea fourth was at least one version of it in the forties was sold in it looks like a whiskey jug. And actually found the one. It wasn't eBay it with some other sales site, but it's supposedly still had product in it really and it was only twelve dollars, So I was like, maybe I should buy this. I gotta see what that tastes like or tastes like gross? What it smelled what it smells like.
Was it Etsy that you saw it on? No, I don't remember where it was, but it was probably Etsy, you think, so, Chuck, I think we should finish up wind down, as you put it before with bad Breath, And I would direct people to our halatosis. I think Colon Worst Smell Ever episode, Yeah, which is a good one. But again, this is this has got some new stuff in it. If you ask me, like, did you know that in the Talmud, bad breath is considered a quote major disability and grounds for divorce.
It's in the Talmud.
Yeah, in that nuts I had no idea, but it's been around a long time. People are like, hey, you can do something about that, and you should for the rest of our sake. Yeah.
I think it's interesting how like maybe underarmed body odor was just sort of accepted and people are like, I guess that's what people smell like. But it seems like from the beginning bad Breast people are like mm mmmm no, no, no, no, that's I don't like.
That, and that interesting. I don't know why it really is.
Yeah, I don't either.
So people have been combating this. This is like the opposite of deodorant. Like, people have been trying to do something about us for a really long time. We've recognized plants having some plants having like fresh smells or almost antiseptic smells, and cultures around the world who were never in contact with one another. All were like, hey, if I chew this, it might do something for my breath.
Yeah, And all kinds of cultures all over the world have and still do chew on little twigs and sticks of different plants because A they might make things smell a little better. B you're kind of scrubbing your teeth like you would a toothbrush, And I think that's it, just A and B sure, yeah, it makes well.
No, there's another one that's ant in bacterial most of the time.
Oh, there you go. I knew that was a number three.
And yeah, ab and three yeah.
And they've also ground up different kinds of powders to make into what you know, would qualify as toothpaste.
Yes, And these were very misguided because they were like, oh, if we use an abrasive, it'll get that gunk off really really well. So they would use everything from like ground up oyster shells to sand to pulverize bricks to pummus. And they figured out pretty quickly at different times in different places. And then I guess the knowledge was lost or not passed on that you couldn't get too abrasive because you'll pull the enamel right off of the teeth. So there were probably a lot of unhappy people walking around at different periods in history with stripped enamel off of their teeth and really really sensitive teeth because their roots were that much more exposed, which is awful.
It is awful. Yeah, And I think like people can overbrush today and do similar damage, right sure.
And it wasn't just the toothpaste or too powders or whatever they were concocting that were problematic. The original tooth brushes, I think the first one was invented in China just before the fifteen hundreds, and it used hog bristles. That thing was in use until the nineteen the twentieth century around the world. They basically used hog bristles until nylon was invented in the thirties. And they're like, let's see if this makes a softer brush, then the hog bristles that make our gums bleed every time we brush.
Have you ever bet a hog?
Yeah? They're not soft. They look soft now not.
It's almost like a porcupine esque. That stuff is really bad.
A little bit. Also, go check out our porcupine episode.
Right, all right, well, let's wind it up in with jeez. I think we've covered this too, we had didn't realize.
We did an episode on the hygiene hypothesis.
Yeah, is you know, can you get too clean? And the answer is yes. Since twenty sixteen, when the FDA banned some ingredients and antibacterial soaps.
We did an episode on that too. Yeah.
They started saying, you know, to keep saying that it's so fun, though they've said, like, you know, some of this stuff is having negative health impacts because you're wiping out all the bacteria potentially creating superbugs, the good microbes that you need, and like, let's tone it down here with the antibacterial stuff.
Yeah, I knew about the superbugs problem. What I didn't know is that there's possibility that the two main ingredients, triclosane and triclo carban are also hormonal disruptors too. So there's a lot of reasons not to use antibacterial soaps, and chief among them is you don't need it. It doesn't do anything more than regular soap, and it's probably harmful. They also kill bacteria indiscriminately, and as we're slowly realizing here in the twenty first century, the microbiome in our body and on our body is really vital to our health. So you don't want to just kill off everything if you don't have to can irritate skin in all sorts of places.
Yeah, you know that, seeb them. And again, like hair, everyone's skin is different. So some people skin does better if it's a little oiler. Some skin gets way too oily, And you know acne can happen. Did what on an acne? Too? But I remember, and I might have told this story in the acne when when I was little, I wanted to We're not little. I was probably like twelve. You know, my sister and other teenagers were using the like buff puffs and nutri gena soap, and I thought, you know that made you like, you know how you pretend to do older things. And so one time I got a buff puff and a nutrigena and like scrub my face really good, just like my sister did. And I had never had pimples until I did that. And I had pimples after that a little, I mean just for like that week, and then I luckily never really had pimples again. But yeah, it's because I disrupted my my natural skin oils and dried myself out really bad.
I did the same exact thing and with nutrigena too, and I used it almost every day.
Oh you kept using it?
I did, and I'm quite sure I changed the chemistry of my face for a very long time as well. I had a really oily t zone afterward.
What's a T zone.
It's the part across the top of your eyebrows and down your nose. Oh, oily t zone.
That's a pretty good Maybe that's the record for the album title for sebum pocket, Yeah.
It is. It'd be a concept album too.
What else do you have anything else?
No? I think that's it.
Yeah. Check out the Hygiene Hypothesis. It's interesting. Oh very I think everyone kind of gets that. We don't need to recap that.
No, if you want to know about it, just go listen to our episode on the hygiene hypothesis. Yeah. Yeah, this one was chalk full of interesting stuff and references to interesting episodes we've done. So hopefully you'll be like, oh, perfume didn't know about that, Oh Soap didn't know about that, and you'll just go enjoy a bunch of grooming and hygiene episodes. Okay, totally, Chuck said, totally. That means it's time for listening to mail.
Did we do a listener mail on another episode?
Everyone almost starting back in Man a long time ago. When you had that idea.
That's right, I've got a.
Really good idea.
All right, here we go. We're gonna call this jogging. I might need your help because there's a little bit of French in here. Okay, Hey, guys. Was delighted to learn about the history of exercise in America and surprised of how recent it was. Something in the discussions of jogging reminded me of a wonderful story I heard from a friend we'll call him Paul, paul name some time ago. Paul helped chaperon a high school exchange trip to France, and he quite enjoyed the family that he stayed with. They were kind, and the father would invite him to join him on a run. The way this invite was expressed was, how would you say, fai t du jogging?
Fay do fay do jogging. Yeah. I'm not sure what that means, though, but I've seen it before.
I guess do you want to jog with me? Maybe I just like to jog. Do you want a jog? I don't know.
I don't know if means okay, so well you read.
Yeah, look it up while I'm reading. So anyway, the Frenchman would say, faye do jogging and said in acute French accent, even the jogging, and it just was amazingly adorable. You guys should give it a try, which I just did. Paul, though, every time, would agree, thinking it would be a nice little gentle jog around the neighborhood, but every time he was reminded this was not the case. Before they'd even left the driveway, the Frenchman set off at a dead sprint because he was training for a race that was a long distance sprinting event. He was also clearly an athlete. Paul would quickly give up and revert back to just regular jogging. And it sounds like the father did a few laps around the city like this and caught Paul lapped in as it got back to the house. I think most I think about this story almost every time I hear the word jogging, and I usually mutter that in a French accent under my breath for a good chuckle. Thanks for joining me in my breakfast wanders before work, Stay well, and that it's from.
James Okay, so I think what he was saying is shall we go jog? Or would you like to go jog? But what he was saying is makes the jog? So he's saying, do you want to go make the jog? That's very cute. It is that's even cuter when you know it. And that's a good reason to learn other languages. Everybody agreed. Who is that from?
James?
Thanks a lot, James, and also Paul indirectly too, and also Paul's exchange family. That was very nice of you to accept them into your lives. If you want to send us an email, just like James did, you can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
