Bill Bryson has an excellent chapter in his new book At Home that explains why until indoor plumbing and water heaters became common people bathed infrequently. The short answer is that it’s a giant PITA.
It was a lot easier for upperclass people to bathe regularly in eras prior to indoor plumbing, because they had servants to carry the very heavy and HOT containers of water to the tubs.
I’m reminded of a scene in the mid-90s BBC Pride and Prejudice where you see the manservant emptying a brass container which easily held five or more gallons into a bath. No handles, either.
I think that’s hard to understand for anyone who’s never suffered clinical depression. It’s not just an especially bad case of the blues, it’s an actual physical disorder. Back when I had severe bouts of depression, just getting out of bed and getting dressed was an heroic feat. Getting up enough drive to take a shower would have been superhuman. I would shower maybe once or twice a week when I had to go get groceries, deposit my unemployment check, or see my employment counselor.
Do you know what the definition of living hell is? Trying to find a job, any job, when you’re severely depressed.
My roommate for my freshman year of college rarely bathed / showered – maybe once every few weeks, at the most. He claimed to have bad eczema, and that showering made it worse. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was some depression involved, as well…Ed was one emotionally dark dude.
Amazingly, while he definitely smelled, it wasn’t as horrifically bad as you would have expected. I suspect that this may have been, in part, because Ed was also one of the most sedentary non-disabled people I’ve ever met.
Assange was between 6 and 10 years old when Robinson published the short story that included that pun.
It is amazing how powerful the smell of smoke is, and how oblivious to it you are as a smoker. Big news for me when I quit and ever since. How non-smokers can ever be involved with smokers is unfathomable to me. I dated a few smokers and no matter what they did, it was impossible to tolerate being anywhere near them, much less intimate. Gah.
+1
Ever drive across the bridge from Philly to South Philly? OMG, what a friggin’ stink! Same with the bridge across the Rouge River near Detroit. People get used to it, although everyone else wonders HOW. There a city that has a plywood manufacturing plant that really stinks up the whole town when it kicks up production. The locals are oblivious to it. Same with another city that manufactures turpentine from pine rot. Nasty! First time I encountered that, I seriously tried to hold my breath for six hours. Believe it or not (who cares, either way), after encountering it several times over some years, I grew to actually enjoy it as an aroma. You get used to it and often never even notice it.
Cowboys get used to the “aroma” of being around their horses. And look how Congress can stay in the job for years while daily churning out massive amounts of bull… well, never mind, you get the drift.
I must have an atypical sniffer. The wife was a smoker but not in the house or vehicles and I rarely noticed any smell about her. And it wasn’t just that I was accustomed, because it drove me completley batty when she’d smoke in the garage on a rainy day. It would reek for several days.
As to BO, there is malodorus BO from disease or diet, and then there is just normal funk. Normal funk doesn’t offend me, in fact quite the opposite. I find it a bit of a turn on when the wife has been out for a run.
Funny you should say that about ‘disease’; I suffer from chronic kidney stones, and my husband swears I smell ‘different’ when I’m sick (he’s too kind to come right out and say I stink!), and it’s not the kind of odor that comes from me just feeling too crummy to shower (according to him).
I wonder what that is?
Somehow I managed to de-stinkify, though. I was a smoker for the first part of a relationship, then I quit, then I took it up again without telling my GF. I’d put out a butt half an hour before seeing her, then shower, brush my teeth, and Febreeze my coat. She never noticed.
My #1 question is how do these people get hired in white-collar professions?
I had a boss at an internship once that was absolutely totally rank. She bragged about buying her clothes at Goodwill. I think sometimes she showered but then didn’t wash her clothes.
Now, I know why they never fired her - she did great work and often took on other people’s work. But how did she get hired in the first place!?!
Has anyone hired someone who then became stinky?
I noticed that working in a hospital, taking blood from patients. There was normal, “This person isn’t too mobile and isn’t bathing regularly” smell, then there is, “This person is deathly ill” smell. The one that stands out the most for me is a woman who had heart surgery of some kind - I’ve never smelled a human who smelled like that before or after her.
I think ADD or ADHD might play a role in this for some people as well. My husband has pretty bad ADD and it impacts his ability to accomplish basic, daily tasks. Sometimes he will announce he is going to go take a shower and 20 minutes later when I am done folding laundry I’ll go into the other room to find him making pancakes or something, shower completely forgotten. He will start to do dishes only to get distracted by a video game or be on his way to scoop cat litter when he stumbles over his old M:tG card collection and 3 hours later the litter still isn’t scooped. Because I’m there to remind him what he meant to do in the first place he gets everything done eventually, but I’d bet good money that if he were single the only time his laundry would get done is when he had company coming over because he just wouldn’t have the ability to focus on the task with any kind of regularity.
On the subject about smoking (which is not on the subject of those who refuse to bathe or shower regularly), it varies with people, environment, and even brand of cigarettes.
I don’t smoke and, while my sniffer isn’t super sensitive, it works quite well. I notice a lot of smells that others admittedly cannot detect. Up close, there’s no avoiding it. I’ll notice the tobacco smell, but it’s not especially powerful, even in bars. My son, on the other hand, smokes (and showers daily), and for some reason, with HIM, it’s friggin’ NASTY. When he walks by after having a cigarette, I gag. Something about his body chemistry and tobacco, I guess. (Don’t knock it, it’s the exact same thing that makes a variety of colognes and perfumes work differently with various people.)
I’ve noticed that people who smoke Newports (my son, included) seem to smell a lot worse. My brother smokes Benson & Hedges, and those things are STRONG. Like burning rope. Actually, like burning pot (no, I don’t smoke that, either). While it’s lit, it can drive you out of the room. But shortly afterward, there’s no lingering residue. So in my own personal opinion, aversion to tobacco has less to do with smell and more with personal preference.
That said, I was surprised to find that a lot of people who do shower daily will still wear the same clothing for multiple days, which can build up a storage of tobacco AND personal smells). One guy actually bragged that he could get three days use out of a pair of undershorts. Yeah! Day 1, normal wear. Day 2, turn 'em inside out. Day 3, any “residue” would have worn off on the outer clothing, so turn 'em right side out again.
But even so, I can tell you there’s a big difference between the smell of someone wearing unwashed clothes, and someone who just doesn’t wash the body crud off himself.
Interesting. I wouldn’t think that there would be much difference in tobacco blends to be that noticeable. I can see the differences in body chemistry thing though. With me, a couple hours of abstaining is more than enough to completely destinkify. But I found out that my skin can take on a certain odor.
From what I understand, bathing daily isn’t necessarily a normal thing in many parts of the world. One day, I finally noticed that many Koreans smell… different. Hard to say exactly how, but the popular theory amongst the Americans here is that it’s BO and Kimchi (mmm delicious Kimchi… but I digress).
Anyhow, I paused and wondered what they think WE smell like.
“That American guy over there? Nice guy, tries to say a few words in Korean. Reeks of Tabasco sauce and coffee.”
Got a cute lady friend, who I dated briefly in college. She doesn’t bathe daily. She bathes every other or every third day or so, typically depending on the weather and how much she moved around that day. She said she just didn’t like bathing so often because it was a lot of fuss. Never heard anybody complain about her smelling like anything unusual, never noticed any unpleasant odors myself. Granted, I tended to be distracted by the way her ears poked out through her hair… but I digress again.
I can see how showering with super hot water (like I do) or scrubbing with soap and a loofah for an extended period (like I do sometimes) could be bad for your skin, especially if you do it often. So maybe use less-hot water, and use a skin moisturizer? Which, now that I think about it, was from that same Cracked.com article mentioned upthread. Plus, one supposes that it never hurts to save a bit of water…
Of course, if you live in, say, Houston, and it’s summertime? Yeah, shower daily. Shower twice daily. Nobody will hold that against you. 
Has anyone every hired someone or been around when someone was hired who was stinky? I’m super curious; perhaps they later got stinky (which seems more logical) or perhaps the hiring manager has no sense of smell. But something must be up because otherwise how would any of them have jobs!?
We had a lady working for us who was obese. Really, really, really big. And her smell…oh my goodness. It was just terrible. (the speculation was it was the combo of her size, plus diabetes, plus other health issues)
When I was pregnant, I had to wait in the hall for the smokers if we were to be in the same meeting. The stale cigarette smell masked her odor. If not, I probably would have vomited.
She was very skilled and had the knowledge we needed - that’s why she was hired.
I was going to ask why you felt the need to note her obesity, then I realized that the speculation was that her obesity caused her smell, along with her diabetes and other health issues.
I’d like to take this moment to say the following:
Obesity does, of course, reduce the general airflow around every part of the body, which could certainly lead to more personal odor if the obese person wasn’t careful about their hygiene.
But that is simply one particular issue among a variety of issues that should and does lead a person to be more conscientious about their hygiene. Other things can be smoking, diet, genes, heavy labor and activity, working around nasty odors like fish, ..whatever. Obese people do not produce more odor, or more noxious odor just by virtue of their obesity.
The woman in your office was, like other people in this thread, probably unaware of the fact that she was malodorous. Had she been made aware, there’s a good chance she would have addressed it and smelled just as clean and fresh as anyone else who bathes regularly does.
I had a boyfriend once, a million years ago when we were both very young. Cute as hell, tall, skinny as a rail. He had ground-in BO. I sent him to the shower with explicit instructions to scrub the hell out of his pits. He did, or claimed he did. Still there. I finally had to go in myself and if I recall we spent quite a while with multiple applications of a lot of soap and a scrubby and even then the best I could do was reduce it to a faint hint detectable only at ultra close range. It took about two weeks of committed daily scrubfests to completely obliterate all traces of the aged stink. (I have a good sniffer)
And at the other end of the spectrum is my ex, who was freakishly odorless…well, not odorless, he had a personal scent, but not one single time in ten years of extreme intimacy did I ever detect, anywhere on his entire body, including feet and all crevices, anything more potent than a very mild musk. EVER. Even when he was ill and didn’t bathe for a few days. NEVER. Amazing. And wonderful. Made him very delicious.
Still, for all the discussion about why it MIGHT be other things that make people smell, the question was about those “who don’t bathe regularly.” And let’s face it; most people do stink when they don’t bathe on some regular basis, whether daily, multiple times daily, or even a week.
Hell, perhaps even a month. The people who don’t bathe for several months do tend to stink, it’s not because of some mysterious hidden illness, and it’s known that they haven’t seen running water most of that time. And the physiologically adverse reaction to water on the skin is a copout. That might apply to 1/1000 of 1% of the people in the world, and even most of those are still capable of maintaining decent hygiene.
As for other parts of the world (which incidentally is not the case in America), I could see where bathing is rare in certain Mideast countries where water is a precious commodity. But even in Indonesia, which has a disproportionate percentage of poor people, they still have cisterns in their apartment to capture water from the rain through an opening in the roof, and they use it often.