OK------before the advent of the usage of soap and regular bathing -----certainly before Elizabethan times and well after Roman times.
How bad did the general populace smell do you think? (Smelling with a modern nose.)
Enough to make you gag? Enough to make you puke?
The Master speaks:
Is good personal hygiene a recent invention? (Did the days of old really stink?)
Here’s a thread based on that column:
Arjuna34
Maybe it wasn’t really so bad, even for a modern nose.
Depends I would think how much spiced food they ate (garlic, onions, etc) -------and also how much stress they had in their lives. (Nothing stinkier as far as body odor (even today) than stress, mental or otherwise)
I think they were probably just as much stressed as we are today if not more so.
Not sure about heavily spiced foods. Might have eaten a very bland diet.
Well---- Cecil did answer that one very well.
Another question is what kinds of sexual practices did they engage in during those times? French kissing? Oral sex? It is to barf. Personally, I am pretty sure my own lineage would have died out if I lived during that time. Bad smells are a deal killer for me and the google ads below hint of even deeper problem.
people forget that we adapt to bad smells rather quickly, 30 minutes stuck someplace stinky and we wont even notice the smell any more. of course the breath on people must have been pretty phenominal at times. getting up close might have been pretty bad.
It’s not just “back then.” When my son and I were in the former Czechoslovakia aabout five years ago the men did not wear deoderant or EVER wash their hair and it was disgusting. Hopefully those western marketeers have figured out by now some way to convince them that real men DO wear deoderant and bathe regularly.
Where were you at? I spent a number of months in dobre stare Ceska Republika about five years ago as well and didn’t think that the instance of smelly guys was any greater than I would find on Chicago public transit.
I would guess a naked wild human wouldn’t stick worse than any other wild animal, and most wild animals don’t really stick all that bad.
Once we started wearing clothes is probably when we started really stinking up the planet.
I agree with the adaptation answer… I used to work for a garbage company, obviously located at a landfill. When I used to go there as a kid, with my dad to drop off a load of junk, I remember the smell made me ill.
In college (well the years between), I worked there as a garbage man (great money btw ($19/hr for a college kid is high society!). I worked there 3 years on and off. Now the smell of trash doesn’t bother me.
I went to the local landfill and my roommate was gagging… to me it smells like home! = )
YMMV.
OT:
I guess I’m perverse… but I like the stink on my dog (well within reason). I think she smells better in her natural state than she does after her bath (ugh, wet dog smell).
Based on some informal research some friends and I conducted a few years ago and lasting ~ 2 weeks, we concluded that people who bathe daily yet wear the same clothes without washing them smell far worse than an unwashed body in clean clothes. It was also true that those involved in the experiment were far less aware of their own stink and the stink of the others than were outside observers.
All hail the western marketeer, always striving to create a demand for something you don’t need, make you feel inferior for not buying it and ashamed of your own body.
Real men don’t smell of deoderant, they smell of human.
Bathing regularly is another matter…
The smell of human…this is a joke right? What about all those men I hear griping about women who don’t shave their legs? They don’t seem to be too delighted about women in their “natural state.”
Sweating is one thing; combining it with bacteria is another. And you don’t have to smell like flowers. Just use an unscented deoderant and no one will know.
I do agree that the west tries to create an artifical “need” for their products, but from a personal point of view deoderant isn’t one of them. On the other hand, my son told me the other day that his razor blades were now costing him about $25.00 a box and I said why don’t you just use the disposable plastic ones. He said they weren’t as good. So, they got to him.
I didn’t say anything about excluding the Chicago public transit. But, the greasy hair was more than I’ve ever seen in the states. The strange thing was that the women were clean, deoderized, and well-dressed. Why they put up with stinky men who rarely washed their hair I couldn’t fathom. We were in Prague for a week or so and then drove across country and ended up later in the Tatras for a week. I don’t remember the name of the villages where we stayed. Beautiful towns though. One funny thing was when we had reserved seats to see a movie and we were all crammed together in the top 6 rows with all these empty seats in front of us. Now that was when the BO was really bad. We were there in the winter so maybe that had something to do with it.
Actually, IME there is a difference. My somewhat-expensive Gillette razor really does do a better job than the disposable twin-blades. But I always keep some disposables on-hand.
I’m guessing you’d probably stop smelling it after a while.
Why do you think so many Eastern European women are looking for foreign husbands? 
Agreed. I wouldn’t even think of shaving my head with a disposable razor. Give me my Gillette Mach 3, thank you.
When everybody stinks, nobody stinks!!!
I’ve tried both disposable and non-disposable razors and can’t quite agree with you on this. In my experience, the main difference in a good shave is in beard prep. Disposable razors may be slightly less good than certain of the non-disposable kinds, but the difference so small, in my experience, that it is not noticable compared to differences caused by how well you’ve prepped the beard. And I don’t think it’s very useful to try disposable razors once before deciding because it cam take a bit of time to become accustomed to a different type of razor.
This is all just IMHE.