That’s the topic of the most recent episode of my podcast “Margins of Error,” the place we transcend the information cycle and deal with the topics that we face each day.
Let’s face it: We reside in a society the place passing judgment on others is a favourite pastime. That’s very true on the subject of how folks look and current themselves.
Just ask Dr. James Hamblin, who made waves a couple of years in the past when he determined to cease showering chilly turkey. After his experiment, he wrote a guide known as “Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less.”
“Hygiene practices are one of the last areas where people will openly call one another gross or disgusting,” Hamblin instructed me. “We’ve made a lot of progress in a lot of other areas, but that is still just an area of just unrepentant judgment, and we need to examine that.”
Yet we appeared to outlive simply wonderful. So, I made a decision to dig into the difficulty somewhat extra. Why are we bathing a lot now, and do we have to? Where do we draw the road between what’s vital for our hygiene … and what’s simply advertising?
According to Katherine Ashenburg, creator of “The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History,” people have an advanced historical past with bathing relationship again to historic Rome. While the Romans liked their baths, bathing turned a grimy phrase for the following a number of hundred years.
Perhaps most telling: French King Louis XIV reportedly seldom took a bath. But he got a pass because he changed his linen shirts multiple times a day. Go figure.
Is cleaning too much bad for us?
So what has changed? On the one hand, we’ve learned a lot more about germ theory. We have a lot more accessibility to clean water sources, soap and bathrooms.
On the other hand, marketing has gone into overdrive. You can’t turn around without an advertisement trying to sell you a product to keep you clean. It’s a multibillion dollar industry.
So tune in to this week’s podcast episode, the place we’re going to discover how often you actually need to scrub up and why it is vital to grasp the distinction between hygiene and cleanliness. Plus, I have interaction in my very own grooming experiment.
(I swear it isn’t that gross.)