Hygiene Ad Infinitum

Should you one day be rooting through the miscellaneous debris that has somehow built up in your attic, and you happen stumble upon a time machine, before you get excited or start planning what you would ask Thomas Hobbes or Sylvester Stallone’s childhood self, you might want to stock up on nose pegs.

This might seem like a strange necessity, but personal hygiene was not the quasi-religious affair it is today. Go back a mere century and your frail nostrils would find themselves invaded by a funk that arose from pretty much every member of the populace. Go back half a century, and valiant females would be leading the way to a cleaner world by bathing a few times a week.

Compare that with today, where, regardless of gender, profession, or even preference, people are expected to be intensely hygienic. An anonymous company in an anonymous country was even considering sending home workers who came to work with body odour, as they and their funky pits might distract the other workers from whatever task they had at hand.

Extremities of hygiene are a very recent thing, but have taken the western population by storm. Perhaps it is getting slightly out of hand though. Body odour is a natural smell, and some cannot control its emanations from their armpits. If they turned up at work only to be sent home owing to their general odour, they might be justified in calling that discrimination.

There are some who have capitalised on the comparatively recent fad of extreme hygiene, the makers of hygiene products. But many forget that the sheer amount of products that they keep in their bathroom cabinet are not utterly necessary to their survival. Excess hygiene, especially in early years, can lead to a deficient immune system. Continuous spraying of deodorant can cause problems such as irritated skin.

Men and women should pause before they reach for their eighth or ninth bottle of whatever they are applying to themselves in the morning and question whether this is really necessary. Body odour was played upon by advertisers in the 1910’s and 20’s who portrayed it as a bad thing, with the intent that insecure people would then buy their product – deodorant (and, boy, did it work!). It is the natural smell our bodies produce, not a sign of deficient hygiene (unless you grade it by today’s ridiculous standards). Our Wandsworth Escorts prefer keeping clean themselves, but appreciate the fact that a bit of grime never hurt anyone before.