The Stinky History of Human Hygiene

Ever wondered when and why people started caring about body odors and cleanliness? Well look no further than today's episode. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we wanted to announce officially ticket sales info
for the last bit of our twenty twenty three tour.
We're gonna be in Orlando on August twelfth. We're going
to be in Nashville, Tennessee, on September sixth. We're gonna
wrap it all up in Atlanta, Georgia on September ninth.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
What. Yes, it's true. And our tickets are starting to
go on sale right now. There's an artist pre sale
that's us for the artists starting on Tuesday, June thirteenth,
then ending that day too, but figure out there's another
pre sale on the fourteenth and the fifteenth, and then
just regular on sale tickets start on Friday, June sixteenth,

(00:38):
And for those pre sales, you can use the code
s YSK live for your pre sale tickets.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
That's right, And for each of these days, everything is
going to go on sale at ten am local time.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
So for tickets and information, you can go to our
website Stuff youshould Know dot com, or you can go
to link tree slash s ysk and you'll get everything
you need there.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Actually I'm a little smelly today.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Are you smell? Pull? I think you're you're nice, I
would say ripe, but not in an unpleasant way.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Oh wait, you didn't scratch. You're supposed to scratch then stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh oh oh wait, oh yes, that is quite unpleasant.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
That tickles. All right, that was my joke.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
That was a great joke. Chuck, now you think so too,
But she's on mute so we can't hear her laughing.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
I am a little bit smelly, but that was not
in preparation to record it. Just haven showered in a
couple of days.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
You know, a couple of days for real?

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, I mean yeah, like two days.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Okay, yeah, I mean I'm not being judgy. I'm just surprised.
I do every day.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Oh I'll skip. I skip days all the time.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
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

(02:31):
like I think I just sleep better if I've had
a shower that day. If I don't, I think I
sleep worse.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Shower before bed, that's nice. I should do that.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Day and it doesn't wake you up too bad.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
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

(04:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Actually, that's cool. Yeah, so you basically glamed.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Yeah. I didn't hang out there a lot, you know,
I just slept there, basically.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
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

(04:38):
to talk about the colonial era yet, so let's start
further back.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
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,

(05:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
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

(05:42):
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

(06:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
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.

(06:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
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

(07:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Like.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
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

(08:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
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

(08:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah, I feel like you're subtweeting the French right now.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
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

(09:16):
you know, basically birds nest in their hair. And that
wasn't necessarily the case.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
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

(09:43):
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

(10:05):
the time.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
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

(10:36):
your body pretty easy.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, And if you grew up in the seventies and eighties,
do they still do life checks?

Speaker 2 (10:42):
No?

Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, we had lice checks in school.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
There's debate at boards of educations.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
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.

(11:26):
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

(11:48):
the hair to help protect it.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
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,

(12:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
It's an old comb.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
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?

Speaker 2 (12:44):
H m hmm?

Speaker 1 (12:45):
What was the brand? I want to say, Goodies? Was
that it?

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yes, you're right, yep, good was it?

Speaker 1 (12:51):
So they make headache powder and combs two different things.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
It could be two different things, but it's also possible.
But they're like ge they they do a lot of
different stuff.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
They bring it things to light.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
So yeah, those combs with the handle and then like
the comb on the side just above where your fist
holds it.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah yeah, sure yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
And then you also had the afropick too.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
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

(13:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
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.

(14:11):
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.

(14:35):
I want to give you two examples. One on our
exercise episode, I was driving around qaing it.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
When you saw a guy jogging.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
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,

(15:06):
I drove past a garbage can near my house that
had an abroller sticking out of it.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
Did you grab it?

Speaker 2 (15:13):
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.

(15:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Wow, I mean this has been These.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Are like two of just fistfuls of examples that have
been happening to me. I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
I love it podcast imitates life or life imitates podcast.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
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

(16:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Well, why would the Europeans call them, Harry, I.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Wow, all right, man, if you see a guy wearing
a buffalo skin tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
That would be I will be reporting back on that.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
What about you know, removing hair like you know, pubic
hair and stuff.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Actually that goes back to ancient Egypt. Did you know that?

Speaker 1 (17:32):
I did not know. That doesn't surprise me, but I
didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
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

(18:23):
eyebrows because they trapped the dirt and the grime and
stuff that keeps it that gets in your eyes.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
Yeah, that's why they're there, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
So to pluck it. It's strictly a cultural beauty standard.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Right exactly.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Right, Yes, they would. They would anoint their heads with
essential oils.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Play. Yeah, and shampoo was a verb, and then it
became a noun once they bottled it, I guess exactly.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
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

(19:21):
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

(19:42):
double their market and they did.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Okay, so we're jumping into the bath chuck cold hands,
jump in together.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
I gotta hold my nose with my other hand, so okay,
fair enough.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
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

(20:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
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

(21:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
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

(21:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah, and that you've probably done this right somewhere in
the world.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
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

(23:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
People you want to swimsuit?

Speaker 2 (23:21):
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?

Speaker 1 (23:28):
No, I'm not into this.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
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

(23:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
I'm having a panic attack.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Oh no, I'm with you.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
I do not either. I basically had to force myself
to just get over it, and once I did, I
was glad I did.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
But I do know it's like, are you Josh fum stuff?

Speaker 2 (24:47):
You should know, right, and I just the helicopter and
I'm like you, no, I.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
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,

(25:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
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

(25:53):
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

(26:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
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

(27:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
I hate that word hygiene more than I hate the
word moist.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Oh yeah, hygiene is kind of gross.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
I got two words for you that are even worse
than just hygiene alone. You're ready, okay. Hygienic utensil.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
Oh. I thought you were gonna say sebum pocket again.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
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

(28:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
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

(29:33):
Europe was already still well established. So it was easier
for us to install pipes rather than retrofit.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yeah, that's so funny. That makes perfect sense.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
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

(30:13):
blankets and stuff like that, and it wasn't used for
washing the body until later.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, I imagine it was a lot of that. Early
soap was very filmy and kind of greasy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
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

(31:00):
that's there's your soap right there.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
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.

(31:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
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

(32:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
I've done it.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
Do you not know about our infrastructure?

Speaker 1 (32:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Oh oh sure, without phosphates, I think yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
But even then I'm like, is this really okay? I
don't know. They say it is, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
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

(33:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
Well, yeah, good enough. At least.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
Do you wash your hair every day? You don't wash
your hair?

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yeah? Almost every day?

Speaker 1 (33:47):
Oh wow?

Speaker 2 (33:47):
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,

(34:08):
oh boy, my hair looks amazing.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Maybe you have a thick, nice mane of hair and
like I do not, I've got anthony heatous hair.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
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?

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Well yeah, and then collectively they're thin.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, no, I'm with you, like a horse's tail or
a pony. I guess the carry Scot did he have
a ponytail.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Only Scott could pull that off.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
Oh, I know, he looked good.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
I think I both.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
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?

Speaker 2 (36:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
I know it's funny. Yeah, we really haven't. Do we
do deodorant?

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah? The difference between anty person and deodorant very well
A long time ago.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
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,

(36:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, it's no good. Ancient Egypt they use ostrich egg
apparently in tortoise shell.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Yeah, I could not find anything on that.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
Yeah, that must have I don't know what kind of
odor that would have. Maybe that was a stabilizer or something,
and they.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Smell like tortoise.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
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

(37:51):
hails from the thirteenth century, named after the thirteenth century
Queen Elizabeth or Isabelle of Hungary at the time.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
With an.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yes, yeah, that's very Hungarian, and it was scented with rosemary.

Speaker 1 (38:07):
I like rosemary. Sure do you ever stroke a rosemary
plant on a dog walk from a neighbor?

Speaker 2 (38:14):
My friend, we have long branches of rosemary like sitting
around our house in vases and stuff.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
Stay answer your question every time.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
Oh man, they didn't think about that.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
Back, so someone's marinating steak might have a little.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Chuck on it, a little bit of chuck.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
I like to think that adds a little certain something.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
It doesn't icy.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
So we talked about germ theory of disease for a while.
That was called the miasma theory of disease Anetinc.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Episode.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
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

(39:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Oh my gosh, and it's bad.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
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

(40:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
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

(41:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
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

(41:48):
unless you count perfumes. The actual attempt to counter body
odor with theodor and antiperspriant is twentieth century I mention basically.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
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

(42:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Rubber dress shields.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
You can buy cat based dress shields.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
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,

(43:18):
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,

(43:39):
unless you clean up your act literally, then you're not
going to get that husband.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
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

(44:03):
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

(44:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
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.

(45:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
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

(45:53):
stink right exactly.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
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

(46:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
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?

(47:01):
What it smelled what it smells like.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
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.

(47:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
It's in the Talmud.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
That, and that interesting. I don't know why it really is.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
Yeah, I don't either.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
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

(48:28):
I chew this, it might do something for my breath.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
No, there's another one that's ant in bacterial most of
the time.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Oh, there you go. I knew that was a number three.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
And yeah, ab and three yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
And they've also ground up different kinds of powders to
make into what you know, would qualify as toothpaste.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
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

(49:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
It is awful. Yeah, And I think like people can
overbrush today and do similar damage, right sure.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
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

(50:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
Have you ever bet a hog?

Speaker 2 (50:31):
Yeah? They're not soft. They look soft now not.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
It's almost like a porcupine esque. That stuff is really bad.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
A little bit. Also, go check out our porcupine episode.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
Right, all right, well, let's wind it up in with jeez.
I think we've covered this too, we had didn't realize.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
We did an episode on the hygiene hypothesis.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
We did an episode on that too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
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

(51:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
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,

(52:25):
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

(52:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
I did the same exact thing and with nutrigena too,
and I used it almost every day.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Oh you kept using it?

Speaker 2 (53:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
What's a T zone.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
It's the part across the top of your eyebrows and
down your nose. Oh, oily t zone.

Speaker 1 (53:22):
That's a pretty good Maybe that's the record for the
album title for sebum pocket, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
It is. It'd be a concept album too.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
What else do you have anything else?

Speaker 2 (53:34):
No? I think that's it.

Speaker 1 (53:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
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

(54:04):
time for listening to mail.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Did we do a listener mail on another episode?

Speaker 2 (54:10):
Everyone almost starting back in Man a long time ago.
When you had that idea.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
That's right, I've got a.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Really good idea.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
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.

(54:45):
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?

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Fay do fay do jogging. Yeah. I'm not sure what
that means, though, but I've seen it before.

Speaker 1 (55:08):
I guess do you want to jog with me? Maybe
I just like to jog. Do you want a jog?
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
I don't know if means okay, so well you read.

Speaker 1 (55:16):
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

(55:38):
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

(55:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
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?

Speaker 1 (56:38):
James?

Speaker 2 (56:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.