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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday. My stepfather escaped nazi Germany, and moved to the us in the 40s. He grudgingly adapted to daily bathing (my mother's insistence), but remarked how very American that is. He was very 20th century European, for sure.

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(European here) my grandparents bathed I think once per week, we often joked about this in the family. My uncle who is a commercial construction inspector/engineer arranged for a full bathroom model a couple years before they died. When we went to sell the house he complained the bathroom was unused and looked the same as the day he signed off on it.

Despite this, they never smelled bad to me, they certainly had a recognizable smell, but it wasn't foul. Contrasting with myself, if I don't shower for a day, I'll get remarks from my girlfriend the next afternoon, and on the third day I smell so foul I can smell it myself. I also get more randomly itchy.

I wonder if by showering daily I'm somehow tampering with my bodies ability to fend off some foul smelling bacteria or something. Besides fearing to smell bad for a couple weeks (months?) to find out, I also enjoy showering to start my day fresh and I like the way it makes my hair feel.

There might be other factors too, like changing into pajamas at night (possibly changing underwear or no underwear), and then fresh clothes in the morning?

As for hair, there's a whole "no shampoo" movement, takes a few weeks for the scalp to adjust.

To what extent is someone's "smell" a product of their local dermal biome and what they've been inoculated with, so to speak, via sharing deodorant, clothing, activity level, diet, etc?

Yes

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/hygiene...

A young Steve Jobs famously thought that as long as you ate a certain diet, you could skip showering/deodorant and still smell ok. His coworkers/manager at Atari did not agree and put him on the night shift: https://techpp.com/2017/02/24/steve-jobs-facts-you-might-not...

I think once your body is used to showering daily, it is never the same in terms of microbes, or it takes years to get back to whatever.

I need to bathe daily. If I don't I get a sore under my arm, and I can smell myself.

I had a girlfriend, well kinda, who didn't believe in showering, and she did smell. I never had the nerve to tell her.

My grandfather didn't bath, and didn't have an odor. He was small, and very skinny though.

My best friend didn't bath, and he did smell. I should have habituated to his smell since I saw him so much, but no. His smell was so bad, I needed to put down a towel before he sat on any chair.

I saw my grandfather once a year.

Smelly armpits are due to particular strains of bacteria that feed on sweat compounds and skin cells. If you haven’t been infected with the stinky ones you might last two days in moderate weather. Get infected and the time goes down to two hours. I found out the hard way, sharing a bar of soap. Avoid. :-/

>It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday.

Americans of a very close earlier ear didn't bathe everyday either...

That's true. It was the 1970s when we were pressuring the stepfather.

Many Americans of the exact same era probably didn't bathe every day.

And true in Europe today. Ever been on a train in Germany in the summertime?

Ever been on the L in Chicago in a car without working air conditioning?

Spoiler: Everybody stinks.

Wrong. Try Japan. They're clean, polite, and courteous. Crowded trains in August (like all year) are surprisingly absent of body odor (and litter, and noisy people, ...).

Different folks are indeed different in some ways.

Well if you want to compare Japan to other countries, you should be aware that the fear of being a burden to others due to one's body odor is a very Japanese phenomenon [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taijin_kyofusho

Asians sweat less and their sweat does not stink as much for some reason.

I read that body odor is controlled by the same gene as the one for ear wax.

People with wet/creamy ear wax smell. People with dry/crumbly earwax don't smell.

I'm not sure if it's true in general, but it's true for me and my partner.

One of our kids has creamy ear wax, and the other has crumbly ear wax. I'm curious if only one of them will need deodorant once they get to puberty...

Genetics is fun.

https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythearwax.html

Didn't the Asians refer to the Portuguese as "garlic eaters"? When one eats garlic, the scent comes out in the sweat - so you can smell them coming.

From my own experience, if I eat garlic and later scrub my head with a wet washcloth, I can smell the garlic on the washcloth.

Sweat doesn’t smell. Bacteria strains common in Asia don’t produce stinky compounds.

As a German, I want to add that on German trains, "in the summer" implicitly means "without working air conditioning" ;).

(Sort-of-jokingly. On ICEs, you're most likely to actually freeze body parts off due to the harsh AC. On local trains, you'll dehydrate due to excessive sweating. There is no middle ground.)

About 1/3 of Germans still don't bathe every day. 1/6 of the French don't bathe every day.

To this day I don't bathe or shower everyday (maybe once a week, or two weeks?). I can't understand this American obsession with running away from your own real self. Why all this intollerance of being and smelling like a human being?

This isn't rocket science. Bad odors are offensive. If you stepped in dog shit, you'd (hopefully) clean you shoe and wouldn't get on a soap box about "running away from the true natural smells of nature" or some other nonsense.

Meh! It's just shit homie! I'm surrounded by it all day every day (no I don't clean shit off my shoes either). "Bad" odors are entirely subjective. Soap box? Last I checked this is an internet forum for seemingly highly sensitive people.

That's gross

Maybe? Gross is not a concept I was raised with. I also raise goats and am often told I smell like a buck in rut (because I do, as I'm always around them). Was always confused after I moved to the US what all the "ewwww!" screaming from my peers was about. What is hoped to be achieved by expressing something like that I wondered? Putting a person in the "other", or "not good enough", "not clean enough", "not wealthy enough" category? Bizarre anti-social behavior in my opinion.

Having dog shit on your shoes is gross. Smelling like a goat is also gross.

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