canyonwalker | (Reply)

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Offs. On many levels. Stay healthy, whatever that means re: cleaning up. Open sores? Bad. Cracked skin? Bad. Smelly? Depends on cultural and personal standards, frankly. Also, frustratingly, for some people it depends on their biochemistry and that's hard to control and no, it isn't just about how often they bathe or what with.

Consideration of access to safe water? Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, etc. There's a whole industry based on telling us we stink and are ugly. It doesn't give a damn about water.

Mind you, I do not like being hairy and smelly. Otoh, my standards for that are apparently not the air brushed instagram filtered version. I bathe to feel clean, to remove my sweat because it irritates my skin badly and causes problems, to remove layers of sunscreen and insect repellent because those keep me alive and healthy but also need to be removed occasionally. I also like to feel that my hair doesn't look totally awful so will make some efforts in that regard. I dry off and use a bit of something powdered in spots because fungal infections suck.

Bathing every day for no reason other than marketing is a nonstarter for me. I hate that it is exceptionally difficult to find things that work for cleaning and occasional deodorizing that are not full of stenchy undying perfumes. Like, fine, if you wanna smell like grass, roses, and cigar smoke, you can choose to add that fragrance to your person. The fact that it costs me extra time and money to not have the perfume drives me up a wall.

Frankly, perfumes do not go well with my attempts to breathe, and if they were old school, you gotta get hella close to smell 'em, I wouldn't have a problem. But omg, this everything has to smell fake and that means it's clean and if it doesn't you are a garbage person is a bad cycle of marketing lies. Also makes it hard for me to breathe.

Seriously, once upon a time the smell of bleach or ammonia or phenol (old school Lysol) meant "clean". Now, they think it's better to have obnox miasmatic perfume clouds in Lysol and gods forbid your bleach actually smell like bleach and not bleach plus rotting vegetation.

I, uh, get annoyed about the obsessive cleaning and perfuming. Sorry.