Clean summary

We weren’t always obsessed with sterile cleanliness. Before germ theory, people bathed for different reasons, including entertainment and general wellness. 

Let’s look at the ancient Roman baths, for example. They were a place for socializing and relaxing. Washing came last. Those baths had no circulation system, so water almost certainly carried a film of human sweat and scum. Hygiene couldn’t have been much of a concern. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, America and Britain were living through a soap boom. One company that stood out was Lever Brothers. Their soap-making wasn’t especially innovative, but their advertising was. They claimed that their product, Sunlight Soap, was a lifesaver. This marketing technique soon made Lever Brothers the world’s largest soap distributor.

The eldest brother, William Lever, was the brains behind the operation. As one historian put it, “Lever didn’t advertise so much as paint the world with his brand.” Ads were everywhere. William even founded a newspaper and published a healthcare book. Both carried the name of his brand: the paper was called Sunlight Almanac, and the book, the Sunlight Year Book.

Fast forward to today, and “indie” brands are now shaking up the skin care industry. 

At the Indie Beauty Expo in New York, the current trend is using words like “clean,” “cruelty-free,” and “pure.” Indie brands also often highlight a specific “new” ingredient; something that hasn’t been emphasized before. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been withdrawing from nature. And yet, in August 2016, a study showed that early exposure to the microbial world outside could be great for our immune systems. 

Researchers focused on two groups of people: the Amish and the Hutterites. These communities are genetically similar, and they live similar lives, largely unchanged since the eighteenth century. But there’s one key difference. In the Hutterite community, children never accompany their fathers to the communal farm. The Amish, meanwhile, work with babies strapped to their backs. So their children grow up interacting with soil, animals, and microbes.

Remember the Lever Brothers from an earlier blink? Their influence on modern hygiene didn’t end with Sunlight Soap. In fact, they introduced a marketing idea which has stayed with us for more than 100 years.

In 1894 they released a new soap called Lifebuoy. They claimed it was as good as medicine: a cure for fevers and colds. Why? Because its main ingredient was an antiseptic called carbolic acid, which destroyed harmful microbes. In a society that had only just discovered germ theory, this sales pitch really worked.

In 2009, Claire Guest was researching the idea that dogs could smell cancer. One of the dogs involved in the study, a golden retriever named Daisy, became Claire’s pet. The scientist remembers walking home from the park, when the dog started acting strange. “She was a bit wary of me,” she recalled.

Suddenly, Claire remembered: a few days earlier, she’d felt a little lump in her breast. At the time, she hadn’t really considered the possibility of breast cancer.

In the 1800s, Florence Nightingale led a team of nurses at a military hospital in Crimea, where the British were fighting back Russian expansion. When Nightingale arrived at the warzone, hospital care was shambolic. Ten times more soldiers were dying from infectious diseases than were killed in battle. 

Wards were dank and swarming with lice and fleas. Nightingale believed the men needed air to get better, so she proposed opening up new doors and windows to improve circulation. Her plan worked: one report suggests that the death rate fell by nearly 40%.