Most of us today have rigidly entrenched habits of personal
hygiene that simply won’t be tenable in a post-apocalyptic world. Many of the personal hygiene products that we
use will no longer be available, and to continue our current lavish use of hot
water would be labor intensive in the extreme.
That’s the bad news. The good
news is that a lot of what passes for personal hygiene these days really has
nothing to do with hygiene but is really just unnecessary beauty
treatment. I’ve done some thinking about
this and tried to imagine what would really constitute necessary hygiene under
potentially adverse conditions. Some of
the circumstances I envision are as follow.
(1) You won’t be able to run to the drug store and buy personal hygiene
products; (2) medical help will be anywhere from scarce to non-existent so
disease and injury preventing hygiene will be very important; and (3) obtaining
and heating water will be a lot of work.
So let’s think about what we need to start doing, what we need to
continue doing, what we need to do but not do as often, and what we can do
without.
Dental Hygiene
This will be an absolute necessity. An abscessed tooth that would be a 45 minute
visit with the dentist today, could be a death sentence if no dental care is
available. I don’t even want to think
about having a tooth extracted without some sort of dental anesthesia. So brushing after every meal and flossing
will be more important than ever. By the
way, you can buy dental floss in bulk for way cheap. 200 yard rolls cost around $2.50.
Hand and Foot Care
First of all, hands and feet should be protected from
injury. Closed toe shoes should be worn
at all times, and steel toe work boots should be worn for nearly all outdoor
tasks. No bare feet!! It may work okay for Cody Lundeen or Amazon
tribesmen, but it is foolish for the rest of us to risk a cut that could become
infected when all we have to do is put our shoes on. Feet should be washed daily and clean socks
should be worn every day. Toenails
should be kept trimmed straight across to avoid ingrown toenails.
Hands should be washed before every meal and immediately
after handling any material that may cause bacterial infection. Work gloves should be worn when performing
any task that could cause cuts or abrasions.
Nitril gloves should be worn when processing game or handling any kind
of decayed material or human or animal waste.
The thing that we’re trying to avoid here is infection. The tiniest cut can become infected, and
without antibiotics that could mean death.
U.S. President Calvin Coolidge’s son died in 1924 from a blister that he
got while playing tennis. The blister
became infected, and since antibiotics had not yet been developed, he
died. Enough said?
Bathing
The fact is that most people bath too often. Bathing too much washes away natural oils and
friendly bacteria that help protect the skin.
Most dermatologists agree that bathing once every two or three days is
more healthy and better for the skin than bathing every day. Let’s face it, most of the time when we take
a shower, it’s not because we’re dirty; it’s because we think we might smell
bad, or because we feel a little sticky.
The daily bath is one of those cultural phenomenon, kind of like
Mother’s Day, that was created by an industry that reaps huge profits on the
event. It’s like, “You smell bad and
people won’t like you so you better take a bath, and your skin’s all dry now from
bathing so you need to rub on some of our moisturizer, and your hair is oily so
you need to wash it every day, and now your hair is all dried out so you need
to use our conditioner.” Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching $$$$.
So how often do you really need to bath? I’ve done some research on that, and I can’t
come up with a definitive answer. Most
of what I have read has a pretty strong bias toward the modern fear of the
human smell, so it’s hard to tell what the bathing requirements are for actual
good health. I’m going to have to fall
back on my Dad’s childhood on an East Texas
cotton farm in the early 1900’s. Besides
his parents there were six kids in the family.
They had to draw all of their water from a well and heat it on a wood
stove. Grandma’s rule was you wash your
feet every night before you go to bed, if something specific gets dirty you
take a sponge bath, and once a week they would draw water and heat it for a tub
bath. My Dad lived to be 90 and his
brothers and sisters lived ranging from 88 to 100 years, so I guess that was
healthy enough.
There is, of course, the smell factor. The human body has an odor. We have been taught that this odor is
offensive, and so we try to either wash it away or cover it up. I imagine that washing it away, other than a
cold water sponge bath, will probably be out due to the amount of work
involved. I don’t think that covering up
the human smell with deodorant or cologne will be very practical either. For one thing these products will not be
available unless you stockpile them or manufacture them from natural
sources. I suppose you could rub
yourself with mint leaves or something of that nature, but there is a second
and more important reason to avoid sweet smelling colognes. Mosquitoes.
Sweet smells, especially fruit or flower smells, attract mosquitoes; and
that is something that we certainly want to avoid. Over one million people per year die
throughout the world from mosquito bourn illnesses, mainly malaria. We wouldn’t want to do anything to attract
these little killers.
So I imagine that we all probably just have to smell a
little bad. The good news is that
everyone will smell bad, so it will quickly lose its social stigma. It has been my experience on long backpacking
trips that everyone smells horrible for about the first three days; and then,
all of a sudden, the smell seems to be gone.
I think the current term, according to one T.V. commercial that I have
seen, is nose-blind. You just get used
to it and don’t notice it any more.
Hair
Over the years I have had hair of every possible
length. At one time I wore my hair in a
ponytail that fell to the bottom of my shoulder blades. A pain to wash, dry, brush, etc. Currently I have a shaved head. Once again a pain. You have to shave your entire head every
couple of days to keep it slick. I
imagine that in a post-apocalyptic scenario both of these would be out. I think that the most practical length would
be as short as you could cut your hair with scissors. Here’s my thinking. The shorter your hair, the less likely that
you will be troubled with critters like head lice. Short hair is easier to take care of. It looks neater, doesn’t get tangled up in
stuff, and requires less soap or shampoo to clean it. Short hair makes it
easier to treat head wounds. Now days if
you go to the hospital with a head wound, the first thing that they are going
to do is shave the immediate area so that it can be bandaged, stitched, or
whatever. This is why the military wants
combat troops to have short hair.
Shaving your head would put you in needless danger of a cut becoming
infected. So hair cut short, but without
shaving, seems to be the most practical solution.
Shaving the face should probably be avoided for the same
reason as shaving the head. A minor nick
can become septic, and without antibiotics this could be deadly. Sorry girls, but I think the same logic will
apply to armpits, legs, etc. So it will
be short beards for men (currently very stylish) and hairy legs for women (not
so stylish).
I don’t know if this is correct thinking or not, but it
makes sense to me.
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