now try doing that with hair. or your hands after vivisecting a corpse, and then delivering a baby. clean up feces and vomit, and then try to get rid of the smell without soap.

every farm worker that works with life stock knows what i am talking about. ever worked on an engine, then tried to clean your hands with water or oliveoil?

I guess the oil has merits, since certain oils DO have detergent properties.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe7275

But if you’re looking to have your mind blown, take a shower and just scrub your skin with a brush, loofah or the palm of your hand and be amazed when you still get clean. If you’re really grimey, you can do what the Romans did and rub yourself with olive oil and scrape it off with a scraper before doing that.

I will try that, thanks.

You are right about one thing: if you are healthy, the skin will provide everything it needs to take care of itself. you ever wondered why kids don't stink, have easy to wipe bottoms, and don't need to wash their hair every day, and what have you? its because they are not yet broken like adults are. yes, it is also the hormones; but if you have an adult that really stinks up the place after taking a shover, chances are that their metabolism is out of whack; the skin is full of microorganisms, and they have a kind of balanced relation ship with the skin. if this gets thrown, certain microorganisms will overtake the others, and produce smells like crazy.

As such, we had ways of dealing with that well before we had soap and people didn’t just immediately switch.

That logic is hard to dismiss, that is sure interesting. you are absolutely right. I wonder what they did.

Early soaps were used for the preparation of textiles rather than personal hygiene.

I guess they used it to clean absolutely everything. because soap loosens up fatty bonds. thats why using disinfectant does not get rid of the dead bacteria; they are still on your hands, albeit dead. soap does not kill most of germs, but thy are unable to cling to the skin.

I was in poor regions of africa multiple times; the poorest of the poor would use soap when they could. people are poor, but not stupid. if what you said would work, they would do it, but they buy soap instead.

wikipedia:

Roman Empire

Pliny the Elder, whose writings chronicle life in the first century AD, describes soap as "an invention of the Gauls".[22] The word sapo, Latin for soap, likely was borrowed from an early Germanic language and is cognate with Latin sebum, "tallow". It first appears in Pliny the Elder's account,[23] Historia Naturalis, which discusses the manufacture of soap from tallow and ashes. There he mentions its use in the treatment of scrofulous sores, as well as among the Gauls as a dye to redden hair which the men in Germania were more likely to use than women.[24][25] The Romans avoided washing with harsh soaps before encountering the milder soaps used by the Gauls around 58 BC.[26] Aretaeus of Cappadocia, writing in the 2nd century AD, observes among "Celts, which are men called Gauls, those alkaline substances that are made into balls [...] called soap".[27] The Romans' preferred method of cleaning the body was to massage oil into the skin and then scrape away both the oil and any dirt with a strigil.[28] The standard design is a curved blade with a handle, all of which is made of metal.[29]

The 2nd-century AD physician Galen describes soap-making using lye and prescribes washing to carry away impurities from the body and clothes. The use of soap for personal cleanliness became increasingly common in this period. According to Galen, the best soaps were Germanic, and soaps from Gaul were second best. Zosimos of Panopolis, circa 300 AD, describes soap and soapmaking.