These Vintage Hygiene Practices Are the Very Opposite of Clean

While it may be gross to us now, people haven't always been so put off by pee and poo that we refuse to use refuse. Traditionally one of the most readily available raw materials used to make things like gunpowder, aged urine (called lant) was also used to clean floors, remove stains, and more. You might wonder how people managed to step inside a recently-cleaned room, but note that they also used aged urine, which has heightened levels of ammonia, to whiten their teeth and wash their face. So they probably didn't mind the smell.

We infuse the scents of flowers into perfumes and cleaning products because they smell so good to us. While scientific understanding and industrial manufacturing techniques have dramatically improved our ability to stimulate our olfactory glands with the touch of a spray or lighting of a candle, the love we have for these floral scents is nothing new. Ancient peoples, for example, used to use flowers to mask their unpleasant body odor with a bouquet held or tied close to their bodies.

While the rich and famous today all have gorgeous tans that show that they can afford to wallow around in the sun all day long, back in the day pale skin was a sign of wealth, as it meant you didn't labor out in the sun. People would color their skin with makeup that would often poison them for the lead content, but also try to induce paleness by eating chalk. Even though it probably won't work unless it makes you sick and you get pale, at least chalk's less toxic!

People didn't shower nearly as much as we do, but that wasn't the least of their problems. People didn't wash their hands, as they didn't know that washing can prevent disease by removing disease-causing organisms lingering on their fingers. To make matters worse, they didn't use silverware and often ate with their hands. Nowadays we wash everything from our hands to our dishes, but back then there was no telling when your filthy hands touching food would make you sick.

Indeed, the only use we have for urine is for tests at the doctor or to treat jellyfish stings - which doesn't work - but before we could use inorganic substances to synthesize chemicals such as ammonia, which is used to this day in cleaning products, we used to get them from an organic source: pee. Also known as chamber lye, aged and fermented urine (lant) was used as laundry detergent. Its use in tanning leather was perhaps the least stomach-wretching, as they also added it to ales and glazed it on pastries.