MikufanMore true words have never been spoken
onionThe top words are true though. People used to not mind the smell of sweat.
That it’s percieved as unpleasant, and that people are worried about others smelling them is a modern trend, which was pushed by advertising.
Yeah, but I recall attending a gaming tournament where smash brothers had an entire gym to itself.
By day two it was so bad that the artists(mostly women) just outside the gym had moved their tables away from the gym.
There is a distinct difference between the smell of freshly generated sweat, and dried sweat mixed with all of the other accumulated filth one accrues when they don’t regularly shower.
Altima NEOThe first time I went to pax, the whole convention stank like stale pizza. Like at a mall next to a Sbarro’s. Problem was, there was no food court or restaurants at pax… It’s all the greasy gamer stink.
With don’t know what you’re talking about. People have been trying to mask body odor for literally thousands of years.
Unless OP’s definition of ‘modern’ is from, at least, the 1500s till now…
samus12345The ancient Romans used a mixture of charcoal and goat fat as a deodorant.
No its not true, there where products masking bodily smells thousands of years. Idk what you are talking about. But i have to say, if you show up unshowered and without deodorant ata fucking con and im near you i will puke all over you.
You’ve heard of “Free Hugs”…
You’ve heard of “Free Shrugs”…
Now get ready for:
if you show up unshowered and without deodorant ata fucking con and im near you i will puke all over you.
Free hurls
Yeah, they ignore that frigging Egyptians who bathed daily and invented cosmetics and soap, also invented perfume and toothbrushing, and incense, and also had deodorants. Over 4 thousand years ago.
People smells, just fucking use deodorant.
This is the dumbest fucking take. The entire historical record disagrees with two YouTube videos and you’ve landed on the latter’s side.
But they did their own research! /s
Yeah, there’s a reason they aren’t scientists.
Big difference between “the smell of sweat” and “horrible BO” though.
JaysynUsername checks out.
It wasn’t so much “not mind” as it was “put up with” since there was no real alternative for the average person. Also, there’s the remarkable ability of the human brain to filter out inputs it deems unnecessary. Bad smells that are a constant presence end up being filtered out.
WraithGearI don’t know bad smells are not filtered for an evolutionary reason. Sure you work at a bakery and the amazing smell of bread is filtered by day 2 never to be smelled again, but i had to bunk under a mfkr in the military who was under shower supervision, and yet still had mark on him from that time someone dropped an alcohol pad on his arm. My brain didn’t filter shit, as in the smell of.
People have been cleaning themselves for essentially forever. Bathing was not as common as it is today, but we know people have been washing their hands, feet and face regularly for many thousands of years.
Cleanliness features very heavily in religion dating back thousands of years, and the earliest soap recipe is from ~2500BC, although we know they were making at scale hundreds of years before then.
Wells to make water available in places where there’s no stream or river date back even further to the ~8000s BC.
Most people weren’t rocking perfumed soaps and immersion in hot water, but washing your clothes with a homemade soap, scrubbing your feet, hands and face with cold water and a rag every day or so and likewise your body roughly weekly was available to most people at a minimum. If you were near a river or body of water, like humans tend to prefer to live, washing your feet, hands and face every morning and a weekly scrub was perfectly comfortable.
Primates are generally very conscious of grooming. Humans are unique in regularly washing with water, but we’re also unique in being nearly hairless, remarkably greasy, and clever. It tracks that we’d figure out the water thing pretty fast.
People also eat a very different diet now, with way more sugar.
Changes things.
Edit downvotes from stinkers
Username checks out
“I don’t actually smell bad, you’ve just been socialized to believe that.”
Please touch grass, shower, and apply deodorant.
It’s funny too because many animals have adapted to not be smelled too easily so as not to become dinner.
Username checks out, the smell makes people cry.
I’ve heard this point a lot but given the fact that until the industrial age, most people had open flames in their kitchen and bedrooms so if i had to guess I’d guess most people smelled of woodsmoke.
That just helped cover the asscrack smell.
WahotsSwamp ass with hints of mesquite or a cherrywood smoke.
I’ve had some exes tell me they love the way I smell after a couple days camping, but also that I can’t touch them because I am grimy.
Woodsmoke doesn’t smell unhygienic…actually many people like the smell
grrgyleI love it. Sadly it’s also carcinogenic
What isn’t…
Death doesn’t. Well, unless you’re the one doing the embalming or applying makeup or making the coffin…
Yeah I love it. Sad to hear it is. Wonder where the state or synthetic chemistry is on it
For the first few hours. Stale woodsmoke in your hair smell awful.
When everyone is used to it.
PsychadelligoatSpend a week roughing it, or in a cabin away from running water, and you’ll realize very quickly that smoke only sorta covers how bad humans can smell
If anything it mixes eventually and makes a whole new nasty
If anything it mixes eventually and makes a whole new nasty
Definitely.
Ricky RigatoniBack then people would stuff flowers in their shirts to cover up all the bad smells.
A friend of mine in the military said when he was deployed and everyone starting stinking. He could be eating with a load of stinking guys. But he could smell if a woman came into the room.
I guess we aren’t too far removed from the animals after all.
EtherWhackOr a metal concert
Oh god… But the ones ive been to smell like beer and urine…
Those are just to help provide more grip to the floor for moshing
Yeah I need antiperspirant or I stink.
Antiperspirant or deodorant? Sweating is natural and some antiperspirant ingredients are harmful.
db0I think body odor has an evolutionary reason to exist, and that reason applies to prehistoric humans living in small gather hunterer societies of <150 people only. Whatever that reason was, is not necessary for our survival in modern society where you meet thousands of people over your lifetime and run into new strangers constantly.
I dont think body odor ever played an evolutionary role. As far as I know body odor is caused by bacterias eating and multiplying whenever we sweat. If this is the case body odor is here because we sweat which isnt that common within the animal kingdom.
(Although dont quote me on any of this, this is just what I seem to remember and Im lazy to look it up - tldr i might be lying)
ElderWendigoEvery single thing on this planet plays an evolutionary role. The planet is a complete system of evolutionary biology. None of the rest of what you said even makes any sense.
Not everything is an evolved functional trait, like the first poster was saying.
Loosing our hair and getting greasy was a functional adaptation. That grease getting stinky is just a byproduct that didn’t introduce a negative selection pressure.
Evolution doesn’t have a plan, it just takes the shortest path towards better that doesn’t make things worse.
Giraffes have a nerve that runs from their brain, down to their torso, then back up to the top of their neck. There’s no reason or benefit to this, it’s purely because when what the nerve runs to evolved in reptiles, it was at the top of the torso. Neck gets longer, nerve follows since there’s no pressure to select against stupid nerve layout.
There’s a species of toad that evolved to become so small that their ear bones can’t actually pick up the sound of their species mating chirp. They still chirp, but none of them can hear it, and instead they signal based on seeing the motion of chirping.
Who said anything about a plan? I just said every part plays a role.
Nope, evolution is chaos. The current planet is the output of a chaotic system. You seriously think koalas play an evolutionary role? Platypus? Sometimes nature just threw shit at a wall and called it “good enough.”
20? I can name hundreds…
Lol don’t be mad
That doesn’t exclude it having a purpose. A lot of our existence we owe to bacteria inhabiting our body
And a lot of what happens in evolution is passed down the generations not because it’s useful but because it doesn’t hinder reproduction.
Body odour does hinder reproduction, though.
But it doesn’t though. Before people bathed consistently, everyone smelled. It wouldn’t have been a factor in partner selection.
It wouldn’t have been a factor in partner selection.
This is pretty presumptuous, as there appears to be a lot we can pick up about potential mates based on their body odor.
ZoidsbergI’m absolutely not an anthropologist, but if we evolved in small <100 person communities, often settling near water, I’d imagine keeping everyone relatively stank-free wouldn’t have been impossible.
There has been some research in this area pointing to being able to smell if someone is sick. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10550911/
Human scent as a first-line defense against disease
Individuals may have a different body odor, when they are sick compared to healthy. In the non-human animal literature, olfactory cues have been shown to predict avoidance of sick individuals. We tested whether the mere experimental activation of the ...
Pretty sure body odor would have worked against them. Once a predator detects body odor of a human… it knows that body odor belongs to human meat.